Social Informatics Program

Helping individuals curate and link social drivers of health (SDOH) and electronic health record (EHR) data to understand how social, environmental, and climate factors impact health. This is accomplished through academic research by:

• Advancing methodology at the intersection of social epidemiology, informatics, and biostatistics

• Curating novel social, environmental, and climate data

• Developing digital tools to democratize these data so that individuals within our community can understand how SDOH factors impact their health

• Collaborating with researchers, administrators, and community members within and outside Duke who are interested in using SDOH and aggregated EHR data

What We Do

• Develop novel approaches to quantify the impact of long-term exposure to SDOH on health

• Provide methodological expertise on grants and projects

  • Digital epidemiology  (i.e., study design, phenotyping)

  • Data linkage (i.e., probabilistic, deterministic)

  • Machine learning

• Curate and democratize SDOH and EHR data

• Develop digital tools to democratize data

  • SEED Health Atlas (https://sdoh.duhs.duke.edu)

Projects

• SEED Health Atlas

• Addressing gun violence

• Disparities in diabetes care

• SDOH in children

• Long term air pollution exposure and risk for pancreatic cancer

• Gentrification and health

• Climate and health

Manuscripts

• SEED Health Atlas
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-clinical-and-translational-science/article/seed-a-novel-webbased-data-visualization-platform-to-visualize-communicate-and-explore-social-environmental-and-equity-drivers-of-health/2B764A271F1252B031AEDF14BBADBFEB

• Addressing gun violence
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38088956/

• Disparities in diabetes care
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39220819/

• Social disadvantage in children
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39143925/

• Air pollution and pancreatic cancer
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39123098/

• SDOH and causal inference
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38144885/

• Impact of gentrification on health
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36367672/
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32437388/

Education

EHR-SDW class
Designing population health and social informatics studies

Collaboration: The Foundation of the Center

• School of Medicine

  • Surgery

  • Medicine

  • Pediatrics

  • Biostatistics & Bioinformatics

• Arts & Sciences/Engineering

  • Economics

  • Statistical Sciences

  • Environmental Engineering

• Duke Center for Aids Research (CFAR)

• AI Health

  • CACHE

• Duke Center for Precision Health

• Nicholas Institute

• Margolis Center

• SSRI

• NCCU