Back in Focus: Post-Pandemic Strategies for Health-Related Social Needs

The healthcare industry’s experience through the COVID-19 pandemic required innovative tactics and new strategies to stay connected with patients and re-engage them in their care, beyond lockdowns, new virtual care offerings and public health safety measures.

Assessing how our communities were changed by financial uncertainty and other impacts from the “new normal” also led healthcare providers to take a fresh look at their approaching to addressing patients’ health-related social needs (HRSNs) and social determinants of health (SDoH).

As efforts grow for healthcare providers to better collect and analyze data with fewer gaps in sharing across the care continuum for value-based care and population health management, many organizations are evaluating how similar workflows impact SDoH/HRSN work and how to improve or automate them in an era of health professional turnover and staffing shortages that could slow down this work.

This new study builds on those findings with new research on how the views of healthcare leaders have been shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as how opportunities and challenges in screening for health-related social needs (HRSNs) have evolved amid the ongoing shift to value-based care and labor market issues affecting staffing in provider organizations.