Collecting social determinants of health information at scale is just one challenge for providers. Others include training staff to collect that data sensitively and explaining what they need to do next in order to act on it at scale, says Dr. Hilary Hatch, a clinical psychologist and chief clinical officer at Phreesia, a patient-engagement technology provider. 

"SDOH is just one of so many different things that providers are asked to do each year. That's just going to be one more thing, and it's just going to take one more minute of your time, but it's impossible, it's really a challenge," she explains.

Hatch leads the development of clinical programs and research partnerships. She has also contributed to National Quality Forum efforts to address social determinants of health utilization. As of January 1, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has mandated that healthcare organizations screen for five social risk drivers.

Partnering with NQF, Hatch and her team looked at ways to scale SDOH without adding to the burden on providers, and developed and tested digital tools that would be user-friendly for patients, protective of privacy and less demanding for health workers.

By assessing the level of a patient's ability to follow through on digital resources, and understanding which patients most need the help of a community health worker, the team was able to cut the FQHC's hands-on SDOH workload in half.

Hatch found that the anxiety patients can experience with depression and SDOH screenings is reduced when it's done digitally. When patients answer questions electronically, caregivers are more likely to identify unmet social needs. 

The information from digital screenings has also helped individualize patient care. For example, analytics have shown the FQHC was able to lower barriers to medication adherence.

In this episode of HIMSSCast, Hatch discusses how the collaborators worked with a Federally Qualified Health Center to identify patients with social needs, and then develop ways to address them at scale.

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Talking points:

• Patient activation measures explained.
• Patient privacy concerns over SDOH questions reduced with digital screening.
• Developing care plans based on patient-activation assessments.
• Where SDOH technologies are going next.
• Feeding analytics to improve population health.

More about this episode:

HIMSSCast: Making SDOH interventions a reality

EHRA recommends simplifying standards to scale SDOH

Scaling SDOH initiatives with analytics and coordinated workflows

SDOH critical to national public health data infrastructure

ONC creates SDOH toolkit for communities

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.