America's third largest city is now connected by something creating a structural shift in how care is delivered across one of the largest urban region's on the continent. Apil is go-live month for wellconnected in Chicago. The Buffalo-born startupmarked a defining milestone with the launch of the Chicago Regionwide Community Information Exchange (CIE). "This is a big one," wellconnected CEO Duane Conners said. "Our work in Chicago supporting the creation of this CIE, designed to enable information-sharing between health care providers, social service agencies, and community organizations." Built through deep collaboration with the Illinois Public Health Institute and a coalition of cross-sector partners, the CIE represents a new kind of infrastructure—one that treats coordination not as an aspiration, but as a baseline. At its core, the Chicago CIE is about alignment. For too long, healthcare providers, social service organizations, and community-based partners have operated in parallel, each carrying partial visibility into a person’s needs. The result has been fragmentation, inefficiency, and, most critically, missed opportunities to intervene when it matters most. The CIE changes that by creating a shared, longitudinal view of individuals and enables real-time collaboration across systems that were never designed to work together. And wellconnected’s role in this ecosystem is deliberate. It powers the social care layer—the interface where coordination becomes action. Through intuitive referral workflows, dynamic resource directories, and care coordination tools, we translate data into decisions and connections into outcomes,where infrastructure meets impact. The initial phase of the Chicago CIE focuses on one of the region’s most urgent challenges: homelessness. Historically, individuals navigating housing instability have been forced to retell their stories across disconnected systems, while providers operate without the full picture. The CIE replaces that experience with continuity—enabling faster referrals, reducing unnecessary emergency room utilization, and giving case managers the tools to act with clarity and speed. Conners said the Chicago CIE was built with the community, not for it. That includes the Illinois Public Health Institute (IPHI), 4medica - One Patient...One Record, New Jersey Innovation Institute and Cornerstone Community Outreach. Practitioners, organizations, and individuals with lived experience helped shape the workflows, governance, and priorities from day one. That co-design is what gives the system legitimacy—and ultimately, staying power. This is the future of care: interoperable, accountable, and human-centered. And this is just the beginning. "What that means is, for one of the first times on a large scale, we're bringing social determinants of health into the daily treatment and care of community members who need it most," Conners said. Because when systems connect, people don’t fall through the cracks—they move forward, which means for one of the first times on a large scale, wellconnected will bring social determinants of health into the daily treatment and care of community members who need it most. As the network expands throughout 2026—bringing in behavioral health, additional providers, and broader community services, the Chicago CIE is expected to become a blueprint for how regions can operationalize whole-person care at scale.