Precision social care delivery

Health care organizations are increasingly embracing efforts to screen for and address patients’ health-related social needs (HRSNs), such as food, housing, and transportation insecurity. These activities have historically focused on specific patients, typically through tailored case-finding approaches. Recent HRSN quality measures and accreditation standards have encouraged universal screening, prompting health systems to adopt more standardized interventions to enable responses at scale. However, under the new federal administration, those activities face new headwinds; proposed policy changes threaten both the funding and accountability mechanisms for social care efforts. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has already announced that it will limit the ability of states to fund social services through Medicaid and has proposed eliminating recent HRSN quality measures. In this environment, health systems and payers may need to be more cautious about deploying high-resource, one-size-fits-all interventions. Instead, they should consider more targeted and efficient approaches that can maximize impact in the context of diminishing policy supports. At the same time, as the broader social safety net comes under threat, health system investment in social care is more important than ever.