Aspects of Social Determinants of Health: An Introduction

It’s always been pretty obvious that factors such as wealth, race, education, and the quality of food and water have enormous impacts on health. But only in the past few years have the medical professions tried to quantify and capture these factors. Given that the field is increasingly digitized and data-driven, health IT is responsible for collecting and analyzing social determinants of health (SDoH). Data can both call out SDoH and help to address its effects. An example of calling out SDoH was cited by Dr. Sherri Onyiego, Medical Director for the Texas Market at Equality Health. They use claims data to track use of emergency rooms, medical equipment, and generic versus brand medications. They also obtain public health data by ZIP code and data from a Health Information Exchange (HIE). That data can reveal important information that might not make it into the patient’s own record, such as an emergency room visit. Onyiego mentioned the recent, scandalous revelation that maternal morbidity among non-Hispanic Black people is much higher than average (and are getting worse) as an example of feeding SDoH data into analytics. An oft-cited statistic estimates that 80% of health outcomes can be attributed to SDoH. Dr. Geoff Rutledge, chief medical officer of HealthTap, says that variations in healthcare outcomes between adjacent counties can be huge. About 25% of the disparity can be attributed to difficulties getting access to healthcare. Even more disparities are caus...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Analytics/Big Data C-Suite Leadership Communication and Patient Experience Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Regulations Care Management SDOH Social Determinants of Health Source Type: blogs