Meeting Individual Social Needs Falls Short of Addressing Social Determinants of Health

Brian Castrucci, CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, and John Auerbach, President and CEO of Trust for America’s Health, discuss how “hospitals and health care systems have started to address [the] social determinants of health through initiatives that buy food, offer temporary housing, or cover transportation costs for high-risk patients. If this is what addressing the social determinants of health has come to mean, not only has the definition changed, but it has changed in ways that may impede efforts to address those conditions that impact the overall health of our country.”