Integration of Social Determinants of Health Data into the Largest, Not-for-Profit Health System in South Florida
Volume 21, Issue 4 (2023), pp. 735–744
Pub. online: 30 August 2022
Type: Data Science In Action
Open Access
Open Access
Received
30 December 2021
30 December 2021
Accepted
4 August 2022
4 August 2022
Published
30 August 2022
30 August 2022
Abstract
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, and live. Although evidence suggests that SDOH influence a range of health outcomes, health systems lack the infrastructure to access and act upon this information. The purpose of this manuscript is to explain the methodology that a health system used to: 1) identify and integrate publicly available SDOH data into the health systems’ Data Warehouse, 2) integrate a HIPAA compliant geocoding software (via DeGAUSS), and 3) visualize data to inform SDOH projects (via Tableau). First, authors engaged key stakeholders across the health system to convey the implications of SDOH data for our patient population and identify variables of interest. As a result, fourteen publicly available data sets, accounting for >30,800 variables representing national, state, county, and census tract information over 2016–2019, were cleaned and integrated into our Data Warehouse. To pilot the data visualization, we created county and census tract level maps for our service areas and plotted common SDOH metrics (e.g., income, education, insurance status, etc.). This practical, methodological integration of SDOH data at a large health system demonstrated feasibility. Ultimately, we will repeat this process system wide to further understand the risk burden in our patient population and improve our prediction models – allowing us to become better partners with our community.
Supplementary material
Supplementary MaterialSupplement 1 contains an example of how to download and clean the American Community Survey data. Supplement 2 contains the full Data Dictionary for Information Technology, that was referenced in Table 2. With this Data Dictionary, the reader can find links to download the publicly-available data sets.
References
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