The Missing Ingredient? Community Voice--A Tool To Capture Neighbor Feedback for sdoh screening
Focus Area: SDOH Screening Evaluation
Resource Snapshot:
Best For:
Organizations Screening for SDOH
Resource Type:
Podcast
Time to Listen:
49:20
Link:
Referenced Study:
Social needs screening measures have gained exponential popularity over the past decade. Even now, we are seeing increased efforts of encouragement geared toward health care organizations to increase the quantity of health-related social needs screening nationwide. Screening is a monumental tool in social needs care delivery- we cannot help what is not known. Though, with the increase in screening prevalence, we are not seeing the same widespread encouragement to engage in the quality of our screening tools.
The team at Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network (SIREN) and Kaiser Permanente joined forces to create a metric that helped healthcare organizations do just that. In SIREN’s podcast Quality over Quantity: Developing New Measures to Assess Patients’ Experiences of Social Care, the team introduces their curated assessment and explains the method of study used to justify it.
Methodology
Researchers conducted two qualitative studies to (1) identify the key drivers of positive experiences with social care services in healthcare settings and (2) explore how racism and race/ethnicity influence patients’ experiences receiving social care. The elements defining patient experience fell into two domains: Operational and relational.
Key Takeaway #1: It is Not Just About What Resources We Give, But Also How We Give Them.
- When asked what they valued most in a social care interaction, many patients described the emotional support they felt by the provider.
- One patient emphasized the paradigm between the resources given and the emotional support.
- Follow-up was greatly impactful. Emotional support alone was enough to warrant the feeling of being supported and cared for, even if there was a gap in resources.
Key Takeaway #2: The Fear of Bias Considerably Impacts Patients and Has a Strong Influence on Resource Seeking and Acceptance.
- The worry of bias fueled distrust in resources and screening methods in Latinx and black patients. This fear resulted in disengagement from social care: from feeling like they could not be truthful in screening measures to causing them to turn down offered resources
- Negative biased experiences of patients receiving medical care carried over into a patient’s perception into their health-based social care experience
Recommendations: Putting Theory into Practice
- Consider the paradigm: neither operational nor relational proficiency are more important than the other– in fact, the emotional support provided can influence a patient’s perception of a resource. Embed the relational aspect into the operational domain by integrating trust-promoting factors into workflows and other organizational-wide components.
- Implement a qualitative assessment tool to understand influences on neighbors’ perception of social needs care. Do not be afraid to adopt aspects of this tool to better fit the needs of your organization.
SIREN included a simple, 9-item questionnaire based on this work to help organizations get started in capturing data about the quality of their social care services. You can find this tool here.