Issue Brief: Coordinated Whole-Person Care that Addresses Social Determinants of Health

To achieve better health outcomes at a lower cost, clinical and social service providers increasingly need access to information reflecting the social determinants of health—such as employment, housing, and education—as they have a profound impact on health.

This brief focuses on five projects funded by Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH) that are developing the data infrastructure to support models of coordinated care across medical and community services. The desired outcome of these models involves system-level changes such that services provided within health care and other settings are oriented around the whole person, and not exclusively on their healthcare needs. These models of care require collaboration not just across organizations, but across sectors.

The brief summarizes approaches and lessons learned from the five DASH grantees — all of whom have unique target populations, goals, partners, and resources, yet collectively are generating lessons learned with respect to multi-sector data sharing specifically for care coordination.