At Socially Determined, we are deeply committed to the science behind our SDOH and HRSN data. That's why our customers can so confidently rely on our insights and expertise to guide them to their goals. To continue to push forward the science of applied SDOH and meet that promise to our customers, we collaborated with partners at Datavant and Your Health Economics Consortium to publish three separate studies at ISPOR 2024, two of which were subsequently published in ISPOR's Value in Health journal.
Our team's presentation explored the linkage of clinical trial data to social determinants of health (SDOH) data to enrich our understanding of patients in rare disease clinical trials via clinical trial tokenization. In this context, tokenization referred to the process of converting sensitive patient data into unique identifiers to support privacy-preserving data linkages, allowing for secure and anonymous linked data analysis.
The presentation argued that the integration of tokenization with SDoH data represents a significant advancement in rare disease clinical trials. It not only enhances our understanding of patients in clinical trials, but also paves the way for more personalized, equitable, and effective healthcare interventions, ultimately contributing to improved patient outcomes for rare disease patients.
You can read more here.
In this paper, Socially Determined data scientists and colleagues at YHEC developed a calculator to estimate the burden of hepatitis C (HCV) within the US. Using publicly available state-level CDC data we focused our analysis on Louisiana and Florida. We selected these states because they had geographic proximity and similar rates of HCV, but different rates of death associated with HCV. This indicated that there may be other social factors impacting the HCV populations in each state.
The work let the team estimate the current QALY loss from untreated diagnosed HCV is 9,100 and 4,500 QALYs (14,287 and 7,069 life years) for Florida and Louisiana respectively. The cost (US$) to treat this population is estimated to be approximately $113m and $56m with sofosbuvir ($82m and $41m with non-sofosbuvir treatment). The cost of not treating is $36m and 18m respectively. A public health intervention that could reduce new HCV cases by 2% would save society $1.6m and £0.8m while adding 122 and 60 QALYs (185 and 91 Life years).
The findings indicated that granular social risk data assets can directly inform public health policy. Socially Determined data can be used to understand variation in social risk to identify opportunities for effective public health interventions, as well as any payer interventions across value-based and commercial populations.
Ultimately, this SDOH data-driven approach can improve outcomes, reduce costs, and drive health equity across the nation.
You can read the entire paper here.
Socially Determined and YHEC conducted a second study on hepatitis C, with the goal of developing an estimate of the costs and savings of using data to better identify and screen at risk populations for hepatitis C in the USA.
For some context, this double focus on hepatitis C was driven by the estimated 2,000,000 – 3,500,000 people living with hepatitis C Virus (HCV) in the USA and approximately 75% do not know they have the disease. The CDC reported 70,000 new cases in 2021 implying a crude secondary infection rate of 0.02 to 0.04 secondary infections per person per year in the US. We used published sources of population screening at 0.01 for general population, 0.2 for targeted populations and 0.6 for people who inject drugs. The cost of screening is $140. We used the Socially Determined data set to examine social risk across 7 domains (economic climate, food landscape, housing environment, transportation network, health literacy, digital landscape and social connectedness) to generate heat maps of very specific locales of higher risk of undiagnosed HCV. We focused this analysis on Louisiana and Florida, which have similar rates of reported acute infection (6.7 and 7.1 per 100,000), but different death associated with HCV (5.34 and 2.89).
They found they could estimate to a high degree of likelihood the number of people with HCV in both Louisiana and Florida (21,469 and 4,280 cases respectively). The cost of universal screening programs to identify these cases would cost US$300m and US$60m respectively. However, using Socially Determined's SDOH data to inform the screening would cost a fraction of that: US$15m and US$3m respectively to find the same number of expected chronic HCV cases. This would prevent 519 and 188 deaths associated with HCV in the first year respectively. This would be at a cost of $29,000 per death avoided in Florida or $16,000 per death avoided in Louisiana.
The full paper is available here.
Ongoing research, even for commercial organizations, is a critical part of making real contributions to healthcare. Socially Determined's commitment to doing so, and further pushing the state of the art of applied SDOH data to improve outcomes and reduce costs, is integral to our purpose.