Washington, DC (March 10, 2022) — Socially Determined^®, the healthcare analytics company that provides Social Risk Intelligence™ to organizations committed to effectively addressing the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), today announced a new social risk score that enables organizations to understand the impact social connections have on health outcomes and business performance. The Social Connectedness metric further enhances the value that Socially Determined’s HITRUST-certified platform, SocialScape^® delivers to clients by expanding its portfolio of community risk scores that assess the core social determinants of health across the United States at a hyper-local level. Social Connectedness joins existing social risk scores including Digital Landscape, Economic Climate, Food Landscape, Health Literacy, Housing Environment and Transportation Network.

For many reasons, lack of social connection can be a major contributing factor to health outcomes. In fact, research from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that social isolation was associated with a 50% increased risk of dementia, 32% increased risk of stroke, and 29% increased risk of heart disease. It also significantly increases a person’s risk of premature death from all causes and is a risk that may rival smoking, obesity and physical inactivity.

The Social Connectedness metric is a first-of-its-kind model that analyzes the influences of loneliness, social network quality, and social capital to deliver comprehensive insights into how they converge to impact a community and the people within it. To assess social connectedness, Socially Determined goes beyond examining the ability for an individual to engage with his or her personal network and considers a variety of factors such as population density, climate, community resources and recreation options in a given area, and a person’s capacity for purpose-driven, meaningful interaction.

“Social connections have always influenced health, but like many other health disparities, COVID-19 illuminated the profound impact in a broader context – especially because of quarantines and social distancing that the pandemic warranted,” said Alan Lattimer, PhD, chief analytics officer at Socially Determined. “Historically, health and social care professionals have only been able to assess social connections based on anecdotal or heuristic evidence, and in many ways, it relegated challenges with poor social connections to long-term care facilities, the mentally ill, and homeless populations. However, this is a much more complex and widespread problem that SocialScape will help expose.”

SocialScape processes dozens of elements including geospatial data from SafeGraph, migration data from the IRS, and other open-source and proprietary datasets to create the Social Connectedness metric. By applying its analytics to this data, SocialScape delivers a risk metric that enables organizations to understand the contours of social connectedness in their community and ultimately, tailor solutions to address them.

For more information on the new Social Connectedness metric, contact Socially Determined at https://www.sociallydetermined.com/contact-us.

 About Socially Determined

Socially Determined provides Social Risk Intelligence solutions to organizations committed to addressing the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) impacting their communities and populations. The company’s platform, SocialScape, delivers unmatched insights into social risk dynamics and their effect on health outcomes and business performance through secure, scalable data processing and proprietary analytics. With SocialScape’s unparalleled view of social risk and Socially Determined’s advisory services expertise, clients can deploy interventions and investments that translate to quantifiable impact. Socially Determined is headquartered in Washington, DC and operates a second office in Blacksburg, VA. For more information, follow Socially Determined on Twitter (@SocDetermined) or LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/company/socially-determined), or visit www.SociallyDetermined.com.