The Kansas City community is extremely fortunate to have two outstanding organizations hard at work helping its Veterans:
· The Battle Within: Founded by over 100 Veterans and First Responders, The Battle Within helps Veterans and First Responders develop skills for long-term healing through family support, continuing education, community building, and commitment to service.
· Veterans Community Project (VCP): Founded by Combat Veterans, VCP provides critical support services, including: The Veteran Outreach Center, which assists Veterans with navigating the VA and their benefits, identification services, mental and physical health referrals, financial counseling, employment support, and more and VCP Village, a specialized community of tiny homes built by Veterans for Veterans.
As these two organizations worked together to serve Kansas City’s Veterans, it became clear that the absence of an effective continuum of care was an obstacle to lasting recovery. While individual services for a singular issue might be outstanding, they were rendered less effective when other complicating factors were not also being addressed.
To address this gap in services, The Battle Within and VCP established the Veterans Coalition, a network of providers working together to deliver comprehensive, wrap-around services for Veterans.
Because The Battle Within and VCP currently use CCL as their case management software, it was a natural fit for Veterans Coalition to use CCL’s Social Health Access Referral Program (SHARP) to coordinate care. A community information exchange, SHARP facilitates:
· Tracking and monitoring Veterans in crisis so they don’t fall through the cracks
· Referrals to other organizations
· Sharing patient records in a secure environment
· Measuring the efficacy of programs/services through shared data
· Joint grant applications
· Tracking outcomes for funders
“The network we are creating will make a huge difference in the lives of Veterans,” said Justin Hoover, Executive Director of The Battle Within. “For example, sharing Veterans’ records means they don’t have to retell their stories (often a very traumatic experience) every time they seek new services.”
Using SHARP, the Veterans Coalition will be able to build, manage, and evaluate an extensive network of partnering agencies. Any organization currently using a different EHR – whether an individual therapist, a hospital, or the VA – can easily tap into the network and:
· Make use of the valuable resources the Veterans Coalition has assembled
· Share records and data
· Refer back and forth
Contact us for more information about our community information exchange solutions and SHARP.