In 2019, social determinants of health got the attention they deserve

In a March 2019 interview with Healthcare IT News, Dr. Jacob Reider – CEO of the Alliance for Better Health and former deputy national coordinator for health IT – described the conversations he’d been having about social determinants of health with an array of different healthcare stakeholders.

“There’s a lot of interest in this in this domain,” he said. “Folks from federally-qualified health centers, so on the frontlines of the medical side. We had folks from states, and/or or former state leaders who are looking at this from a public health perspective. We had folks from social care providers. We had health plans. So we had this really broad cross section of the care continuum, all saying, ‘Hey this is important and we would like to participate in some way, in figuring this out together.’”

The push to do a better job incorporating social determinant information into care and treatment plans gained momentum in 2019, as more and more provider organizations recognized the key role that housing, transportation, food security and other non-clinical factors play in patients’ health.