Health Agency Mulls Adding Living Conditions to Patient Records

The Department of Health and Human Services is asking health-care industry participants for advice on how to collect information about transportation, housing, employment, schooling, and other factors that have a large impact on peoples’ health.

The HHS Thursday asked for public comment about how to create standardized data elements for “social determinants of health” that would eventually be included in electronic health records systems.

The disproportionate impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on disadvantaged groups and neighborhoods has brought new attention to living conditions outside the formal health-care system that can vastly alter peoples’ propensity toward illness.

President Joe Biden took ...