Congratulations to SC CTSI Clinical Research Informatics leadership team members Neil Bahroos, MBA, Daniella Meeker, PhD, and Juan Espinoza, MD on their stellar presentation at the annual CTSA Spring Meeting on April 14, 2021. Their virtual breakout session was so popular that attendance filled up and had to be capped. Bravo!

Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) are social and economic conditions that can have a big impact on people’s health, well-being, lifelong quality of life, disease burden, and access to care. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) can be enriched with SDoH variables to help researchers better understand health across the lifespan – giving them insight into environmental factors that can lead to disease, as well as variables such as homelessness, access to fresh foods and green spaces, transportation, pollution, and uptake/access of health services. The presentation by Mr. Bahroos, Dr. Meeker and Dr. Espinoza provided an overview of social determinants of health (SDoH), how to map these concepts to existing ontologies within an informatics setting, and provided strategies for standardizing SDoH concepts, data collection, patient-level data used for screening and contextual data like that used for geocoding.