Frameworks for identifying and assessing social determinants of health (SDOH) are effective for developing long-term societal policies to promote health and well-being, but may be less applicable in clinical settings. The authors compared the relative contribution of a specific set of SDOH indicators with several measures of health status among patients served by health centers (HCs). The 2014 Health Center Patient Survey was used to identify a sample of HC patient adults 18 years and older that reported the HC as their usual source of care (n = 5024). The authors examined the relationship between SDOH indicators organized in categories (health behaviors, access and utilization, social factors, economic factors, quality of care, physical environment) with health status measures (fair or poor health, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, depression, or anxiety) using logistic regressions and predicted probabilities. Findings indicated that access to care and utilization indicators had the greatest relative contribution to all health status measures, but the relative contribution of other SDOH indicators varied. For example, access indicators had the highest predicted probability in the model with fair or poor health as the dependent variable (72.4%) and the model with hypertension as the dependent variable (47.4%). However, the second highest predicted probability was for social indicators (54.1%) in the former model and physical environment (44.7%) indicators in the latter model. These findings have implications for HCs that serve as the primary point of access to medical care in underserved communities and to mitigate SDOH particularly for patients with diabetes, depression, or anxiety.
Keywords: access to care; community health centers; health equity; population health; social determinants of health.