Social Determinant of Health

Social determinants of health (SDOH) encompass the environmental and societal factors influencing health outcomes, and research focuses on accurately extracting this information from unstructured clinical notes to improve healthcare. Current efforts leverage natural language processing (NLP), particularly large language models (LLMs) and transformer-based architectures like BERT, often coupled with machine learning algorithms such as XGBoost, to efficiently and accurately identify SDOH factors like housing stability, employment, and substance use. This work aims to improve the identification and understanding of SDOH's impact on health disparities and inform interventions, ultimately leading to more equitable and effective healthcare delivery.