Creation of a Mapped, Machine-Readable Taxonomy to Facilitate Extraction of Social Determinants of Health Data from Electronic Health Records.

A comprehensive, mapped social determinants of health (SDH) taxonomy in machine readable format was developed. The framework is intended to facilitate the extraction of social risk factors (SRFs) out of electronic health record (EHR) data and categorize them by domain and determinant to facilitate interpretation. Where other SDH frameworks have been focused on data input, this framework is designed from a data extraction point of view using EHR data in conjunction with published literature, public health policy documents, and official crosswalk maps. Frameworks developed by leading public health organizations were reviewed and synthesized to create an SDH framework comprising of 97 distinct SRFs organized under 16 domains. 2,329 medical codes across three standardized medical vocabularies, 10,896 free-text diagnosis descriptors, and 25 health insurance keywords were mapped to individual SRFs in the SDH framework. The framework is available as an open-source resource in Python dictionary or JSON format. ©2021 AMIA - All rights reserved.