Four Myths You Probably Believe About Social Determinants of Health

“That is akin to giving a patient diagnosis with no prescriptions or referrals to help them get better. Within the designated system of patient engagement, whether that is an EHR, CRM, or other platform, we need to build or integrate expanded capabilities for SDoH identification and intervention, including closed-loop referrals and tracking outcomes throughout the continuum of care. It will be a great day when we can rethink social determinants of health as social ‘barriers’ or ‘influencers.’ It is possible and necessary to reduce or eliminate these factors’ effects on people’s health outcomes by not only identifying, but referring, patients to social services agencies and tracking progress to close the gaps in care.”

-David Wenger, CEO and founder, Bridge Connector

“Identification of a patient’s SDoH is still a struggle. One reason is that SDoH information isn’t readily available to payer and provider organizations when important treatment decisions are being made, in part because these details are essentially trapped as unstructured text within clinical notes. Too often, clinicians are unaware of key SDoH information until after a patient’s health has been negatively affected. However, AI-based tools such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) makes unstructured data usable by automating the identification and extraction of key concepts from large volumes of clinical documentation.”

-Elizabeth Marshall, MD, MBA, director, clinical analytics, Linguamatics, an IQVIA company

“Physicians have long experienced the impact of SDoH on patient health, care outcomes, costs, physician burden, and the physician-patient relationship. In fact, the Physician Foundation’s 2018 survey of more than 8,500 physicians, almost 90% said their patients had a serious health problem linked to poverty or other social conditions. SDoH are also driving up healthcare costs and reducing quality of care for everyone as health-related social needs and associated behaviors drive 70% of health outcomes in the U.S.”

-Gary Price, MD, president, The Physicians Foundation

“While there are challenges to collecting and analyzing social determinants of health data, harnessing the true value of this information is far from impossible.  An organization needs to define their strategy for tackling one or more social determinants with regard to tools and workflows to capture the information; and have an action plan when an issue is identified … Efforts to align standardized assessments and coding systems for capturing social determinants and processes to evaluate the effectiveness of collaborations will be key to collecting and scaling social determinants of health data.”

-Lindee Chin, MD, senior clinical director, Value-Based Care, Edifecs