Standardized measures for social determinants of health from NIH

This announcement from NIH addresses an issue that was quite a big problem for IBH-PC over the last 6 years - the lack of standardized measures for SDOH. Progress! (I also like their brief definition of SDOH as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age").

Notice Announcing Availability of Data Harmonization Tools for Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) via the PhenX Toolkit 

Notice Number: NOT-MD-21-003

The purpose of this Notice is to announce a major data-harmonization effort at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and to encourage the minority health and health disparities research community to use new data collection tools emerging from this effort.

The NIMHD is dedicated to advancing science by improving the yield and impact of its research portfolio. One way to accomplish this is to provide investigators with a common set of tools and resources that allow their work to span the diverse areas of the minority health and health disparities. Social determinants of health—the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age—are known to drive health disparities. Recognizing this, the NIMHD, in collaboration with the National Human Genome Research Institute and the broader scientific community, has identified a series of Core and Specialty measures that will promote the collection of comparable data on social determinants of health (SDOH) across studies. The SDOH are categorized into categories of individual and structural factors that have impact on human health.  The list of constructs and measures is not exhaustive and NIMHD will continue to work towards greater harmonization of measures through vetted common data elements in the science of minority health and health disparities.

The NIMHD and its partners in the scientific community strongly encourages investigators to incorporate the measures from the Core and Specialty collections available in the Social Determinants of Health Collections of the PhenX Toolkit (www.phenxtoolkit.org) whenever possible.

Core collection: The measures in this collection are deemed relevant and essential to all areas of minority health and health disparities. Funded investigators are strongly encouraged to incorporate, at a minimum, the Core-Tier 1 measures in all primary data collection.

Specialty collections: The measures in these collections are organized at the individual and structural levels for more nuanced investigations of how SDOH influence health. The Individual SDOH Specialty collection includes measurement protocols for use in research where information is being collected from and about people answering for themselves or their family. The Structural SDOH Specialty collection includes measurement protocols at the structural or community level. Funded investigators conducting research in the specified areas of science are strongly encouraged to incorporate the Specialty measures related to the specific concepts covered and are discouraged from using alternative measures in lieu of the Specialty measures to collect similar data.

Through the use of these SDOH measures and common data elements, minority health and health disparity researchers will be able to share, compare, and integrate data across studies. By advocating the use of these common measures, the NIMHD and its partners in the scientific community aim to further enhance the science of minority health and health disparities while advancing a culture of scientific collaboration.

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-MD-21-003.html

 - Ben Littenberg