Social determinants of health (SDOH) are gaining increased recognition as significant factors that influence healthcare outcomes for different patients. A meta-analysis by Gale and colleagues showed that the number of deaths attributable to education, racial segregation, and low social support are comparable to deaths due to myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular disease, and lung cancer. This has led to increased attention on the collection and coding of SDOH data in the EHRs to support care.
Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an Health Level 7 (HL7) standard designed to overcome technical shortcomings of previous standards, it uses generic definitions of common healthcare concepts to cover typical use cases and easily exchanges data in XML and JSON formats.3 It is presently used to exchange data between EHRs and have been adopted by other big technology companies to standardize health data exchange. Ensuring the easier exchange of this data will allow healthcare providers to better coordinate care, stratify risk, address important population health issues, and improve community-based care. This will be dependent on the capacity to easily harmonize this data across platforms and creation of tools that FHIR can use to more efficiently transmit this data.
The aim of this project is to create a system/registry that can serve as the backbone of a SDOH Application program interface (API) that can be used as a template and reference for transmitting SDOH data between EHRs and across different platforms.
- Braveman P, Gottlieb L. The Social Determinants of Health: It’s Time to Consider the Causes of the Causes. Public Health Rep. 2014;129(Suppl 2):19–31.
- Galea S, Tracy M, Hoggatt KJ, Dimaggio C, Karpati A. Estimated deaths attributable to social factors in the United States. Am J Public Health. 2011 Aug;101(8):1456–65.
- Lehne M, Sass J, Essenwanger A, Schepers J, Thun S. Why digital medicine depends on interoperability. npj Digit Med. 2019 Aug 20;2(1):1–5.