Volunteer: Technical Assurance Review for a Maternal and Child Health Platform

This is a volunteer opportunity provided by Taproot Foundation, a nonprofit creating social change through pro bono connections. My goal for this Taproot project is to create an independent technical assurance report and prioritized risk-remediation plan for Rooted, our patient-centered maternal, newborn, and pediatric health platform. We are seeking a senior healthcare software architect, cybersecurity professional, or similarly qualified technology leader to review our proposed system architecture and foundation plans. The volunteer will assess identity and access management, audit logging, data protection, backups and recovery, system integrations, migration from our current platform, and readiness for future HIPAA-regulated operations. The project will include reviewing selected architecture documents, participating in two or three virtual meetings, identifying significant gaps or risks, and providing written recommendations categorized by urgency. We would also like the volunteer to help define which decisions require additional specialist review before implementation or production use. This is a bounded advisory and assurance engagement—not a request to build the application. The review can be completed using architecture documents and synthetic or nonproduction information; access to patient information is neither anticipated nor requested. Through working with our organization on this project, the volunteer will support our mission by helping Rose City Wellness build a safe, trustworthy technology foundation for expanding access to continuous maternal, newborn, and family healthcare. Rooted is being designed to connect pregnancy, birth, postpartum, lactation, newborn, pediatric, and mental health information around one longitudinal patient record. This is especially important for the low-income, Medicaid-enrolled, uninsured, and rural East Texas families we serve, who often experience fragmented care and limited access to maternity services. A qualified independent review will help us identify security, privacy, reliability, and architectural risks before they become embedded in the platform. The volunteer’s expertise will directly influence how safely we protect sensitive health information, coordinate care, migrate existing records, and expand services. This work will strengthen our organizational capacity while helping create a more connected and equitable model of care for families. My team and I have prepared for this project by completing a detailed platform blueprint, clinical concept model, implementation roadmap, responsible AI and safety specification, migration inventory, and initial governance package. We have defined the platform’s intended users, clinical domains, system boundaries, implementation sequence, release gates, and nonnegotiable privacy and safety requirements. Our Executive Director and clinical system owner will serve as the volunteer’s primary contact, provide organized review materials, protect time for weekly meetings, and respond promptly to questions. We will limit the initial review to the documents and decisions most relevant to the volunteer’s expertise. The volunteer’s findings will be entered into our formal decision and risk registers, translated into implementation requirements, and used to determine whether foundation work may proceed. Significant findings will remain open until they are resolved or formally accepted by an authorized human decision-maker. We are prepared to implement the recommendations rather than allowing the final report to sit unused. Rose City Wellness Mission: Rose City Wellness is committed to transforming maternal and infant health outcomes in our region by providing compassionate, evidence-based care throughout pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and the newborn period. We serve families of all backgrounds—especially those most impacted by health disparities—with holistic services that center dignity, safety, education, and informed choice. Through clinical excellence, community outreach, and culturally responsive support, we aim to ensure every parent and baby receives the care they deserve.