Anyone who has filled out a pre-visit patient questionnaire has experienced some of the data extracted from social determinants of health (SDOHs). Questions about transportation (ex. Has a lack of transportation kept you from medical appointments?), housing, food, and personal safety may be asked on paper or in person at an appointment in order to help provide a larger picture of a patient’s overall health.
If there is a need to get more specific with any of the questions (and the patient is comfortable answering more specifically), there is an opportunity to gather even more data. All this paints a picture of population health, and that data is critical in providing the best care possible.
Value-based care
There are a couple of important boxes to check for providers when it comes to SDOHs. The first is whether they are screening for them in the first place. A data brief from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology shows that in 2022, 83% of hospitals reported collecting social needs data, but just 54% did so routinely. Lower-resourced hospitals, which the brief describes as, for example, small, rural, critical access, or independent hospitals, less frequently conducted routine screening than higher-resourced hospitals.
A big incentive for hospitals to collect SDOH data is value-based care. If providers are responsible for reporting certain metrics in order to meet incentives and avoid penalties, it is imperative to gather as much information as possible. The clinical and financial outcomes of population health management initiatives are among the data points that need to be tracked.
Health policies
In addition to improving care at an individual facility, population health data can be used to guide overall health decisions and federal recommendations by an organization like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC collaborates with state, tribal, local, and territorial public health departments, healthcare partners, and federal agencies to gather public health information.
Part of the CDC’s process is to integrate all of the information so that conclusions can be drawn. Once there are significant enough data sets that valuable information can be shared, the CDC can work to provide public access to the data and visualizations, so that everyone has actionable insights to high priority public threats.
How data can be used to improve care
Whether it’s on a local level or a national level, it is important to have a healthcare-focused analytics solution that can turn the data into actionable information. The solution needs to be able to integrate data from any number of sources. While a healthcare facility could be using different systems at a few different locations, the CDC is dealing with hundreds of locations that could all be using varying types of technology. An analytics solution needs to be able to take all of that data and turn it into one single source of truth, especially with something as critical as patient health. The same integration can be used to easily produce the types of reports that are necessary for value-based care models.
That’s when the data can be put into practice. The data can be used to:
- Highlight opportunities to improve patients’ access to care
- Measure the impact of interventions
- Identify the patients at increased risk of disease burden and resource utilization
- Determine where and how health resources are being allocated
The costs associated with poor health can run up quickly – both for a patient and a healthcare provider. Data is the key to controlling those costs. By identifying risk and the likelihood of certain resources being needed for treatment, organizations can better prepare ahead of time rather than react in the moment. Using the data gathered from previous similar cases, hospitals can know what strategies were successful.
All of this leads to better treatment for patients, and it all stems from data. It may seem like appointments are already too short to spend time on the questions that check in on the social determinants of health. But the time spent gathering that information could pay off in the overall health of a hospital and its community.
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