Elevance Health and HealthBegins Launch Collaborative Social Needs Investment Initiative

Imagine a prescription that could help someone with kidney disease manage her condition, reduce her stress, and improve her quality of life.

Now imagine if that prescription were for a meal – designed just for her.

There’s evidence that medically tailored meals, developed as part of a care plan by a registered dietitian nutritionist, can help people with chronic conditions better manage their health through the food they eat. It shows that intervening at one of the root causes of poor health – in this case a lack of access to nutritious food – can improve health outcomes.

Elevance Health and HealthBegins created The Social Needs Investment Lab: A partnership to provide actionable health insights and improve health equity. The partnership supplies evidence assessments that help healthcare systems, managed care plans, and community-based organizations apply insights derived from the assessments to make effective investments that improve the health of the people and communities they serve.

"The partnership between Elevance Health and HealthBegins equips healthcare and community leaders with the evidence-based tools needed to address social drivers of health and invest in solutions that foster health equity,” said Dr. Shantanu Agrawal, chief health officer at Elevance Health. “Together, we are committed to creating healthier lives and stronger communities by integrating social drivers of health into the core of population health strategies.” 
 

What Happens in the Social Needs Investment Lab

While the idea that social needs influence health is not new, data on the effectiveness of interventions is not always available or easy to access.

“Just like we study and test medicines to understand which work best to address physical and behavioral health, we need to study which types of interventions address social health most effectively,” Agrawal said. “These efforts will help us establish best practices.”

The Social Needs Investment Lab contains assessments of interventions that evaluate the intervention based on which present strong evidence, which present sufficient evidence, and which need more research.

To develop the evidence assessments, Elevance Health and HealthBegins together leverage their combined expertise in research, health equity, and addressing the social drivers of health. Built on publicly available, peer-reviewed journal data and summarized into tables, the evidence assessments highlight a specific approach or intervention. Assessments can be filtered by HRSN category, payer type, age group, and more.

An Example: Medically Tailored Meals

Consider medically tailored meals (MTM), designed to provide optimal nutrients to people who have a specific diagnosis, such as HIV, kidney disease, diabetes, or heart failure. The meals incorporate ideal quantities of fruits and vegetables, account for dietary preferences (such as vegetarian or gluten-free), and provide options for people who can’t chew or digest certain foods. Some meals might include complex carbohydrates to provide energy and maintain blood sugar levels, while others might offer more green leafy vegetables to reduce inflammation.

The lab shows there is sufficient evidence that medically tailored meals can have positive impacts on health and social outcomes, and that for some people with diet-related conditions, MTM will reduce healthcare costs and unnecessary utilization. This, in turn, could potentially lead to improved affordability and less disruption in their lives.
 

How the Whole Health Index and the Social Needs Investment Lab Work Together

Knowing that 80% of health stems from factors outside a traditional healthcare setting, Elevance Health’s Whole Health Index (WHI) uses more than 90 data points in the categories of physical, behavioral, and social health to assess the whole health of a person or community of people. The WHI identifies the pain points, and the social needs investment lab highlights what may work best to alleviate them. For example, the WHI might find a community experiences food insecurity, diabetes, and loneliness. The lab then shows what interventions may work best to address these factors.

“These two initiatives help us measure and operationalize our whole-health approach,” Agrawal said. “We’ve shared them externally because we know data-driven and evidence-based programs lead to better outcomes and help us achieve our purpose to improve the health of humanity.”
 

Who Can Use the Social Needs Investment Lab?

The lab can be useful for anyone with an interest in improving individual and community health through collectively addressing the social drivers of health, for example:

• Managed care organizations
• Healthcare systems
• Employers
• Community-based organizations
• Social service providers

The work of the Social Needs Investment Lab partnership can help health industry leaders better understand what interventions most influence health-related social needs, so they can develop solutions that can improve the health of people and their communities.