Advancing the interoperability of social and behavioral determinants of health

Daniel Vreeman

Daniel J. Vreeman, PT, DPT, MS, FACMI

Director, LOINC and Health Data Standards, Regenstrief Center for Biomedical Informatics

Regenstrief-McDonald Scholar in Data Standards, Indiana University School of Medicine

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This presentation discusses the fundamental need for representing individual- and community-level social and behavioral determinants of health (SDH) variables in common vocabulary standards. We explore how enriching existing standards with representations of SDH measures can improve interoperable sharing, aggregation, and computation in clinical, population, and research applications. This session highlights the growing momentum for incorporating SDH variables in LOINC, a freely available international standard for identifying health measurements, observations, and documents.

As a widely adopted vocabulary standard in EHRs, LOINC codes enable interoperable data exchange and promotes reuse of this data through aggregation, analytics, and cross-study comparisons. This session provides an overview of LOINC’s current model, coverage for representing SDH content, and how implementers can use this content. We also discuss the current efforts to catalyze addition of SDH content in LOINC and how users can propose new individual or community level variables for inclusion.

120 minutes
Recorded 2018-08-20