Smart Community Health: A Comprehensive Community Resource Recommendation Platform.

Abstract

Health disparities and inequities are explained by the conditions of places where people live, learn, work and play. In fact, the health of an individual is partially related to access and quality of health care and mainly associated to his behaviours, socioeconomic conditions and other community related factors that are often challenging to address by health care organizations. To meet the need for information about local social services organizations and the ability to offer resource referrals, a number of platforms have been proposed that provide electronic social resource directories and facilitate referrals to social service agencies. However, these platforms show limitations with regards to their dependancy to health care organizations, application portability, service availability, and user engaging interactions such as tracking, monitoring and notification. Moreover, existing social resource referral platforms suffer from a fragmentation of services and a disconnection between individuals in need and service providers. In this paper, we introduce Smart Community Health (SCH), a novel independent platform that prioritizes connecting people in need with local community resources. SCH is a full-service, end-to-end community service provider recommendation platform designed to help address pressing social, environmental, and health needs within our communities. The platform is composed of a mobile application for individuals looking for services and a web application dashboard for the management of community service providers and health care organizations.