On February 12, 2026 SIREN co-directors Danielle Hessler Jones and Laura Gottlieb and Alameda Health System Medical Director of Patient Quality, Andy Quiñones-Rivera, had a conversation about assessing patients’ experiences of healthcare-based social care. Here’s the scoop: Recent state and national efforts to incentivize social care have introduced measures focused on the quantity of social risk screening or referrals. These measures fail to simultaneously assess the quality of those services, including the patient experience of having healthcare teams ask about or intervene to address social conditions. The result has been an emerging national concern that rather than leading to care improvements, healthcare-based social care activities might instead be implemented in ways that cause harm to patients, e.g., by triggering stressful reactions, stigmatizing patients, not leading to meaningful service referrals, or otherwise undermining patients’ relationships with healthcare providers. In this conversation, panelists described their recent work developing and validating the new Patient Experience of Social Care Measure, which can serve to counter-balance the current quantity-focused assessments.
Access the Patient Experience of Social Care Measure here.
University of San Francisco California