What’s New

AHRQ Releases a New Family of SDOH Data Files to Facilitate Research

One of AHRQ’s goals is to facilitate health services research, especially research that focuses on priority populations, by recognizing the impact from social determinants of health. Through funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund, AHRQ has created a beta version of AHRQ’s database on Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). This new family of databases provides a range of well documented, readily linkable SDOH variables across domains, saving the effort of having to access numerous source files and align their collection periods and geographic levels.

Variables in the files correspond to five key SDOH domains: social context, economic context, education, physical infrastructure, and healthcare context. The files can be linked to other data by geography (county and zip code).

The SDOH beta data files mark a starting point to inform additional work AHRQ is undertaking to develop SDOH data. AHRQ is making these initial “beta” files publicly available in the hope that these files can begin to fill a near-term need for readily available data on SDOH. Please send feedback and questions to SDOH@ahrq.hhs.gov.