Gravity Project

Launched in May 2019 by the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN) with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Gravity Project is a national public collaborative effort that is developing structured data standards to help reduce current barriers for documenting and exchanging social risk and protective factors within the health care enterprise and with other sectors. The Gravity Project convenes stakeholders from across the globe through an open and transparent collaborative process where they develop and test standards to facilitate social determinants of health (SDOH) data capture and exchange across a variety of systems and settings of care and social services. Despite increased interest around identifying and addressing social determinants in the context of US health care settings, existing medical coding vocabularies are poorly equipped to capture related clinical activities. Core concepts related to clinical social determinants activities (e.g. screening, diagnoses, and interventions), as well as codes and value sets to adequately reflect those concepts, must be identified, defined and agreed upon by the health and social services communities in order to effectively document these activities. Standards are needed to promote the collection and use of SDOH data, to enable sharing of SDOH data across organizations, and to facilitate payment for social risk data collection and intervention activities. The Gravity Project addresses the needs for both semantic and structural level interoperability of SDOH electronic data.