Social determinants of health – the nutritional, housing and safety characteristics of patients living outside of nursing facilities – contribute to disproportionate risk of illness, hospital readmissions and lack of access to quality health care for vulnerable populations, including Medicare recipients. at.
Consider that medical care may only account for between 10 and 20% of health outcomes, while a patient’s neighborhood and environment, economic stability and education, social and community context, and individual behavioral factors account for 80 to 90% of health outcomes, according to Rick Krohn, Director at HealthSense, connected health expert and HIMSS innovation author.
The opportunity to impact population health outcomes via SDOH lies in the ability to “integrate unstructured, non-traditional health data into the patient record,” he wrote for Healthcare IT News during the pandemic.
SDOH data is an issue of interoperability because it is often intentionally intercepted.
“It is a multifaceted issue that begins with awareness – there is an incomplete understanding of the value and catalog of SDOH data for clinical care and population health management,” Krohn said.
Providers only have the background information that they can see right in front of them in the patient room. Would a diagnosis or care plan change if the doctor truly knew the patient beyond their symptoms and medical records?
Dr. Ben Zaniello, Chief Medical Officer at PointClickCare, has encountered SDOH data interoperability issues in all of his experiences with healthcare ecosystems – on the provider, payer, and technology developer sides.
Zaniello says the broader healthcare ecosystem is focused on creating technology infrastructures to support holistic care for people, and he explains the data challenges associated with WPC – what is needed to drive patient behavior, improve health outcomes and healthcare costs to control.
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Conversation topics:
- Managing aspects outside of patient symptoms to ensure successful patient care.
- Balancing violations with the “well-intentioned gates” that restrict shared access to data.
- Improving care coordination and visibility and not “caving the EHR.”
- Where Post-Acute Coordination Meets Behavioral Health Regulation 42 CFR Part 2.
- How competition in healthcare leads to the use of HIPAA and technical loopholes to prevent data from being shared.
- Three paths to a holistic care reality.
Health equity is hindered by SDOH coding barriers
Go beyond SDOH to reduce readmissions
Social determinants of health may be helpful in predicting sepsis readmission
The data challenges of SDOH and how to overcome them
Important new report calls for better integration of social determinants of health
Andrea Fox is managing editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.