Presentation of SDOH Referral Project
SDOH = Social Determinants of Health
SDOH refers to the non-medical conditions and environments where people are born, grow, live, work, and age that significantly affect their health outcomes, functioning, and quality of life.
Speaker/Sponsor: Char Miller
Her background:
- Current Day job: IT program manager
- Past experience: 15 years at Microsoft, career with database architecture
- Completed masters of public health 4 years ago
- Masters project was adding SDOH to OpenEMR.
- Will be leaving current job to focus full-time on SDOH project in December
- Also, starting own advising company in September.
Project Name: OpenEMR Care Sphere
Target beneficiary: CBO’s (community based organizations)
Estimate of over 100,000 CBOs in the US.
Most CBO’s are small and run by volunteers. They do not have the resources or finances to maintain electronic records. Most that maintain records maintain them on paper.
CBO’s need a way to receive from and pass information to clinicians (doctors, social workers, etc)
CBO (community based organization) do not have way to electronically receive SDOH reports.
CBO need to pass information of what they are doing back to the clinician.
Goal of project is to create a working closed loop referral.
First phase of Project:
Regional NSF icore (innovation core) - 4 weeks
go out and interview 20 different people.
Interview CBO’s and clinicians (MSWs)
Volunteer. Not paid
Need 2 members on a team
Stephen Nielson is working on closed loop referral in Ireland
Currently, Epic and Cerner provide licenses for
Now, CBOs use products called Aunt Birtha, . . .
Don’t handle referrals and are expensive
Most CBOs do things manually, want to get a fax or phone call.
Second Phase:
National NSF icore
7 week program, 100 interviews
Need post-doc from UC Berkeley
$50,000 grant for travel and expense
After National NSF icore, can apply for a grant for a pilot.
Third Phase:
Create a for-profit company to use to apply for a grant.
Company is for expense only.
Proposed company name: OpenEMR Care Sphere
SBIF (small business innovation fund) grant
$275,000 grant (soonest to apply is Jan)
If get grant, can build instance of OpenEMR that CBOs can host.
Use OpenEMR in 2-3 CBO’s
If pilot goes well, then OpenEMR Care Sphere will be a certified government vendor.
Fourth Phase:
SBIF level 2 grant is $1,000,000 to expand to 50-100 CBO’s.
Char’s son is a recent biochem grad.
Taking a year off, then will maybe go to a Masters/PhD program
He will be one member of the regional NSF icore, char will be another member.
Char asked if OpenEMR has an architecture diagram:
Architecture Diagram
In Documentation folder
Mermaid diagram
Schema is now in openemr website:
View graphical relationship by clicking on Relationship tab
Should SDOH functionality be in a custom module, or go through core?