Advancing Interoperable Social Determinants of Health

On July 26th SIREN Managing Director Caroline Fichtenberg participated in a webinar on Advancing Interoperable Social Determinants of Health (SDH). Hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (HIT) as part of their webinar series Interoperability in Action, the event highlighted the value of interoperable SDH data and the current challenges facing that goal and efforts to address them. It featured a number of experts including:

• Caroline Fichtenberg of SIREN discussed the value of capturing SDH data in clinical settings;
• Dan Vreeman of the Regenstrief Institute defined the various elements of interoperability and highlighted how interoperability can work;
• Michelle Proser of National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) and Rosy Chang Weir of Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations discussed the implementation of the PRAPARE screening tool;
• Rachel Gold of OCHIN described OCHIN’s SDH electronic health record tools, which is based on PRAPARE;
• Hilary Placzek of Health Leads discussed challenges with data integration;
• Rob McClure, ONC/National Library of Medicine (NLM) consultant, described the different medical terminology systems available to code SDH data;
• Lisa Lang of NLM presented on various organizational tools for coordination of HIT efforts;
• Theresa Cullen of the Regenstrief Institute described previous efforts to develop medical terminology and interoperability standards for newborn screening and Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs);
• Matt Lambert and Anthony Beverina, of Socially Determined described their plans to develop an analytic framework to assess SDH risk;
• Julia Skapik and Al Taylor of ONC highlighted their organization’s role and resources in this space and provided recommendations for those wanting to develop standardized systems for SDH data collection.

Read more about the webinar here. We’ll share a link to the archived webinar once it is available. Along with partners at the ONC, NLM, Regenstrief, NACHC and other organizations, SIREN is working on helping to create a streamlined system for capturing SDH data in electronic health records. If you are interested in learning more about this effort, contact us at siren@ucsf.edu.