In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare, data science has emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing social determinants of health (SDoH) and uncovering causes of health inequities.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(24)00022-0/fulltext
This article delves into a recent publication in The Lancet that discusses these issues in depth.
Understanding Social Determinants of Health
SDoH are diverse conditions in people’s environments that affect their health. These conditions can have a greater effect on quality of life and other health outcomes than healthcare spending or lifestyle choices alone. They shape economic policies, social norms, and other environmental factors, which in turn influence individual behaviors.
The Challenges and Solutions
The publication highlights three challenges to measuring and analyzing SDoH:
- Measurement: SDoH data is hard to measure, especially at multiple levels like individual, community, and national.
- Data Acquisition and Integration: Data science methods can help capture social determinants of health not easily quantified, like racism or climate impacts, from unstructured data sources including social media, notes, or imagery.
- Coherent Analysis: The acquisition, integration, and coherent analysis of a holistic set of determinants is only made possible with data science.
The Role of Data Science
Data science—a cross-disciplinary set of skills to make judgments and decisions with data by using it responsibly and effectively—can be harnessed to overcome these challenges. For example, natural language processing can extract housing insecurity from medical notes, and deep learning can parse environmental factors from satellite imagery.
Conclusion
The publication underscores the potential of data science in addressing complex health issues and promoting equity. By leveraging data science, we can inform analytical models to account for, analyze, and implement interventions on SDoH, such as greenspace improvements. This approach can help us move towards a more equitable healthcare system where everyone has a fair opportunity to live a healthy life.