2020 State HIT Connect

The influence of social determinants on health (SDOH) outcomes is increasingly recognized in emerging payment reform programs, federal and state-based policies, and information technology initiatives. The growing awareness of how SDOH shapes health has contributed to efforts to address actionable socioeconomic risk factors through the healthcare delivery system. An important challenge to these efforts is the fragmented communication and coordination among individuals and the stakeholders providing them social services.  This fragmentation has many consequences including reduced effectiveness of resource availability and allocation, and frustration for individuals needing services and support. Advancing SDOH interoperability is foundational to addressing individuals’ social needs and to inform public and population health policy actions that impact SDOH upstream.

This session will introduce the National Alliance to Impact the Social Determinants of Health (NASDOH) in partnership with Leavitt Partners, and the Gravity Project, an HL7 FHIR Accelerator Project, initiated in May 2019 by the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN) in partnership with EMI Advisors LLC.

NASDOH will present on the framework it is developing to advance an individual-centric, open, and interoperable ecosystem for SDOH data collection and sharing. The presentation will highlight 5 key opportunities to foster SDOH interoperability and their benefit. The Gravity Project will highlight its work to develop coded data elements and an HL7 SDOH FHIR Implementation Guide to foster the collection and sharing of social risk factors in clinical settings. The presentation will describe it consensus-driven process for developing data elements and key learnings about productive ways to engage communities in defining core data needed for interoperability.