Social Determinants of Health

What’s a Healthcare System to Do?

A growing literature regarding the health consequences of social risks, such as substandard housing and food insecurity, combined with increased adoption of risk-based payment models have contributed to a wave of healthcare sector initiatives focused on the social determinants of health. Yet decisions about how and when to address adverse social conditions are frequently guided by limited information about potential interventions and a lack of data on their effectiveness. We describe four complementary strategies that healthcare leaders can pursue to intervene on social adversity, split between patient care and community-level approaches. Patient care strategies rely on data about patients’ social risks to adapt medical care or improve patients’ social circumstances directly. Community-level strategies focus on improving the broader health and well-being of the local population through a mix of direct investments in communities and collaboration through multisector partnerships. Each approach presents unique incentives and challenges, and healthcare systems wanting to address social adversity may adopt one or more.Understanding the range of potential choices may help healthcare leaders make more informed choices in response to patient needs and changing payment and policy initiatives.

The Journal of Health Policy & Management is an open access scholarly periodical that publishes peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts based on update scientific revelations pertaining to multiple aspects of leadership, management and administration of public health systems, health care systems, hospitals and hospital networks

The journal  aims to highlight the development of novel informatics approaches to collect, integrate, and analyze all types of data relevant to COVID-19 in order to accelerate knowledge acquisition and scientific discoveries in COVID-19 research, thus informing better decision making in clinical practice and health policies.

Authors can submit their papers via the online