Enriching Electronic Health Records with Social Determinants of Health Data from Consumer Database: A Comparative Fit-for-Use Study

Although social determinants of health (SDH) significantly impact health outcomes, reliable data on SDH has not been widely accessible. Despite recent efforts to integrate more individual-level social determinants of health (I-SDH) data into electronic health records, the available sources of SDH that can be accessed at scale remain predominantly community-level, structured SDH (S-SDH). An alternative, though underutilized, strategy for collecting individual-level social determinants of health (I-SDH) is to link with third-party consumer databases that have accumulated socioeconomic status data over an extended period. In this pilot study, we aimed to systematically evaluate the quality and fitness-for-use (FFU) of a widely used consumer database for the prediction of 30-day unplanned hospital-wide, all-cause readmission (HW-ACR). We found that the inclusion of I-SDH not only provided significantly more predictive power over S-SDH but also allowed for the opportunity to explicitly uncover potential social risk factors that would otherwise remain hidden.