Integrating Social Determinants of Health into the EHR
“Social determinants of health” (SDHs) are nonclinical factors that profoundly affect health. Helping community health centers (CHCs) document patients’ SDH data in electronic health records (EHRs) could yield substantial health benefits.
Our speaker, Dr. Rachel Gold, leads a team that developed a set of EHR-based SDH data collection, summary, and referral tools for CHCs; her team is now studying how to help CHCs adopt these tools into standard workflows. This presentation describes considerations that arose while developing these tools and presents some preliminary lessons learned.
Rachel Gold, PhD, MPH, is an Investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Northwest Center for Health Research, with a joint appointment at the OCHIN community health information network, where she is the Lead Research Scientist. Dr. Gold’s work centers on research at OCHIN’s national network of safety net CHCs. Her overarching research interest is determining how electronic health records can be harnessed to address disparities in healthcare quality and outcomes in primary care safety net clinics. Dr. Gold is PI of several NIH-funded studies, involving cross-setting implementation of a quality improvement initiative from Kaiser Permanente into CHCs, which involves direct comparison of the effectiveness of several implementation support strategies. She also leads a study of how to help CHCs start collecting and acting on information about patients’ social determinants of health, using EHR-based approaches. She also serves / served as co-Investigator on studies evaluating: the effects of parental insurance coverage on children’s health care access and outcomes; the use of EHRs to support safety net clinics’ efforts to help their pediatric patients stay insured; the feasibility of applying national pediatric care quality measures in safety net clinics’ EHR data; and strategies for helping safety net clinics implement team-based perinatal depression identification and care.
Dr.Gold’s article from the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine is available here.
This Webinar is a non-commercial presentation sponsored by ZurickDavis
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Posted on Jan 18, 2018