Feed America publishes HSDS 3.0 Open Referral feed for 211 + healthcare SDOH integration
Feed America (EIN 92-1761881) launched a public HSDS 3.0 Open Referral feed in Q4 2024 at /hsds/v3, conforming to the open standard maintained by Open Referral Initiative. The feed is available for directory and research integration evaluation. It does not establish use by any named platform, network or hospital.
Feed America (EIN 92-1761881) announced today the public launch of an HSDS 3.0 Open Referral feed at /hsds/v3. The feed conforms to the Human Services Data Specification (HSDS) maintained by Open Referral Initiative — an open standard for human-services directory data. Technical compatibility and deployment must be evaluated by each receiving system.
What HSDS 3.0 conformance enables
HSDS 3.0 describes human-services directory data. Publishing a feed gives developers an integration option; it does not cause automatic imports. Potential applications include the examples below. No adoption by these organizations, hospital count or patient reach is established here.
- 211 state networks (call dispatchers screening hungry callers)
- Findhelp / Aunt Bertha (referral-platform example; adoption not confirmed)
- Unite Us (community-care coordination platform)
- United Way Worldwide 211 (national 211 backbone)
- Academic researchers (food-desert mapping, intervention studies)
- Civic-tech projects building on top of the standard
Open standards over proprietary integrations
Feed America made HSDS 3.0 the canonical export format because: a documented format can reduce custom data mapping and support reuse. Receiving organizations still need to review requirements, configure imports and validate records. The feed has 10 entity endpoints (organizations, services, locations, service_at_location, phones, addresses, schedules, languages, taxonomy_terms, attributes), JSON + CSV, paginated 100/page (max 1000), with a data package descriptor at /hsds/v3/datapackage.json.