By Janet Campbell (Epic), Chair, EHR Association Social Determinants of Health & Health Equity Task Force
A patient’s risk within social determinant of health (SDOH) domains is typically assessed by social care or healthcare professionals through either conversation or use of standard screening questionnaires or validated testing instruments. The challenge, however, is a lack of consensus on which specific domains should be assessed for patients, and how they should be assessed.
(more…)Posted by EHR Association on May 14, 2024
https://ehrablog.org/2024/05/14/recommendations-for-capturing-social-determinants/
By EHR Association SDOH & Health Equity Task Force
Global Health Equity Week, October 23 – 27, 2023, is a week of action that seeks to spotlight the transformative capabilities of health information and technology in reshaping healthcare, reducing health disparities, and improving access to healthcare for all communities. As part of its mission to improve the quality and efficiency of care through innovative, interoperable health IT adoption and use, the EHR Association continues to appeal to lawmakers and national regulators in support of expanding access to telehealth, addressing social determinants of health (SDOH), and increasing interoperability between healthcare providers and community-based organizations (CBOs).
(more…)Posted by EHR Association on October 24, 2023
https://ehrablog.org/2023/10/24/global-health-equity-week-bridging-healthcare-disparities-through-technology-and-policy-advocacy/
By Janet Campbell (Epic), Chair, SDOH & Health Equity Task Force
Recognizing an important opportunity for the EHR Association to be a proactive leader in the burgeoning and increasingly critical field of social determinants of health (SDOH) and health equity, the Association has kicked off its recently established SDOH & Health Equity Task Force.
EHRs have revolutionized the healthcare industry and even how care is delivered. But the practice of addressing social risks and delivering care equitably varies widely across organizations. Thus the role of the EHR – and therefore the role of health IT developers – remains largely undefined. The potential for EHRs to advance SDOH and health equity is significant, including the proactive collection of demographic and determinant data, segmenting quality reports to uncover disparities, and facilitating prompt closed-loop community-based organization (CBO) referrals.
(more…)Posted by EHR Association on July 2, 2023
https://ehrablog.org/2023/07/02/sdoh-and-health-equity-task-force/
By Daniel Seltzer, Co-chair of the EHRA Opioid Crisis Task Force
Care disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other ongoing events have put long-term opioid therapy (LTOT) patients at increased risk for opioid-related harm and heightened the urgency around addressing the opioid crisis. This has, in turn, presented a significant opportunity to leverage technology to improve certain care processes around opioid therapy, starting with digitizing the tapering plan and incorporating existing clinical practice guidelines into clinical decision support (CDS) tools.
These are areas that have been researched extensively by EHRA’s Opioid Crisis Task Force, which was formed in 2018 to explore and recommend ways EHR technology can help solve the complex opioid crisis puzzle. This research culminated in the newly released Opioid Tapering Implementation Guide for Electronic Health Records, a set of clinical practice guidelines that can be operationalized to improve opioid stewardship and opioid tapering in clinical practice.
EHRA’s goal with this Opioid Tapering Guide is to enable an organization’s health IT team to implement tapering best practices more rapidly using EHR-based CDS tools. The EHR developer community can also use it to steer the future development of new or updated products and services that can help hospitals, physician practices and other care environments implement these and other best practices.
In developing the guide, the Task Force leveraged evidence-based guidelines on opioid tapering published by several organizations and agencies with subject matter expertise, including clinical recommendations from the United States CDC, VA/DOD, and HHS. These referenced guidelines include tapering plans for pain lasting longer than three months or past the normal tissue healing time frame, outside of active cancer treatment and palliative or end-of-life care.
(more…)Posted by EHR Association on January 11, 2022
https://ehrablog.org/2022/01/11/new-guide-offers-guidance-for-digitizing-opioid-tapering-plans/
Developer and Community Perspectives
By EHRA Public Policy Leadership Workgroup
Health equity and social determinants of health (SDOH) currently play a large role in the national conversation on health care, with the Biden Administration ranking it as one of its highest priorities. Practically, however, these discussions have been underway for years.
SDOH and health equity are a public policy and care coordination challenge, one that health IT can play an important role in resolving. Consider that 80% of health is determined by non-clinical factors. However, there is a wide information gap separating healthcare organizations and the social and community agencies at the forefront of identifying and addressing these socioeconomic needs. Health IT and interoperability standards facilitate the secure, seamless exchange of patient data between these environments to improve population and individual patient health outcomes.
(more…)Posted by EHR Association on October 27, 2021
https://ehrablog.org/2021/10/27/sdoh-and-health-equity-summarizing-the-ehra-congressional-briefing/
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