PA Navigate website aims to simplify referrals to food, housing, other services

• By Lucy Albright/LNP | LancasterOnline

Doctors and social service organizations in Pennsylvania will have an easier time tracking patient referrals with the launch of the PA Navigate website.

Lancaster County Commissioner Alice Yoder joined state Department of Human Services Secretary Dr. Valerie Arkoosh at Community Action Partnership in Lancaster city this week to announce the new website, which can be accessed at pa-navigate.org.

“The work we do at hospitals is virtually sick care, but the work that’s done from a community standpoint, and how people identify health, really happens in the communities where we are,” said Yoder, who was the longtime executive director of community health for Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health before being elected to the board of commissioners in November 2023. “PA Navigate has the hope of really connecting the two.”

PA Navigate allows people to seek out services related to food, housing, career training and other needs, which is similar to the existing PA 211 system operated by the United Way of Pennsylvania.

But, according to Arkoosh, PA Navigate brings something new to the table: it will allow doctors and social service organizations to easily refer patients to a service in the community, and to keep track of those referrals.

Arkoosh said that health issues don’t happen in a vacuum.

“As a physician I saw patients who in order to be healthy needed so much more than the prescriptions that my colleagues and I could … provide to them,” Arkoosh said, citing needs related to food, housing, mental health care, transportation and childcare among other things.

But she said it can be hard for providers to know if the patients actually accessed the services they were referred to.

Through PA Navigate, a doctor can look up a service — like a food pantry — and can forward the patient’s basic contact info to that service, Arkoosh said. The food pantry can then contact the patient directly, and if the patient uses the service they can let the doctor know.

Community Action Partnership CEO Vanessa Philbert spoke about the importance of innovation and collaboration, and stressed the need to focus on the people who will use these services.

“I always feel like it’s a responsibility of mine, and I’m sure many of you feel that way, to ensure that we are speaking up for those who are impacted by the services and the things that we’re trying to do, so that we don’t miss the moment of what they really need,” Philbert said Tuesday.

The PA Navigate program will cost $15.5 million over five years, and is being funded by a federal grant through the American Rescue Plan, state Department of Human Services spokesperson Laura Humphrey said.

PA 211 — like the regional PA 211 East run by United Way of Lancaster County — offers information by phone and online to help people connect with social services, from child care to food banks.

Kristen Rotz, president of United Way of Pennsylvania, said PA 211 has staff who answer phone calls, text messages and web chats. In 2023, the service received 384,000 phone and text requests, she said.

Rotz said that PA 211 in some cases does provide a kind of closed loop where the referrer knows the outcome of the referral. She said the platform has a statewide contract with a Medicaid managed care insurer to provide closed loop navigation for their members.

“The future of success to get community-based organizations to participate means that we need to be able to embrace as many different technology platforms as possible and integrate data so that everyone has the outcome information that they need — with consent of the customer,” Rotz said.