Advancing Interoperability of Patient-level Social Determinants of Health Data to Support COVID-19 Research

Abstract

Including social determinants of health (SDoH) data in health outcomes research is essential for studying the sources of healthcare disparities and developing strategies to mitigate stressors. In this report, we describe a pragmatic design and approach to explore the encoding needs for transmitting SDoH screening tool responses from a large safety-net hospital into the National Covid Cohort Collaborative (N3C) OMOP dataset. We provide a stepwise account of designing data mapping and ingestion for patient-level SDoH and summarize the results of screening. Our approach demonstrates that sharing of these important data - typically stored as non-standard, EHR vendor specific codes - is feasible. As SDoH screening gains broader use nationally, the approach described in this paper could be used for other screening instruments and improve the interoperability of these important data.