Written by: Anne Heaney
The UAB Obesity Health Disparities Research Center (OHDRC), powered by the UAB Minority Health & Health Disparities Research Center (MHRC), produced a free resource toolkit with validated measures for social determinants of health – the external conditions that impact health.
Over the last year, this toolkit has proven to be useful, according to Elizabeth Baker, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology. Since its release, Baker has been asked to share the toolkit with UAB faculty and investigators. It has also been incorporated in classes across campus.
When speaking to students, Baker keeps her presentations focused on available measures, different levels of measurement, and appropriate statistical techniques when examining social determinants of health. She also presented the toolkit at the UAB Core Day on February 23, 2022.
Baker plans to take the toolkit to the next level. She and Gabriela Oates, Ph.D, assistant professor of pediatrics in the Division of Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine, will map the toolkit’s social determinants of health categories onto clinical events in electronic medical records (EMR) to facilitate research. They are also in the process of updating the toolkit with area-level measures of social determinants of health that can be geo-linked with patient data. These activities are supported by the MHRC’s Social Determinants of Health Core that Baker and Oates co-lead.
The toolkit is housed in UAB’s Canvas platform and is accessible with a Blazer ID. It also can be accessed here. Email mhrc-sdh@uabmc.edu for more information.