Introduction: Healthcare is Shifting Upstream

Market Primer: Social Innovations for Health (Part 01)

This article is part of our new market primer series on social innovation for health. Learn more about our research and check out the Table of Contents here.

Social determinants of health (SDOH) have emerged as a key area in ongoing efforts to reform the US healthcare system. This growing consensus builds on more than a decade of work nationwide to align financial incentives, adopt health information technology (HIT), and standardize an array of clinical programs.

For health systems, moving beyond facility walls, to capture and incorporate SDOH data into community level programs and partnerships, represents the next phase of population health management (PHM) strategy.

The movement to address SDOH is the result of a gamut of policy programs at the federal and state levels, key business trends in the insurance, care delivery, and health information technology (HIT) industries, and market level developments specific to communities around the country.

Those key trends are built on the core assumption that moving the healthcare system’s efforts upstream toward community-level prevention will have a positive clinical and economic impact. That assumption in turn stems from two…