Improving child health care outcomes through social needs intervention-A signal

There is a growing empirical evidence base acknowledging that key determinants of health are often upstream of actual health care service provision yet have important impacts on health outcomes.¹ The article by Pantell et al² contributes to the social needs screening literature by demonstrating the effects of an intervention on the important health care outcome of inpatient utilization. In this secondary analysis of a previously published randomized clinical trial,³ the study team reports the health system utilization differences between an intervention group, which received up to 3 months of tailored social needs–related service navigation by trained college students, compared with a group receiving only written information on relevant local resources (active control). The authors found that the participants who received the intervention had similar utilization of the emergency department as those in the control group but were less likely to be hospitalized in the year following enrollment.