About the Challenge

Announcements

The AHRQ Visualization Resources of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge team will hold a webinar on Wednesday, April 10, 2019, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. (ET) to share information and answer questions about the challenge competition.

Join the Webinar :

Event number: 739 982 296
Event password: JZFup2Vg

Audio conference:

Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 1-877-668-4493.
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-479-3208.
Access code: 739 982 296

If you have any technical difficulties accessing the call, please email Susan Kerin at susank@capconcorp.com

Video Message from AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna About Entering the Challenge

Watch AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna discuss the $220,000 challenge to develop tools to predict and meet health service delivery needs in communities.

(YouTube Video: 2 minutes, 24 seconds)

Challenge Purpose:

Significant disparities persist among many U.S. subpopulations in their receipt of quality health care. Further, there are multiple social factors that contribute to poor quality care and increased health care spending.

This challenge is consistent with HHS Secretary Azar’s goal of increasing value-based care by leveraging technology and providing innovative tools to help organizations improve their understanding of factors that contribute to poor quality care and address unmet community health service delivery needs. Evidence has suggested that using data on social determinants of health1 (SDOH) and community services may help AHRQ and others better plan for the use of limited resources, improve population health outcomes, and drive savings.

Challenge Goal:

The AHRQ Visualization Resources of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge seeks tools that support visualizing such data clusters to enhance the research and analysis of community-level health services.

Challenge participants must develop visualization tools that can augment the insights drawn from the analysis of medical expenditure and health care utilization data at the community level. Tools must use publicly available and free SDOH data from at least three of the following data sources:

Federal databases.
State databases.
Other locally available data sources, such as SDOH data from voice, digital, and social medical requests via service lines, for example--
- 911 emergency services.
- 311 non-emergency requests for community services.
- 211 personal referrals for community services.

A list of these resources are provided on the AHRQ Challenge website. These tools should be constructed and presented so that AHRQ can apply them in at least two of the following areas:

Develop studies (data linkage, machine learning, and modeling).
Relate initial consumer health-seeking behavior.
Evaluate health status.
Predict needs for emergency, hospital, and community health care services.

1. Healthy People 2020 defines social determinants of health as the conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Conditions (e.g., social, economic, and physical) in these various environments and settings (e.g., school, church, workplace, and neighborhood) have been referred to as “place.” In addition to the more material attributes of “place,” the patterns of social engagement and sense of security and well-being are also affected by where people live. Resources that enhance quality of life can have a significant influence on population health outcomes. Examples of these resources include safe and affordable housing, access to education, public safety, availability of healthy foods, local emergency/health services, and environments free of life-threatening toxins.

Page last reviewed March 2019
Page originally created December 2018

Internet Citation: About the Challenge. Content last reviewed March 2019. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/sdoh-challenge/about.html