Using an Ontology to Facilitate More Accurate Coding of Social Prescriptions Addressing Social Determinants of Health: Feasibility Study
Abstract
BACKGROUND: National Health Service (NHS) England supports social prescribing in order to address social determinants of health, which account for approximately 80% of all health outcomes. Nevertheless, data on ongoing social prescribing activities are lacking. Although NHS England has attempted to overcome this problem by recommending 3 standardized primary care codes, these codes do not capture the social prescribing activity to a level of granularity that would allow for fair attribution of outcomes to social prescribing.
OBJECTIVE: In this study, we explored whether an alternative approach to coding social prescribing activity, specifically through a social prescribing ontology, can be used to capture the social prescriptions used in primary care in greater detail.
METHODS: The social prescribing ontology, implemented according to the Web Ontology Language, was designed to cover several key concepts encompassing social determinants of health. Readv2 and Clinical Terms Version 3 codes were identified using the NHS Terms Browser. The Royal College of General Practitioners Research Surveillance Centre, a sentinel network of over 1000 primary care practices across England covering a population of more than 4,000,000 registered patients, was used for data analyses for a defined period (ie, January 2011 to December 2019).
RESULTS: In all, 668 codes capturing social prescriptions addressing different social determinants of health were identified for the social prescribing…
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