Monmouth County, NJ, driving countywide adoption of wellconnected’s digital social care network

When Monmouth County officials decided to create a better way to deliver social care to their residents, they knew the key was in creating a coordinated effort that involved dozens of nonprofit agencies.

The result of that effort is Monmouth ACTS, which launched in February as a streamlined way of connecting residents to needed services and support. The effort involves a state-of-the-art electronic referral system that assesses a person’s needs, refers them to the appropriate agency and then creates a record of the services they receive.

That system is our allco platform. wellconnected signed a two-year deal in collaboration with NJ 211 Partnership to deliver allco to Monmouth County and the nonprofit social care agencies that work with the county.

allco is a first-of-its-kind case management tool that creates a digital social care network. The result is an efficient, transparent and accountable system that drives better outcomes for the people it serves.

“Our technology is about understanding people’s needs and delivering them to the right place to meet those needs,” said Duane Conners, founder and CEO of wellconnected. “Users such as Monmouth County recognize that the best way to meet those goals is by creating a collaborative, community-wide, digital network of social care agencies.”

The bulk of any county’s budget is largely made up of social care services to its residents, but most counties have an ad hoc system for dealing with social care agencies, even though the county is often their primary funder. The agencies themselves often manage referrals through word-of-mouth and do not keep individual records, which creates downstream problems when they have to file reports to their funders.

Under Monmouth ACTS, calls come in from residents and an employee walks them through a questionnaire created by allco. The answers to that screening inform the referral, and the employee has a list of all possible agencies with a nuanced view of the services they provide. Finally, the agencies log the service they provide, creating records that can be used to treat people in the future.

This is a paradigm change in the way regional social care networks are administered and is designed to free up county personnel and agency workers to do their jobs. After the referral system is fully implemented, Monmouth County will work on driving adoption of allco as the full case management tool for the nonprofit agencies in its network. The goal is to create a relationship between wellconnected and Monmouth County well beyond the two-year implementation phase of the project.

wellconnected was formed in 2021 in response to the deep gap in software solutions that serve the nonprofit social care world. Most nonprofits use pen-and-paper or Excel to manage patient intake, referrals and stakeholder reporting – so they aren’t keeping records of the people they serve and their referral systems are mostly anecdotal.

Our response to that problem, the allco platform, is more than a suite of software tools. It’s a system that mirrors best practices in the healthcare industry, bringing actors in the social care spectrum together and generating data that can be used to improve their collective performance.