IRIS
Community-powered. Communities, connected.
The Problem
Social service agencies often refer clients to each other. After all, if you're a candidate for one social service, odds are good that you could also be served by another. But the knowledge of what services are available, and how and when that referral happens, is mostly sitting in agency staff heads. Communities often struggle to coordinate referrals, and matching families in need to services is often shaky.
So:
IRIS is a tool designed to encourage warm handoffs among community partners, keeping providers updated along the way. Communities using IRIS can make referrals to each other directly, and coordinate and monitor those referrals to make sure no one drops the ball - and no familiy falls through the cracks.
We designed and build IRIS from the ground up with our client partners - a team of social scientists and researchers at the Center for Public Partnerships and Research.
👆 One of our favorite details is the central visual metaphor we designed: each new referral is visualized as planting a seed. When the referral is accepted by the other agency, a plant begins to row. And when the referred agency makes contact with the family, a flower blooms. It's something that could be a small detail, but the impact is large.
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Of course, family privacy in a service like IRIS is critical; the platform is HIPAA compliant, and user access is tightly controlled by the team at CPPR. The clients have put a ton of care and attention into protecting their end-user's privacy. We're really proud of this!
IRIS is in use in eight communities today, and the team is piloting with more communities now.
It is also maybe the first application we've built that the end users called 'Damn sexy.'
