Systems and Standards Journal Articles
October 23, 2020

Oregon’s Approach to Leveraging System-level Data to Guide a Social Determinants of Health-informed Approach to Children’s Healthcare

By: Colleen P. Reuland, Jon Collins, Lydia Chiang, Valerie Stewart, Aaron C. Cochran, Christopher W. Coon, Deepti Shinde, Dana Hargunani

Children’s health and healthcare use are impacted by both medical conditions and social factors, such as their home and community environment. As healthcare systems manage a pediatric population, information about these factors is crucial to providing quality care coordination. The authors developed a novel methodology combining medical complexity (using the Pediatric Medical Complexity Algorithm) and social complexity (using available family social factors known to impact a child’s health and healthcare use) to create a new health complexity model at both the population-level and individual-level. Findings from the article demonstrate that a large number of Medicaid/CHIP-insured children could benefit from targeted care coordination and differential resource allocation that aligns with their health complexity.