Social Determinants of Health Data Dashboard

Good health depends on access to quality clinical care as well as non-clinical factors – known as social determinants of health (SDOH) – that influence health outcomes and can provide important context to clinicians in the process of identifying and treating what ails patients. These factors include societal and environmental conditions such as access to nutritious food, reliable transportation, stable housing, educational opportunities, and gainful employment. Clinicians and community stakeholders continue the work to better understand the scope of SDOH and the influence they have on health outcomes. Meanwhile, recent changes in ICD-10 coding have created a mechanism for providers to effectively code patients’ SDOH as documented in a clinical setting as they would for traditional clinical diagnoses. Given this development, the VHHA Foundation, the charitable nonprofit affiliate of VHHA, has developed an SDOH Data Dashboard that monitors the frequency with which these particular SDOH-related Z codes are recorded in connection to patients hospitalized in Virginia. The dashboard will highlight aggregated trends across SDOH categories and promote the use of this data for multiple applications to support hospitals and community partners in the work to address social factors that impact individual and community health. The data insights gained from this new tool can assist providers in:

• • Tracking social needs that impact patients in support of enhancing personalized care;
  • Aggregating patient data to help refine social determinants-focused strategies; and
  • Identifying population health trends to help guide community engagement.