In the Worx | A Healthworx Podcast
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are social risk factors — like food insecurity, housing instability, or poor health literacy —that have an impact on overall health.
Our guest, Trenor Williams, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Socially Determined, a technology company that measures the impact of SDOH and combines those analytics with clear steps businesses can take to address them.
In this episode, Trenor shares the origins of the company, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the tangible results they’ve delivered.
We discuss:
Discover what we talked about below.
“Physicians and clinical leaders should play a much bigger role in the business—including the technology and analytics—of healthcare.” — Trenor Williams
Every time somebody was eligible for Meals on Wheels, licensed social workers would make an appropriate home visit to learn more about that person. They would dig into their health — not just their health care — but their overall health.
Often, these social workers learned more in a single visit than Trenor did managing that same person in a family practice role. Trenor described this as a "light bulb moment" about the lack of visibility in the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers often work in the dark about what drives a patient's decisions and choices or why families and communities make the health and healthcare decisions that they do.
Inside the four walls of a clinic or hospital, providers are blind to certain realities. Trenor, however, saw an opportunity. Could we, he asked, increase and provide visibility to the healthcare ecosystem around these factors that for so long have not been a focus of our healthcare delivery system?
That question led to founding Socially Determined in 2017.
These days, anybody can acquire raw data. Either it's publicly available, or you can buy it from a data vendor.
Data availability isn't the problem Socially Determined is working to solve. The company hopes to help users turn raw data into meaningful insights. It's answering questions such as:
Socially Determined's dedicated data science team builds algorithms around a social risks of thinking model. Here's how it works:
Let's say they want to understand the primary drivers of food insecurity. Those might be affordability, food literacy or accessibility to healthy food options. The team builds back from the drivers and says, “What specific information is going to help you understand affordability and accessibility of food insecurity?"
To do that, they have to understand financial situations, transportation networks and language. They need to know where every fast food restaurant and full-service grocery store and food bank is to determine the resources available.
"We work backwards from that idea of a score at a domain level," as Trevor puts it, "to the drivers, to the metrics that could lead to those drivers, then to the specific data elements."
To do that, the team curated publicly available data sources and different commercial data vendors and partners who could provide that substrate, which Socially Determined could turn into actionable social risk intelligence.
“At Socially Determined, we built domain specific risk scores and process metrics. Because at the end of the day, what's really important is not the score itself, but how organizations act on it." - Trenor Williams
A global social risk score might reveal that someone has an increased risk, but it's not going to tell the provider what to do. It's not going to help them act or intervene.
Consequently, Socially Determined built domain-specific risk scores and process metrics. They asked, At the end of the day, what's really important?
It's not the score itself. It's how organizations act on it. They need those insights at the domain level and wrapped around a risk score.
When the organization intervenes around something like food insecurity, for example, they can address the real concern. If the issue is affordability, the organization will take one track, but if it's lack of healthy food options, they'll go with a different approach.
"It's our job," Trenor said, "to help provide that level of granular detail of information."
“More than 90% of health systems and health plans across the country have initiatives specifically targeted around social determinants of health.” — Trenor Williams
Treatment plans from a healthcare provider get determined in part by risk factors and levels. The same thing is true at the community level. Insight is only as good as the action it informs.
Insights into social determinants of health can help diversify clinical trials and retain trial participants. For example, if transportation is a problem, the data will reveal it so the research team can solve that issue.
Data and insights are good for everyone. They can help the industry achieve greater financial returns. They can help diabetic patients see fewer complications, health plans recruit new members, and providers offer the best possible service.
"The more data points and proof points that we can help bring to the industry," Trenor said, "the more adoption that happens across the industry."
That's really exciting.
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