Social Determinants Today, Social Determinants Tomorrow
Discussion about how social factors affect health care costs continues to amplify—and the numbers are pretty clear. Low-income consumers—who often have more negative social determinants of health—are higher utilizers of acute care services; account for the majority of both preventable hospitalizations and readmissions; have higher rates of smoking and obesity; and have shorter life spans.
As Arthur C. Evans Jr., Ph.D., then commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services (DBHIDS), explained in his keynote address, Tending To …