The utility of the Brokamp Area Deprivation Index as a prescreen for social risk in primary care

OBJECTIVES: To assess the relationship between an area deprivation index (ADI) and a social determinant of health (SDoH) measure within a diverse sample. A pre-screening tool based on routinely collected information could reduce clinical burden by identifying patients impacted by SDoH for comprehensive assessment. STUDY DESIGN: 499 consented pediatric patient-families who spoke English, Spanish, or Arabic, and had a child ≤12 years receiving primary care at a large academic institution were enrolled. Participants completed the Health Leads Social Needs (HLSN) survey. Residential address was extracted from the electronic health record to calculate Brokamp ADI at the census-tract level. The main outcome was the correlations between the total HLSN score and Brokamp ADI, overall and in each language subgroup. ADI distributions were also compared between participants with/without need for each of the eight HLSN survey SDoH domains, using two-sample t-tests and Pearsons chi-squared tests. RESULTS: 54.9% of participants were English-speaking, 30.9% were Spanish-speaking, and 14.2% were Arabic-speaking. Spearmans correlations between Brokamp ADI and total HLSN score were: overall (r(s)=0.15; p=0.001), English (r(s)=0.12; p=0.04), Spanish (r(s)=0.03; p=0.7), Arabic (r(s)=0.24; p=0.04). SDoH domain analyses found significant ADI differences between those with/without need in housing instability, childcare, transportation, and health literacy. CONCLUSIONS: There were small but statistically significant associations between the Brokamp ADI and total HLSN score and SDoH domains of housing instability, childcare, transportation, and health literacy. These findings support testing the Brokamp ADI as a pre-screening tool to help identify patients with social needs in an outpatient clinical setting.