Healthify is the leading software solution for addressing individuals' social determinants with care coordination between health care and community services. Social Health Determinants Care Management- Healthify.
February 26, 2019 - Most medical professionals agree that efforts to address the social determinants of health (SDOH) will be critical to meeting value-based care demands and improving patient care outcomes.Healthcare experts also that attending to these social needs is the right thing to do, acting on a philanthropic impulse.The proof is in the pudding. From physician offices and hospitals to large medical systems and nationally-recognized payers, efforts to address the SDOH at scale have taken over. These healthcare providers are investing heavily in projects that will promote both social and physical health.But what initiatives are actually effective in meeting patients’ social needs?
Which specific projects scale easily and make a noticeable dent in patient health?At this point, the healthcare industry doesn’t quite know, according to Garth Graham, president of the Aetna Foundation, which hosts programming around the SDOH.READ MORE:“Nationally, there's awareness that we need to tackle social determinants of health, but the best strategy to do that has not been uniformly identified,” Graham explained in a previous. “It's not always clear whether the best thing to do is tackling food insecurity, whether you tackle housing, whether you tackle transportation, or whether you look at issues around education and job security.”Some industry leaders are beginning to investigate this question by looking at evidence-based community health projects. A partnership between the Aetna Foundation and the National Quality Forum will aggregate examples of successful social programming. The two healthcare leaders plan to build a guidebook of sorts for other organizations looking to begin the same types of projects.The American Hospital Association (AHA) is also applications for its 2019 Innovation Challenges to address the SDOH using health IT.But certain models have already begun to emerge as effective, or at least feasible and scalable. As more healthcare organizations forge community relationships, they are building programs that look at food security, affordable housing access, and medical transportation barriers.Although SDOH projects must be community-specific and informed by a comprehensive (CHNA), these social issues have emerged as common and as ones with viable solutions. Working to address food securityREAD MORE:Food security is one of the top.
Patient populations across the country live in food deserts in which it is difficult to obtain food either due to geographic or financial barriers.