Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 20, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 19, 2020
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Using an ontology to facilitate more accurate coding of social prescribing
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social prescribing is being supported by NHS England to address social determinants of health, which account for 80-90% of health outcomes. Despite its promise, there is a lack of data on what social prescribing activity is taking place. Though NHS England has attempted to overcome this problem by recommending three standardised primary care codes, these codes do not capture social prescribing activity to a level of granularity that would allow for fair attribution of outcomes to social prescribing.
Objective:
In this manuscript, we explore whether an alternative approach to coding social prescribing activity, specifically through a social prescribing ontology, can be used to capture a higher degree of detail on the social prescriptions used by primary care.
Methods:
The social prescribing ontology, implemented according to the web ontology language (OWL), was designed to cover several key concepts covering social determinants of health. READv2 and CTV3 codes were identified using the NHS Terms Browser. The Royal College of General Practitioners Research Surveillance Centre (RCGP RSC), a sentinel network of 1000 primary care practices across England covering a population of over 4,000,000 registered patients, was used for data analyses covering a period from January 2011 to December 2019.
Results:
668 codes capturing social prescriptions for different types of social needs were identified for the social prescribing ontology. For the period between January 2011 and December 2019, social prescribing ontology codes were used 5,504,037 times by RCGP RSC primary care practices as compared to 29,606 instances of ‘social prescribing’ codes, including NHS England’s recommended codes.
Conclusions:
A social prescribing ontology provides a powerful alternative to the codes currently recommended by NHS England to capture detailed social prescribing activity in England.
Citation
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