Knowledge Base Article

“The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels. The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities - the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries.”

• Social Determinants of Health World Health Organization definition

The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion’s Healthy People 2020 initiative includes a Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) topic area. They note that “social determinants of health are 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…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.”

In general, since the Wednesday@One focuses on topics related to Medicare Rules and Regulations in the acute hospital setting, you may be asking, this is interesting but what does it have to do with the hospital? Well, I am glad you “asked.”

ICD-10-CM codes included in categories Z55-Z65 identify patients with potential health hazards to socioeconomic and psychosocial circumstances. Information represented in this code block is information that would typically be identified by a Social Worker, Case Manager, or admitting nurse as a hospital begins the discharge planning process as soon as the patient is admitted.

In Coding Clinic for ICD-10-CM/PCS, First Quarter 2018, a question was asked to verify whether or not these codes could be assigned based on non-physician documentation. Advice given was that these codes represent social information and it would be acceptable to report them based on documentation from other clinicians following the patient.

To help you begin to understand what information is represented in these codes categories, the following table provides a high-level detail of the code categories and examples of codes within each category.

In MMP’s 2019 IPPS Proposed Rule series of articles, there was a related article discussing CMS’ efforts to account for social risk factors in several of the Hospital Quality Reporting Programs.

The Health People 2020 SDOH topic area has a goal to “create social and physical environments that promote good health for all.” A key to this is analyzing and acting upon data. As a hospital it is important that you begin to identify and utilize these codes.

If you are interested in learning more about SDOH’s, you can visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Social Determinants of Health web page at https://www.cdc.gov/socialdeterminants/.