Childhood Obesity Preventer

Is your health center currently in the process of considering, implementing, or revamping a social needs screening program within your EHR or health IT system? Join this learning collaborative to learn about health center promising practices and key considerations to support the successful collection, monitoring, and addressing of social needs data. During the series, participants will explore the levels of maturity in the social needs screening implementation process. The levels of maturity include: 

• Level 1: Coming to Consensus
• Level 2: Implementing a Social Needs Screening Tool
• Level 3: Responding to Positive Screens
• Level 4: Monitoring and Using Data

Participants will gain information on concrete strategies and IT solutions that will help to improve internal systems, such as EHR utilization and care team workflows, and increase their capacity to advance individual and population-level health.  The HITEQ Center has partnered with the Louisiana Primary Care Association to design this series. Louisiana-based health centers will be showcased throughout the series to share their experiences with social needs screening, including successes, challenges, and lessons learned.

Is your health center currently in the process of considering, implementing, or revamping a social needs screening program within your EHR or health IT system? This learning collaborative taught participants about health center promising practices and key considerations to support the successful collection, monitoring, and addressing of social needs data. During the series, participants explored the levels of maturity in the social needs screening implementation process.

The levels of maturity included: 

• Level 1: Coming to Consensus
• Level 2: Implementing a Social Needs Screening Tool
• Level 3: Responding to Positive Screens
• Level 4: Monitoring and Using Data

Participants gained information on concrete strategies and IT solutions that have helped to improve internal systems, such as EHR utilization and care team workflows, and increase their capacity to advance individual and population-level health. The HITEQ Center partnered with the Louisiana Primary Care Association to design this series. Louisiana-based health centers were showcased throughout the series to share their experiences with social needs screening, including successes, challenges, and lessons learned.

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

The HITEQ Center put on this learning collaborative to learn about health center promising practices and key considerations to support the successful collection, monitoring, and addressing of social needs data. During the series participants explored the levels of maturity in the social needs screening implementation process. Participants gained information on concrete strategies and IT solutions that helped to improve internal systems, such as EHR utilization and care team workflows, and increase their capacity to advance individual and population-level health. Health center exemplars were showcased.

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.