Building Community Connections to Advance Health Equity
Summary
In 2024, Blooming Health committed to scale its services to 16 states across the United States and reach 2 million individuals by 2025, leveraging technological innovation, capacity building, and knowledge sharing to drive sustainable improvements in health equity for older adults and underserved populations.This commitment seeks to mitigate health inequities and promote healthier communities by bridging awareness gaps, so older adults and underserved populations can effectively navigate the complex network of social services. Blooming Health also aims to improve the capacity of the community-based organizations that serve these populations . Blooming Health will harness its expertise, resources, and technological capabilities to connect social service providers with older adults and underserved community members to address their health-related social needs effectively and improve the likelihood of equitable access and outcomes over time.This will include expanding partnerships with community-based health care providers, affordable housing, supportive housing, and community care hubs and social care networks.
Approach
Blooming Health commits to scaling its services to 16 states across the United States, including Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, and Colorado, and reach 2,000,000 individuals by 2025, prioritizing outreach and service availability in underserved areas. This will include expanding partnerships with community-based healthcare providers, affordable housing, supportive housing, and community care hubs / social care networks.
This commitment seeks to mitigate health inequities and promote healthier communities by bridging awareness gaps, ensuring that older adults and underserved populations can effectively navigate the complex network of social services, and improving capacity of community-based organizations that serve older adults and underserved populations in a trusted manner.
Blooming Health will leverage its expertise, resources, and technological capabilities to connect social service providers with older adults and underserved community members to address their health-related social needs effectively. The goal is to ensure equitable social care by providing timely access to information on public resources, community events, weather/disaster updates, wellness checks, and surveys, empowering individuals to lead safe and healthy lives.
The AARP Foundation supports their platform for under-resourced non-profits and provides strategic information on available public resources such as student debt relief and supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP) benefits.
Blooming Health’s commitment encompasses technological innovation, capacity building, and knowledge sharing aimed at sustainable improvements in health equity for older adults and underserved populations.
Action Plan
Blooming Health’s goal is to reach 2 million older adults and underserved members via the platform and increase their presence in over 16 US states by 2025. Quarterly estimates for achieving this goal are below.
2024-2025 (project timeline) Q1:
Scale services to reach 181,920 enrolled users of Blooming Health platform and 5 additional states
Q2:
Scale services to reach 335,252 enrolled users of Blooming Health platform.
Expand partnerships to Community care hubs / social care networks that coordinate social needs detection and social care in a region and collect reimbursement from health plans or health systems that bear risk on the population.
Continuously improve their platform and technology to comply with standards related to data security.
Q3:
Scale services to reach 820,212 enrolled users of Blooming Health platform.
Expand partnerships to affordable housing and supportive housing organizations that are working towards providing stable housing for older adults and underserved members at risk for homelessness.
Continuously improve their platform and technology to enable interoperability with other data systems in the care ecosystem.
Q4:
Scale services to reach 2,094,470 enrolled users of Blooming Health platform.
Reach a minimum of 100,000 users/state in 10 US states.
Expand partnerships to Community health centers / federally qualified health centers that deliver preventative clinical services for older adults and underserved community members.
Continuously improve their platform and technology to comply with standards related to enable accessibility support for disabled clients / staff.
Background
The lack of availability, access, and awareness of social services significantly contribute to the health disparities faced by older adults and other underserved populations.
Particularly with older adults, 80% of them have at least one chronic condition, and 68% have two or more (Boersma et al, 2020 Prev Chronic Dis ) . Nearly 9.5% of older adults live below the poverty line, with higher rates among older women, Black, and Hispanic adults (Ochieng et al, 2024, KFF) .
A 2024 National Poll on Healthy Aging shows that most older adults and their caregivers are unaware of important public resources for social support (Solway, 2024) . Even when aware, older adults and underserved populations often struggle to access available social services through community-based organizations and government agencies.
At the same time, community-based, social service providers face critical gaps in staffing and capacity for outreach. Manual communication methods and language barriers hinder outreach, education, and needs assessment of diverse populations, much of which is further exacerbated by the technology divide. Trust issues arise as older adults, frequent scam targets, struggle to distinguish reliable information.
Similar to older adults, other underserved populations face health disparities due to a range of drivers that include language barriers and the technology divide. Data shows that Black individuals in the United States (U.S.) have a life expectancy 4-5 years shorter than their white peers (Hill and Artiga, 2023, KFF) ; individuals identifying as LGBT+ report being in fair or poor health more frequently than peers, and; rural residents and homeless individuals experience higher death rates than the general population (Meyer et al, 2023, NBER) .
These challenges highlight the need to provide better outreach and awareness of available resources such as financial assistance, food security, housing support, and employment opportunities to improve overall well-being and health outcomes for older adults and underserved populations.
Progress Update
Partnership Opportunities
Blooming Health seeks financial support for social service providers that serve older adults and underserved communities and seeks to implement the Blooming Health engagement solution, but lacks the financial resources.
Blooming Health is also eager to partner with community organizations that are interested in implementing the solution.
Additionally, it welcomes support from media partners who are interested in sharing the impact stories from the work with community organizations and advancing health equity., Blooming Health offers a completely turnkey solution for social service providers serving older adults and underserved members, and are looking to improve client communication and engagement while measuring the impact of their programs and their organization via client-reported data.
In addition to the technology, Blooming Health is willing to share the learnings from the ground and expertise in developing age-friendly solutions with other ecosystem partners.