Key Findings

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Publicly available social determinants of health (SDOH) indices are not designed to be universal measures or compendia of measures that can be readily entered into statistical models. Each varies in its purpose and composition.

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These indices draw from multiple data sources, such as the American Community Survey and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and use different measures to conceptualize SDOH domains, such as economic stability, education access and quality, health care access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, and social and community context.

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The composition of an index has multiple analytic implications for statistical modeling, including impacts that may skew the data or introduce collinearity.

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Many of the data available today predate the pandemic and may not capture the current state of key SDOH factors.

From: Social Determinants of Health: A Review of Publicly Available Indices

Cover of Social Determinants of Health: A Review of Publicly Available Indices
Social Determinants of Health: A Review of Publicly Available Indices [Internet].
Hinnant L, Hairgrove S, Kane H, et al.
Research Triangle Park (NC): RTI Press; 2022 Dec.
© 2022 RTI International.

This work is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-ND), a copy of which is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

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