ICD10monitor Reports on Latest Development in the Social Determinants of Health

The Gravity Project will be the editorial focus on tomorrow’s Talk Ten Tuesdays.

The latest big development associated with the oft-discussed social determinants of health (SdoH) – a national collaborative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – will be reported on during the next upcoming edition of the Talk Ten Tuesdays weekly live Internet broadcast.

ICD10monitor publisher Chuck Buck, who made the announcement, said the collaborative was formed to advance interoperable social risk and protective factor data. The entity is called The Gravity Project and was launched May 2, 2019. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is partnering with the University of California San Francisco’s Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN), along with EMI Advisors LLC. Reporting on the work of The Gravity Project during the broadcast will be EMI Program Manager Evelyn Gallego.

In an email statement to ICD10monitor, Gallego said that SIREN, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and in partnership with EMI Advisors, LLC, initiated the Gravity Project to bring industry leaders together to identify and harmonize social risk and protective factor data for interoperable electronic health information exchange.

According to Gallego, The Gravity Project convenes a public collaborative to accomplish the following goals for the social domains of food security, housing stability and quality, and transportation access:

• Develop use cases to support documentation for screening, diagnosis, treatment/intervention, and planning activities within electronic health record (EHR) and related systems;
• Identify common data elements and their associated value sets to support the use cases;
• Develop a consensus-based set of recommendations on how best to capture and group these data elements for interoperable electronic exchange and aggregation; and
• Initiate development of an HL7® Fast Health Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) Implementation Guide based on the defined use cases and associated data sets that will be finalized in the next phase of work.

Gallego said project objectives are being accomplished through weekly one-hour virtual meetings and collaborative project product development through the HL7 project confluence page.

For seven years, Gallego served with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), providing subject matter expertise to the health information exchange grant program, the ONC Tech Lab, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes (PCOR) Coordination program.

“Focus on the social determinants of health constitutes one of the most talked-about trends in American healthcare today, and for good reason – through addressing the healthcare needs of the most vulnerable citizens among us, we lift the pedigree of the entire industry,” Buck said. “I can think of no better person to outline this exciting new initiative, created to help accomplish this goal, than Ms. Gallego.”

Talk Ten Tuesdays’ broadcast, featuring Gallego, will broadcast live at 10 a.m. EST on Tuesday. In addition to the special appearance of Gallego, the broadcast will also feature Gloryanne Bryant, a nationally recognized health information management leader, author, and clinical coding and documentation expert. Bryant will be reporting on the most recent Coding Clinic edition published by the American Hospital Association.

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