Blog Posts

Developer Challenge: Advancing Health Equity Using Social Determinants of Health

Allscripts works with thousands of healthcare organizations in the United States and around the world that use our solutions every day. That translates to millions of lives that have the potential to be impacted by the functionality available in our software. Allscripts Professional EHR™, specifically, is one of our many solutions that has the capability to save discrete data related to social determinants of health and make this information actionable and available to clinicians right in their workflows when they’re with a patient. Through our open platforms, we can connect with other software and services that can make an impact in patient care. Although this is one small feature in a larger application, it’s also a massive opportunity for clinical software to enhance the dialogue around diagnosis, treatment and patient care.

Information regarding the social determinants of health (SDOH) plays an important role in advancing health equity and improving health outcomes across all patient populations. Relevant social determinants can be different for every patient, group and organization as providers around the world serve diverse patient populations. One challenge that arises when we think about sharing SDOH information is that we will never be able to take a one-size-fits-all approach. We’ll also never really know the individual impact that any of this information might make in the life of just one patient; one family. How do you quantify the long-term effect of connecting patients with food insecurity with a local food bank that provides stable, healthy options for their meals? How do you put a value on exploring options related to improving air quality for a child with asthma? I’m inspired to think about the enormous potential for good that we can do when we bring this information to the point of care and give our clinicians an opportunity to have more meaningful interactions with patients that enable them to address these important aspects of the patient’s daily life that could make a difference in their overall health.

At Allscripts, we’re proud to have the opportunity to shine a light on this important issue through our Advancing health equity using social determinants of health Developer Challenge. Our clients are taking part in the challenge as well, as judges and advocates for more information about social determinants of health. They are looking forward to seeing how the organizations participating in the challenge solve some of the challenges they’ve seen in connecting these pieces to help serve their patient populations. It’s great to see the collaboration across the healthcare spectrum to address this topic.

At a time when equitable access to healthcare is more important than ever, we believe access to patients’ social determinants of health information is key in advancing health equity across patient populations. We are looking for solutions using technology to share relevant social determinants of health patient information with care providers. We look forward to working with organizations trying to solve this same problem who would like to participate in our Developer Challenge and join us in our mission to ensure healthcare is truly Open, for Everyone.