Payers, providers and other healthcare institutional stakeholders are essential components of Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) solutions. And they are particularly effective when linked with community ‘influencer’ organizations that can provide local insights and serve as public #healthcare rallying point.
Families across the nation, urban and rural, are in crisis. They are wrestling with an array of financial burdens to a degree few ever experienced – unemployment, financial market downturn, business closures, and strained household budgets. People are being stressed-tested to the max. In the short-term, uncertainty about the #COVID19 shutdown timeline and access to a safe, science validated vaccine is driving consumer anxiety. Add to the mix healthcare costs, already outpacing wages, with high deductible health plans and climbing out-of- pocket expenses, consumers are facing extraordinary financial health burdens. They are delaying care, skipping prescriptions, and ignoring chronic conditions.
#SDOH are the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live & work, their behaviors, and systems put in place to deal with healthcare. We know that socioeconomic disparities in income, literacy, housing, jobs, nutrition and education are forces that can have twice the impact on an individual’s health than biology, DNA, and clinical care.
Health inequities are avoidable or unfair differences in distribution of health resources between diverse population groups. For example, life expectancy of a black Chicagoan is nearly 10-years lower than their white counterparts. Babies born 6 subway stops apart in New York City have a 9-year difference in life expectancy. COVID19 has highlighted these health inequities in terms of who gets tested, hospitalized and treated. It has been glaring in communities of color.
There’s nothing like a #pandemic to shine a bright light on gaps and imbalances in our healthcare system. And unfortunately, given the confluence of economic, political and healthcare forces we’re likely to see things get worse before they get better: increasing number of uninsured Americans, strained state Medicaid budgets, an aging chronic population, partisan gridlock stalling progress, and rampant mental health issues associated with the pandemic and its ‘life disruptors’. So indeed, it is going to take every healthcare stakeholder to ante-up and help solve disparities and inequities in our neighborhoods. Investing in epidemiological, data driven methodologies that support integrated community based SDoH programs focused on under-served populations will improve quality of life and over time, life expectancy.
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