The Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation has developed a new tool that enables providers to better understand the challenges that a specific neighborhood faces in accessing healthcare services.
Healthcare organizations need all the help they can get identifying SDOH. A new tool developed by the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) could help.
The Dallas-based innovation center, which was spun out of Parkland Health in 2012, recently debuted the Community Vulnerability Compass (CVC), a data tool that pulls in ZIP codes, census information, and neighborhood-level information to better understand the health, resiliency and economic vibrancy of a particular neighborhood.
The goal, says Steve Miff, PCCI’s president and CEO, is to dig down deep into the many barriers that effect healthcare access and help health systems and hospitals design care pathways to boost clinical outcomes in underserved populations.
“Our health does not really become, doesn't start and doesn't end in our clinics [or] in our hospitals,” Miff said during a recent HealthLeaders podcast. “It really starts and continues in where we live, where we work, where we play, [and] where we pray. [This helps in] understanding and knowing [how to] be able to address those elements that oftentimes are barriers to access the health of communities.”
The CVC analyzes 26 different factors, including food insecurity, paycheck predictability, insurance coverage, education, internet availability, mobility, transportation, sidewalks, affordable housing, green space, clean air and crime statistics, to give providers a picture of a neighborhood’s healthcare options. And that, in turn, gives providers a roadmap to improving care for a specific patient.
“Now we have much richer information about that individual [that is put] into those databases that these organizations use,” he said. “It’s being used for planning, it's being used for patient outreach, it’s being used for placement of resources, and it’s being used to be able to coordinate activities and resources specific to that community on how individuals can be helped in their journey.”
Miff said the tool was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to help providers understand which neighborhoods were particularly susceptible to the virus. Following that crisis, PCCI adapted the CVC to meet the guidelines of the federal government’s Healthy People 2030 project.
Miff said the tool will not only help providers improve care management, but enable them to collaborate with various public and community health organizations on projects that can improve entire neighborhoods, even towns and cities. That might include public housing developments with better access to healthcare, food programs in areas where access to healthy food is limited, or mobile health programs in areas with a high percentage of cancer or chronic diseases.
“To understand vulnerability, we need to be able to collaborate and create those connected communities, and we need to use [this data] at scale,” he said.
To listen to the HealthLeaders podcast with Steve Miff, click here.
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Health systems and hospitals are using innovative technology and strategies to identify social determinants of health.
With these new approaches, a provider can identify the challenges to accessing care that patients face by the neighborhoods in which they live.
Providers can use this data to improve care services and collaborate with other organizations on public and community health programs.