“Social prescribing is going to become one of the most important ways technology addresses SDOH,” says Sashi Padarthy. “Just like prescribing medications and sending the prescription to a pharmacy, social prescription allows providers to search and notify the nearest shelter, food bank, or transportation service and send the information to them to make it easy for patient and frictionless.”

Excerpts from Managed Healthcare Executive’s article:

“Social determinants of health (SDOH) has become one of the biggest buzzwords in healthcare. In the quest to provide more complete care—and lower healthcare costs—stakeholders across the healthcare industry, are realizing that treating a patient doesn’t have to begin or end in a hospital.

SDOH encompass a variety of factors, from housing availability to water access to income to food stability—not typically factors considered by most stakeholders.

AI, often touted as the next great innovation in healthcare, is also being used to address SDOH.

Sashi Padarthy, AVP, Healthcare Business Consulting at Cognizant, a technology consulting firm, says that machine learning will be one of the most important technologies for success. He sees AI being used to detect SDOH factors in EMRs, which can then notify providers and care managers in real time.

Currently, he says, 'capture of SD data is still very much based on manual, and often time-consuming processes (e.g., care managers often leverage standard paper-based questionnaires). Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning—new methods of identifying SDoH—have started to show significant promise. These new methods leverage the data that is already present within a patient’s electronic health record as an input to a machine learning model that analyzes and predicts the likelihood the patient is at risk for a SDOH.'”

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