VALID AI Announces a Challenge and Call to Action to Integrate Social Determinants of Health as for social vital signs at the point of care.
VALID AI, a 50+ health systems, health plans and partners collective focused on validation, execution and value creation from Generative AI, is launching a challenge and call for organizations worldwide to integrate Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) as Social Vital Signs at the point of care.
The concept of SDOH encompasses various factors, including but not limited to socioeconomic status, language and literacy skills, neighborhood, employment, social support networks, as well as access to healthcare. These determinants are crucial in shaping an individual’s health outcomes and risks. Despite their significance, SDOH are often overlooked, hidden within unstructured notes, or insufficiently captured during patient assessments.
Evidence has been building on the need for making SDOH available as Social Vital Signs (SVS). However, real-world implementations of SVS have not happened because of the many technology, data-sharing, and policy barriers. The goal of this call in partnership with HLTH foundation and NODE.Health is to elicit partners that will work together to make SDOH variables like housing and transportation as accessible and actionable for clinicians and organizations similar to blood pressure monitoring.
“I am hoping this challenge and call to action will activate organizations of all sizes to work together in an open innovation framework to make social vital signs a reality for all care settings irrespective of geographic location or practice type,” says Dr. Atreja, CIO and Chief Digital Health officer and founding chair for VALID AI.
VALID AI 40+ member organizations will serve as co-hosts in each state to support Gen AI sandbox environments and workstreams that will facilitate organizations, researchers, students, patients, and community members to tackle a series of mini-challenges that currently prevent the widespread adoption of social vital signs in clinical practice. The output from the following mini-challenges will be combined and made available as a Gen AI SDOH Toolkit:
- Developing an evidence library that aggregates data, evidence, and standards related to SDOH, published till date.
- Ensuring wider availability of diverse clinical notes and enhancing the annotation of clinical notes to capture SDOH accurately.
- Leveraging generative AI and other technologies to identify and extract SDOH indicators and making these algorithms openly available.
- Creating intuitive dashboards to visualize SDOH through Smart on FHIR apps makes these insights accessible to healthcare providers.
- Mapping out SDOH gaps and linking them to local resources, facilitating a seamless, semi-automatic solution to address these needs and close the gaps.
“VALID AI’s focus on SDOH and SVS is inspiring, and this challenge offers a great opportunity to comprehensively rethink how we identify and incorporate these elements within clinical care,” said Craig Kwiatkowski, Senior Vice President and CIO at Cedars-Sinai, and a founding member of VALID AI. “Advances in generative AI may enable a future where healthcare is seamlessly tailored to each patient’s specific needs.”
Organizations and teams can join us in the pledge by going to http://validai.health and clicking on “Pledge for social vital signs”.
About VALID AI
VALID AI stands for Vision, Alignment, Learning, Implementation, and Dissemination of Validated Generative AI in Healthcare. It is a member-led collaborative of 50+ health systems, health plans and partners that was launched at HLTH in 2023. VALID AI member organizations work together to explore uses, pitfalls, and best practices for the evaluation and implementation of Gen AI in health care and accelerate execution and real-world evidence. Organizations can submit interest form over next 10 weeks to participate in the SDOH challenge by going to http://validai.health