Oregon’s Approach to Leveraging System-level Data to Guide a Social Determinants of Health-informed Approach to Children’s Healthcare

Children’s health and healthcare use are impacted by both medical conditions and social factors, such as their home and community environment. As healthcare systems manage a pediatric population, information about these factors is crucial to providing quality care coordination. The authors developed a novel methodology combining medical complexity (using the Pediatric Medical Complexity Algorithm) and social complexity (using available family social factors known to impact a child’s health and healthcare use) to create a new health complexity model at both the population-level and individual-level. Findings from the article demonstrate that a large number of Medicaid/CHIP-insured children could benefit from targeted care coordination and differential resource allocation that aligns with their health complexity.