Childhood Obesity Preventer

With nearly 100% of community health centers utilizing electronic health records (EHR) to care for patients, focus has pivoted from implementation and new workflow development to enhancement in order to drive value and reflect patient needs and population trends. EHR technology presents potential opportunities and significant constraints. Providers frequently document and share potentially sensitive information in the EHR, such as risk for intimate partner violence (IPV), consistent offers of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), or patient sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). Capturing such information can be immensely helpful in providing care tailored to individuals’ needs, but additionally challenges teams to develop workflows that keep the data private rather than risk harm to patients through improper or unintended disclosure.

The HITEQ Center interviewed ten health centers and health center partners to identify solutions and promising practices for addressing childhood obesity across the health center program. The focus included how health centers are meeting the Uniform Data System (UDS) measure and how they are taking further steps to identify and intervene with those at risk of obesity leveraging health information technology, electronic health records, and the data they have. Seven key areas are identified in the resulting issue brief.

This resource will equip health center stakeholders with the understanding of how standardized social determinants of health (SDoH) data can be used and which ICD 10 Z codes can be used to document a patient's social needs, and are therefore pertinent to a standardized SDoH data set.

The purpose of the infographic is to describe how SDH data would be used for a variety of goals that would have traction with the clinic staff audience who may likely need to modify workflows and behavior in order to collect such data.  The visual case could be used in presentations or hung on a provider break room wall.

This resource will equip health center stakeholders with the motivation, knowledge, and ability needed to collect and use standardized social determinants of health data.