Accounting for social risk factors in Medicare payment: Identifying social risk factors

The US Department of Health and Human Services, acting through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, has asked the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene an ad hoc committee to identify social risk factors that affect the health outcomes of Medicare beneficiaries and methods to account for these factors in Medicare payment programs. The committee’s work will be conducted in phases and will produce five brief consensus reports. In this first report, the committee presents a conceptual framework and describes the results of a literature search linking social risk factors, including socioeconomic position, to health-related measures of importance to Medicare payment and quality programs.