Dr. Jacob Reider - CEO of the Alliance for Better Health and former deputy national coordinator for health IT had described the discussions he had been having about social determinants of health with an array of healthcare stakeholders.

He said lot of interest has been shown in this domain, especially among people from federally-qualified health centers, so on the frontlines of the medical side. People from states and/or former state leaders are looking at this from a public health perspective. May it be social care providers or health plans, interest was shown in this area.

So, there has been a broad cross section of the care continuum who believed that this is an important part of healthcare and they would like to participate in some way, figuring this out together.

The push to do a better job incorporating social determinant information into care and treatment plans gained momentum in 2019. More and more provider organizations realized the important role that housing, food security, transportation and other non-clinical factors play in patients’ health.

Value of addressing such variable is apparent and so are the challenges many health systems face while integrating social determinants of health into workflows, beginning with the electronic health record.

Reider said that the first step is how we capture information about identification of people’s social care needs because, in the medical universe there was ICD and SNOMED-CT that was used to capture information, though the system wasn’t efficient enough but was reasonably good way of representing the fact that a patient had diabetes using the coding system.

We don’t have a consistent, predictable, repeatable mechanism for expressing that somebody has food insecurity needs or is a domestic violence victim or has behavior health issue that makes it a challenge to leave the house. They might also be having transportation challenges.

Inspite of these challenges people have begun thinking about this in a way like never before. Cross-stakeholder efforts to pay more attention to SDOH is reaching critical mass.