Problem: The traditional approach to physicians' history taking is designed to facilitate diagnosis and treatment of biomedical conditions. However, in the 21st century, health is critically influenced by the interaction of biomedical conditions and nonbiomedical factors such as patient's ability to manage chronic disease and the social determinants of health. Interventions to expand routine history taking to include nonbiomedical factors have not been widely adopted, possibly due to the difficultly of incorporating long checklists into routine care and the inability to achieve consensus on the relevant behavioral or social determinants of health content applicable to all patients.
Intervention: In 2015-2016, we introduced medical students to a 6-domain (biomedical and psychiatric conditions, behavioral health, living environment/resources, social support, and functional status) approach to history taking and instructed them to elicit information from each domain alongside the traditional approach. Students were required to obtain information from each domain in one admitting history or one daily progress note, discuss their findings with the attending physician, and involve members of the medical team in addressing concerns and barriers in the care of that patient. Students' history notes were reviewed for completeness and compared to those from a student control group. Students also completed a 10-question evaluation of the model.
Context: The intervention was conducted during a 1-month rotation on a hospitalist general medicine service from May 2015 through August 2016.
Outcome: Patient history and daily progress notes were collected from 38 fourth-year intervention students and compared to 24 control students on the same service from the previous year. Compared to control students, intervention students provided more patient information (p ≤ .001) in all nonbiomedical domains except behavioral health. Intervention students reported that the 6-domain model helped them identify clinical information that could be addressed with existing resources and prompted involvement of social workers, pharmacists, and nurses in care planning. They also indicated the framework added clinically valuable information and enhanced team-based care.
Lessons learned: A domain-based framework can be used by medical students to identify clinically relevant behavioral conditions and social determinants of health tailored to individual patients while avoiding long standardized checklists. Arguably, routine collection of behavioral and social determinants of health is a necessary first step in enhancing physicians' awareness and skills in working with health care teams to address nonbiomedical determinants of patients' health.
Keywords: health disparities; history taking; medical students; social determinants of health.