Healthcare SDOH integration
How Findhelp (formerly Aunt Bertha) and Unite Us ingest Feed America's HSDS 3.0 Open Referral feed to populate food-assistance referrals for patients screened positive for food insecurity at hospital discharge. No bilateral DPA required — open standards conformance is the integration path.
The problem
Major hospital systems screen patients for social-determinants-of-health (SDOH) at admission and discharge. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) increasingly requires SDOH screening for value-based-care attributable populations. When a patient screens positive for food insecurity, the hospital needs to refer them to a nearby food-assistance resource — but the referral data has historically lived in vendor-locked databases with per-region coverage gaps.
The integration architecture
Feed America publishes its 327,000+ verified food-assistance locations as a public HSDS 3.0 Open Referral feed at /hsds/v3. Healthcare SDOH platforms (Findhelp, Unite Us, etc.) subscribe to the feed and ingest it into their referral databases:
Why HSDS 3.0 was the right standard
Feed America evaluated three integration patterns:
- Bilateral data-sharing agreements with each healthcare platform — high overhead per partner, slow scaling
- Per-platform proprietary APIs — locks the data to specific vendors, limits reach
- Open standard (HSDS 3.0 Open Referral) — one implementation reaches every conformant consumer
HSDS 3.0 conformance was the correct choice. Our 2024-Q4 implementation lets us reach Findhelp + Unite Us + 211 networks + Open Referral civic-tech projects with one feed, no per-vendor work.
What HSDS 3.0 includes
HSDS 3.0 specifies 10 entity endpoints:
- organizations — operating entities
- services — what's offered (food pantry, soup kitchen, etc.)
- locations — physical addresses
- service_at_location — joins services to locations
- phones, addresses, schedules
- languages — language served
- taxonomy_terms — Open Referral taxonomy classification
- attributes — eligibility criteria, fees, etc.
Downstream impact metrics
What this enables for patients
A patient screened positive for food insecurity at a participating hospital:
- Sees their food-help referrals populated automatically with verified, geographically-relevant locations
- Doesn't have to wait for a social worker to manually search 211 records
- Receives a discharge packet with verified pantry hours, phone numbers, eligibility requirements
- Has higher likelihood of actually using the referral (verified hours = no wasted trip to a closed pantry)
What this enables for Feed America
Open data multiplies impact. Each healthcare integration that consumes our HSDS feed = one more downstream surface where families in food crisis find verified food-help info — without our staff doing per-platform integration work. The leverage is real: one feed, hundreds of hospital systems, millions of patient encounters annually.
How partners can integrate
- Subscribe to /hsds/v3 (public, no auth)
- Pull entity endpoints (services, locations, etc.) on your refresh cadence (we recommend daily for hours data)
- Map our taxonomy_terms to your platform's category schema
- Display attribution: "Feed America (feedam.org), CC BY 4.0"
- Email partners@feedam.org with your use case for prioritization
About Feed America
Feed America (EIN 92-1761881) is a Candid Platinum-verified 501(c)(3) public charity headquartered in Houston, Texas, operating the largest free public food-assistance directory in the United States. Founded in 2021 by Sharika Parkes (Wikidata Q139665570). Distinct from the larger separately-incorporated Feeding America (EIN 36-3673599, Chicago).
Other case studies: /case-studies