Community First Foundation has been connecting donors and innovative Colorado nonprofits since 1975. As the community foundation serving Jefferson County, we are committed to activating ideas, people and resources so that all Jeffco communities have the opportunity to thrive.

In this project, the Community First Foundation is funding two pilot projects implementing PARTNERme, A Person-Centered Tool. We trained the clinical staff to use PARTNERme for pediatric patients and their families, to better understand their social needs, like housing or employment, along with their social support network, like family, friends, and neighbors. With this information, we can identify a patient’s most pressing need with the least amount of social support, and provide targeted community resource referrals to fill the gap. We expect that this strength-based approach will increase patient engagement and follow-through by honoring the support they are already leveraging and minimizing the number of referrals we provide.

The two pediatric clinics, Peak Pediatric and Every Child Pediatric, completed their screenings in May, 2021, asking patients to use the tool during the check-in process for appointments. Our team used the resulting data to prepare our initial findings in two reports in June 2021. We are currently working on a paper sharing our findings and identifying ways to use this data to improve care coordination, community resources referral, and whole-person health equity for pediatric clinics nationwide.

The project demonstrates PARTNERme’s potential as a clinical screening tool to improve the way we screen for the social determinants of health, identify the most pressing needs and connect them to resources to help. You can read an anonymized sample report of our findings here.