News Photo by Mike Gonzalez MyMichigan Medical Center Alpena nurse Amy Fettes looks at her computer at an office desk at the hospital last week.

ALPENA — The state wants to help Michigan’s providers of health care and social services work better together by more easily sharing information and resources.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services recently made public a list of 33 recommendations crafted by the department’s Community Information Exchange Task Force, which began meeting monthly in August 2022.

Among the recommendations:

∫ The state should develop standards for providers to share data “at a statewide scale.”

∫ The state should develop a uniform directory of resources “as a public good.”

∫ The state should develop a uniform way for providers to collect data, with clients’ consent, “about clients’ social needs, risks, service-related activities and results.”

The task force’s report, finalized in August, says the state should “leverage a variety of financing mechanisms” to accomplish its goals, “including the capacity to provide more social services.”

Within the next year, DHHS aims to launch “mini-toolkits” that include webinars and other resources to help organizations and providers implement the task force’s recommendations.

“The goal of CIE is to ensure residents can get social needs, like housing, food and childcare met quickly and efficiently,” Chelsea Wuth, a spokeswoman for DHHS, said in an email to The News. “By sharing data efficiently between social service providers, health care providers and payers MDHHS can connect residents quickly to the resources they need.”

DHHS has also planned projects to help health organizations build shared databases, which would help those organizations do things like identify shared patients.

The task force is part of DHHS’s Michigan’s Roadmap to Healthy Communities initiative, which aims to build stronger and healthier communities by 2024 by focusing on and promoting health equity, housing stability, and food security for everyone in the state.