Social determinants of health (SDOH) are a large umbrella of factors that influence the health status and cost of care for millions of Americans. They include everything from health literacy and nutrition to transportation and housing, all of which can both create and exacerbate conditions that could otherwise be avoided or well-managed.
Over the past 20 years, healthcare data has benefited from increased digitization. However, there are still roadblocks to tracking social factors and their impact on cost of care and health outcomes. Hospitals are rightfully focused on the immediate and long-term patient journey through diagnoses and disease state progression in clinical settings. Payers, the other major source of healthcare data, rely on claims based on that clinical data. While the introduction of ICD-10 Z-codes have enabled growing understanding and capture of the clinical impact of social determinants of health, their adoption and categorization remain limited.
Access to social risk insights to measure and address the impact of SDOH on patient lives can be challenging due to many factors including:
By aggregating data from federal, state, local, and commercial sources, normalized, granular, and actionable datasets can be built to clearly identify social risks across communities and populations. These insights provide an immediate opportunity to identify patient and community social risks. Combined with your medical or claims data assets, they can be used to detect signals along the patient journey driving discovery of opportunities for intervention for relevant patient cohorts within prioritized therapeutics areas, or commercially speaking, within brand specific brands.
Socially Determined delivers on the promise of applied SDOH data. With 7 targeted domains including financial, food, housing, transportation, health literacy, digital landscape and social connectedness, Socially Determined leverages a diverse set of data sources to generate social risk data at the community level (ranging from ZIP code down to 200 square meters) and individual level.
We provide next-level social insights for research of nearly any healthcare goal by equipping our partners with data that is ripe for integration as part of existing analyses and strategic initiatives. Through this approach we have solved data quality and granularity issues that have long plagued nearly every applied use of SDOH and, in turn, help to deliver real health outcomes.
With Socially Determined, a patient’s lived experience adds real, verifiable context to their clinical journey. This allows life sciences organizations, already positioned to play a leading role in addressing SDOH, to utilize our regularly refreshed data to drive newly targeted initiatives, improving outcomes and reducing costs.
To learn more about how Socially Determined drives results for life sciences organizations, download our free ebook or reach out to us today.