State Level Policies and Programs Addressing SDOH

Market Primer: Social Innovations for Health (Part 05)

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

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) were defined by the World Health Organization in 2008 as “ The conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.”

Those conditions, as explained by healthypeople.gov, are local or hyper-local in nature: “ Resources that enhance quality of life can have a significant influence on population health outcomes. Examples of these resources include safe and affordable housing, access to education, public safety, availability of healthy foods, local emergency/health services, and environments free of life-threatening toxins.”

It’s true that health care has become a massive industry in the US, one where federal policy has a clear impact on the budgets, incentives, penalties, and other market forces shaping communities’ ability to address the needs of their citizens. Yet when it comes to the SDOH, state-level policies and programs are responsible for driving some of the more innovative work, from payment experiments to funding…