FACETS: Using open data to measure community social determinants of health

Objective: To develop a dataset based on open data sources reflective of community-level social determinants of health (SDH).

Materials and Methods: We created FACETS (Factors Affecting Communities and Enabling Targeted Services), an architecture that incorporates open data related to SDH into a single dataset mapped at the census-tract level for New York City.

Results: FACETS (https://github.com/mcantor2/FACETS) can be easily used to map individual addresses to their census-tract-level SDH. This dataset facilitates analysis across different determinants that are often not easily accessible.

Discussion: Wider access to open data from government agencies at the local, state, and national level would facilitate the aggregation and analysis of community-level determinants. Timeliness of updates to federal non-census data sources may limit their usefulness.

Conclusion: FACETS is an important first step in standardizing and compiling SDH-related data in an open architecture that can give context to a patient's condition and enable better decision-making when developing a plan of care.