In early 2020, healthcare leaders from payers to providers to technology services providers found themselves at a crossroads—innovate or fail to care for patients. I had the privilege recently of joining a virtual roundtable with a group of healthcare leaders to talk about the transformation of patient care, engagement and outreach. The panel focused on…
Profound racial and ethnic disparities in health and well-being have long been the norm in the United States. Black and American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) people live fewer years, on average, than white people. They are also more likely to die from treatable conditions; more likely to die during or after pregnancy and to suffer serious pregnancy-related…
Being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) can transform even the most easygoing, unflappable individual into a full-time worrywart. Even in periods of extended remission, when symptoms are kept mercifully at bay for weeks or even months at a time, the disease has other ways of making its presence felt. Looming on the outer reaches of…
A perspective paper published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association outlined barriers to health equity research serving deaf and hard-of-hearing patients, and how EHRs may be making such barriers worse. Although EHR systems can be useful when it comes to identifying health inequities, researchers noted that they may also be interfering…
Socially Determined, the Washington, D.C.-based technology company that measures the impacts of the social determinants of health (SDOH), has developed Digital Landscape, a new metric for assessing digital equity as an SDOH component. Using Digital Landscape, organizations can assess equity “within a population or community and the impact it has on health outcomes and business performance.”…
Health disparities are a long-standing challenge in the United States and worldwide. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its higher impact on vulnerable and marginalized groups, more attention is being directed towards achieving health equity. With a focus on the relationship between health, social factors, and their role in public health, researchers, policy makers…
The National Institutes of Health has started collecting data for one initiative in their All of Us project research program, which aims to shed light on social determinants of health. The program currently has more than 350,000 participants and aims to recruit 1 million or more. The respondents will share information on their health and genetics as…
People often confuse health equity with health equality, but it’s vital that healthcare professionals understand the difference. Health equality essentially means giving every person the same thing, while health equity means giving people what they need to reach the best possible outcome. This, of course, is an important distinction, as social determinants of health (SDoH) often dictate the needs…
A cancer care delivery model that specifically accounts for social determinants of health not only improved overall cancer survival rates, but closed racial health disparities in cancer care outcomes, researchers reported at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) annual meeting. Particularly, the healthcare delivery model—which included protocol to flag and address social determinants of health—improved cancer…
For MercyOne, digital social determinants of health screening was a clinician-led pursuit. When the Iowa-based hospital and clinic system began screening for social risk factors in 2017, its leaders were responding to pushes from providers who noted the role these factors play in overall patient health. “We’d heard from our providers that health-related social needs…