As healthcare providers, the social determinants of health (SDOH) can feel unwieldy and frustrating. How can you make sure your patient has a friend, enough food, and the counselling services they need?

There are so many questions surrounding SDOH, but what many providers don’t know is that there is a growing number of technology solutions they could potentially rely on to help them with these problems.

In the last few years, there has been growing interest in SDOH, and a lot of providers and technology solutions have risen to the challenge. When it comes to these technology solutions, what are the things that you should be thinking about? What all goes into an SDOH network?

To help you answer these questions, KLAS met with industry experts, providers, and vendors to develop a framework outlining SDOH networks.

The framework outlines six areas targeted by SDOH network vendors. Whether you feel overwhelmed by SDOH or aren’t even sure where to start, this framework will give you one of the most comprehensive grasps of what technology can actually do to address your SDOH needs and the needs of your patients.

Referral Network Builders

Before we dive into the framework itself, it can be helpful to understand the nature of the majority of these solutions. SDOH technology services are often considered to be referral network builders.

This means they help you to build relationships, manage communications, and track reporting between community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, social service organizations, and your own healthcare organization in order to address SDOH.The Framework

Framework of social determinants of health network

Breadth of Services

While talking with live provider organizations and SDOH vendors, we were surprised by the breadth of what these technology services were claiming to do.

These solutions have gone past just analytics and a resource directory. Their ability to help organizations identify SDOH needs, care coordination, and managed advisory services was very impressive to us.

We are going to make sure that our framework is up to date concerning which vendors are providing what services as this market continues to grow. In coordination with the framework, your organization will be able to form a strategic plan to address your specific SDOH needs.

More to Come

SDoH solutions are growing dramatically because every healthcare organization in the US is going to have to tackle these SDoH challenges. What’s exciting now is that we are seeing leading organizations actually make a difference at a meaningful level. We aren’t quite to a majority of providers adopting these solutions, but that could easily be expected within the next two years.

KLAS will publish a report in the next six months to let you know how well these vendors are actually delivering so that you can compare their performances and highlight notable product differences.      Photo Credit: Adobe Stock, NicoElNino