Social determinants of health: the need for data science methods and capacity (April 2024)

Summary

This Lancet article highlights three challenges to measuring and analysing social determinants of health (SDoH) for which data science—a cross-disciplinary set of skills to make judgements and decisions with data by using it responsibly and effectively—can be harnessed. The three challenges the authors examine are:

1. Data necessary for capturing the exposure of interest at multiple levels appropriately are not always available nor easy to measure.
2. SDoH are distal to individual health outcomes compared to biomedical determinants such as comorbidities.
3. The distal placement of SDoH in relation to health outcomes results in requires long periods of time to observe their effect.

Content