Performance of 4 Methods to Assess Health-Related Social Needs

How do different methods of classification perform in measuring health-related social needs (HRSNs)?In this cross-sectional study including 1252 adult patients, compared with reference standard measures, neither screening questionnaires, natural language processing of clinical notes, computable-phenotyping, nor machine learning classifiers approaches performed very well for every HRSN. Every approach showed some potential unfairness, measured as false negatives.These findings suggest that reliance on a single method will underestimate patients’ true social burden.

Corresponding Author: Joshua R. Vest, PhD, MPH, Department of Health Policy joshvest@iu.edu).

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