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Editor’s Note: We invited the authors to submit this article in follow-up to a presentation they made at the 2022 Medical Library Association Conference.
PowerPoint presentation
Social determinants of health (SDoH) are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, and work (e.g., economic stability, education access and quality, healthcare access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, and social and community context), and they significantly impact an individual’s health and wellbeing (Healthy People 2030). Health care alone is estimated to account for just 10-20% of an individual’s overall health status, with SDoH and genetic factors playing much more significant and predominant roles (https://doi.org/10.31478/201710c). With robust connections to community partners, access to data, and touch points with patients, healthcare systems are ideally positioned to address SDoH, yet systems struggle to identify how best to capture and manage SDoH needs. MUSC Health’s academic medical center leveraged an existing partnership with MUSC Libraries to inform our health system’s population health strategy and implementation tactics using best research evidence.
When tasked with developing a comprehensive population health strategy, MUSC Health leveraged an existing partnership between the system’s quality department and MUSC Libraries, called MUSC’s Value Institute. The Value Institute partnered with population health leadership to integrate their existing evidence synthesis service to infuse best research practices into strategy development and implementation. The Value Institute is a group of evidence-based practice methodologists, project managers, and a medical librarian who facilitate the development and implementation of evidence-based clinical decision support tools for population management. As part of strategic planning for population health, MUSC Health’s executive leadership team identified pertinent clinical and policy questions for which the Value Institute completed literature searches, appraised evidence, and summarized findings. These findings were used by senior leadership to inform population health strategy and implementation decisions. Examples of topics searched as part of this partnership included: 1) the most effective way to screen for SDoH needs, 2) the best clinical data to use for predictive risk assessments, 3) the most efficient approaches to outreaching high-risk patients for care coordination, and 4) the effectiveness of integrating behavioral health resources into primary care offices and into clinics for patients with complex medical conditions.
Use of the Value Institute’s evidence synthesis service to promote evidence-informed strategic planning decisions led to the successful implementation of population health strategies for our healthcare system and has benefited our community. The evidence synthesis service helped secure grant funding for two behavioral health resources for our adult and pediatric sickle cell disease clinics. This program also informed MUSC Health’s enterprise-wide roll-out of SDoH screening and referral management and led to embedding three social workers into primary care clinics, which resulted in a reduction in hospital readmissions and emergency department utilization. These are a few demonstrable ways the program has resulted in improvements in care delivery. Our population health strategy tactics each have metrics of success, which are monitored on MUSC Health’s scorecard. Achievement of these measures will also serve as a way to monitor our program’s effectiveness going forward.
Leveraging the academic health system’s existing partnership between the MUSC Libraries and hospital’s quality department has enabled MUSC Health to develop and implement data-driven population health strategies informed by best research evidence. While not every organization has an existing partnership such as this, there is opportunity for academic medical centers to initiate similar collaborations with medical librarians that provide liaison services at their institutions. For more information on this approach, please feel free to contact any of the three authors.
DCT Featured Article – July 12, 2022
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