Hear Pamela Landsman-Blumberg and Rick Chapman highlight the importance of SDOH and discuss examples of how claims data and EMR linked with SDOH can inform use cases.

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are considered the root cause of health inequities, driving as much as 60-80% of health outcomes. These are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. Interest in SDOH data is increasing for several reasons, including calls for representativeness in clinical studies, documentation of patients' needs, and identification of social programs to help alleviate these needs.

The COVID pandemic's disparate impacts on different populations has highlighted these issues and the urgency in addressing them. Increasingly recognized is that such data are needed to ensure comparative effectiveness research (CER) and health technology assessments (HTA) do not ignore health care interventions potential impacts on health disparities. Without this attention, we cannot assess whether implementation of new interventions is likely to reduce disparities or perhaps even exacerbate them.

Examples of these use cases are shared, highlighting at least one of the following conditions: diabetes, prostate cancer, Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and heart failure.