Social Determinants of Health Shared Resource (SHARE)

graphic that says SDOH social determinants of health with icons for a house, car, dollar sign and heart with a heart beat line through the middle

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that broadly affect health and quality of life outcomes. Data on social determinants can be used by health care systems to increase understanding about the populations and communities they serve.

The mission of the Social Determinants of Health Shared Resource (SHARE) is to execute and maintain a multi-level infrastructure for integrating specialized and patient-reported SDOH data with existing data sources to develop and support new health equity-related translational and cancer research across MUSC Hollings Cancer Center and MUSC.

“ I was one of the first Hollings members to make use of SHARE. It was a great experience. I would recommend other investigators make use of SHARE, which can link clinical data available in electronic health records with other public use datasets. ”

Michael Cummings, Ph.D., Cancer Prevention & Control member

SHARE Services

Provide consultation services for users to obtain customized SDOH-related research data sets and analyses for various needs including obtaining preliminary data and secondary analyses for research proposals and publications.
Guidance on integrating SDOH data with EHR, biospecimen, and other data types.
Guidance on feasibility determination and enabled access to a full research dataset with appropriate oversight and governance of data release, by working with dedicated SHARE data analysts (serving as honest broker).

Collect routine patient-reported SDOH data to enrich SDOH data acquired through the electronic health record to better understand how multi-level factors (i.e., socioenvironmental, economic, perceived behavioral) are important to disease risk and health care outcomes.
Provide additional/specialized SDOH data that is not being acquired through the standardized assessment tool.

Provide specialized geographic analyses (i.e., mapping spatial distributions, proximity analysis).
Spatial linkage to contextual data (i.e., population demographics, social vulnerability and area deprivation).
Assess geographic determinants related to health care and health outcomes (e.g., neighborhood SDOH).

Expand SDOH domain variables by applying advanced text extraction approaches, including well established NLP pipelines to extract specific terms, and deep learning (artificial intelligence) methods, which allow researchers to access SDOH data present in unstructured clinical notes.