Providers and payers have an unwavering mission to care for patients and communities, but they often do not have access to data on the factors that affect healthcare costs and outcomes while carrying out this mission: social determinants of healthTraditionally, medical institutions have only had access to clinical and claims data for the patients they serve, but social factors such as transportation, housing, or healthy food often have an even greater impact on a person’s health than their own genes.
This problem led Trenor Williams to discover social decision, a healthcare analytics startup focused on SDOH insights, launched in 2017.On Tuesday, the startup closure $26 million in Series B funding by the capitalparticipation of existing investors LRV Health, OSF Healthcare, Ziegler Link Age Fund and HealthWorxinvestment sector CareFirst BlueCross Blue Shield. This round brings the Washington, D.C.-based company’s total raised to date to $36 million.
During his time as a practicing physician, Williams said, he was forced to roll out social decisions, in which he noted that the health care system was “severely hindered” in its view of the factors that affect a patient’s health.
“For example, it’s easy to talk to someone with prediabetes about how they should eat healthier, but you don’t know if they can afford healthy food, if the community they live in has healthy food options, or if they have transportation to There is a place to choose,” he said.
Most healthcare organizations identify SDOH affecting their community through one-to-one screening or anecdotal evidence. Screening, however, has some major limitations, as this method of tracking SDOH involves only those who come into contact with the health care system, allowing the most vulnerable to slip through the cracks. He also points out that this approach doesn’t scale and only provides an opportunity to help if someone has a problem.
To build technology that gives healthcare organizations a more accurate picture of SDOH affecting the patients they serve, Williams said his team collected datasets from public and private sources, using the constantly updated data to enhance insights.
Society decided to make this data available by creating analytical models to assess multiple SDOH domains (such as accessibility, reliable housing, food insecurity, and social connectedness) and platforms and user interfaces for exploring the insights found by these analyses.
The software generates a FICO-like social risk score that clients can use to better understand social risk in their communities and drive health equity. These risk scores are based on hundreds of proprietary and open-source datasets about individuals and their environments, including data on income, household size, vehicle ownership rates, location of healthy and unhealthy foods, education levels and home ownership.
The startup uses a subscription model, selling its software to health plans, health systems and life sciences organizations. CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield and American Health is one of its clients. The new funding will be used to attract new customers and expand Socially Delivered’s customer engagement, Williams said.
“Through our work with clients like CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield and AmeriHealth, we’ve proven that our approach works and can make a real impact,” Williams said. “Customers are expanding the duration and scope of their contracts because of the value we’ve demonstrated, and we’re now able to bring our unique solution to more organizations across the healthcare ecosystem.”
The SDOH software space is new and growing, and Williams says it falls into two categories. The first includes companies that offer referral networks, connecting people to community resources to help meet their needs.He said these companies, such as ask for help and unite uscompletely different from his method.
The second category includes companies that provide analytics to help healthcare organizations interpret SDOH data and take action. Socially determined risk scoring does this by encouraging customers to take action. For example, if a payer finds that its members in a particular city have little access to healthy food, that insight can lead them to address the problem by partnering with local organizations to distribute healthy meals to households.
Williams said Socially Delivered has an edge in this area because it has “pioneered the field” with SDOH-focused software and has improved its analytics and underlying analytics for longer than any other company in the space. data.
Photo: elenabs, Getty Images
