In recent years, health centers have become increasingly interested in and charged with not only addressing the health concerns of their patients, but centering and responding to patient’s social needs. According to Healthy People 2030, social needs, also known as the social determinants of health, are the conditions in the environments where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Social needs encompass the quality of and access to resources such as housing, transportation, safety, employment, food, and more. Identifying and addressing unmet social needs as part of the clinical encounter provides the opportunity to deliver higher-quality, whole-person care, advance population health, and reduce healthcare costs.

When implementing a social need screening program, it can be challenging to identify how frequently to conduct the screening with patients. Health centers may have to explore various strategies to develop a workflow that prevents appointment backups and reduces the burden on staff. This resource shares examples of strategies gleaned from interviews with health centers.

Implementing a social need screening effectively is an iterative process. Many health centers find that their approach evolves as new concerns or considerations arise. The examples in this resource, gleaned from interviews with health centers, illustrate that unique context and needs drive what works.

Establishing a social need screening program requires buy-in from both leadership and staff. This resource shares examples of strategies gleaned from interviews with health centers.

In this video, viewers will learn how People, Process and Technology should factor into a health center's social needs screening workflow

This resource will equip health center stakeholders with the understanding of how standardized social determinants of health (SDoH) data can be used and which ICD 10 Z codes can be used to document a patient's social needs, and are therefore pertinent to a standardized SDoH data set.

This HITEQ Highlights webinar presented promising practices and key considerations informed by health centers across the US who are successfully collecting, monitoring, and addressing social need data. 

Health centers are increasingly interested in implementing social need screening tools to identify ways to advance whole-person care and community-level health. However, implementing social needs screening tools requires a great deal of investment with regards to securing buy-in from leadership and staff, configuring the EHR, and developing processes and workflows for addressing positive screens. While addressing social needs in the context of healthcare is not new, systematically collecting, monitoring, and acting on data is an emerging space. With many health centers now trialing this implementation process, there are a number of promising practices that might be valuable to health centers considering this next step. This webinar offered key takeaways and examples to guide health centers through the implementation process, or help health centers with existing social needs screening programs to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in their EHRs and workflows.