State Medicaid programs need to do a better job of measuring and addressing the social risks their patients face, the National Quality Forum has asserted in a new report.
To do so, NQF concluded, state Medicaid programs should “…work more with healthcare organizations and communities to better manage social disparities.”
How?
According to the NQF, state Medicaid programs should:
- Acknowledge that Medicaid has a role in addressing social needs that impact health.
- Create a comprehensive, accessible, routinely updated list of local community resources for healthcare organizations.
- Harmonize tools that assess social needs that impact health to ensure that they collect and document the same type of information.
- Create standards for inputting and extracting social needs data from electronic health records to strengthen information sharing between health and non-health providers and programs
- Increase information sharing between government agencies.
- Expand the use of waivers and demonstration projects to begin to learn what works best for screening and addressing social needs that impact health.
Learn more about how the NQF wants state Medicaid programs to address the social determinants of health in the new report Food Insecurity and Housing Instability Final Report, a link to which can be found here.
