LOINC® from Regenstrief Institute and the Health Data Standards (HDS) team have received an additional $500,000 in funding to expand efforts to address health disparities documented in electronic health records (EHRs). This funding, provided by the Regenstrief Foundation, will support the inclusion of four additional health-related social needs domains over project years two through four, increasing the total number of standardized social risk domains from 25 to 29.
The four-year global initiative, led by HDS at Regenstrief in collaboration with Health Level Seven® (HL7®) International’s Gravity Project, aims to enhance the collection and utilization of social risk data in healthcare. The expansion will enable:
- Increased awareness and monitoring of health-related social needs by clinical teams.
- Reductions in health disparities through improved clinical care adjustments.
- Enhanced data quality for high-impact research.
HDS, in partnership with HL7® Gravity Project, is identifying and standardizing core social risk assessments to build a more comprehensive set of social risk domains impacting individual, community and global health. This includes developing terminology for existing and newly curated assessments.
With the added funding, the project will now address two additional social risk domains per year, increasing the overall goal from eight to 14. The new domains selected for Year 2 are:
- Protective Factors – Positive social influences that mitigate health risks.
- Education Related to Material Hardship – Knowledge and resources related to essential items such as diapers, car seats and infant supplies.
By expanding standardized social risk data, this initiative will benefit patients, healthcare providers, community-based organizations, researchers and technology vendors—advancing healthcare on a global scale.
LOINC, short for Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes, is a global standard for health terminology. Created and maintained at Regenstrief, LOINC enables the identification, exchange and collection of data across health systems and is used around the world.
See the initial press release announcement of the awarded grant here.
About LOINC® from Regenstrief Institute
LOINC® was created in 1994 at Regenstrief Institute to facilitate interoperability in healthcare and is administered by Regenstrief Institute Health Data Standards. There was a growing trend to send clinical data electronically between healthcare entities, a practice that has now become ubiquitous. Today, it contains more than 104,000 concepts for everything from an albumin level to a zygomatic arch X-ray report. For each concept, LOINC contains many other rich details, such as synonyms, units of measure and carefully crafted descriptions.
About the Regenstrief Foundation
Regenstrief Foundation is an independent non-profit foundation based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Established in 1967 by industrialist Samuel N. Regenstrief and his wife Myrtie Regenstrief, the foundation provides grants for innovative research directed toward improving the efficiency, quality, and accessibility of health care.
About Gravity Project
Established in 2019, the Gravity Project is a nationally recognized multi-stakeholder public collaborative of 2,500+ participants from across the health and human services ecosystem focused on developing consensus-driven data standards to support the collection, use, and exchange of data to address the social determinants of health. As an HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7® FHIR®) Accelerator, Gravity advances the use of data standards for social care in patient care, care coordination between health and human services sectors, population health management, public health, value-based payment, and clinical research. Gravity continues to advance its mission by leveraging its core standards to address national healthcare interoperability priorities related to social care delivery and quality reporting. Learn more about the Gravity Project by visiting thegravityproject.net.
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