ACORN SDOH survey: Terminological representation for use with NLP and CDS

Objective: Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) greatly influence health outcomes. SDOH surveys, such as the Assessing Circumstances & Offering Resources for Needs (ACORN) survey, have been developed to screen for SDOH in Veterans. The purpose of this study is to determine the terminological representation of the ACORN survey, to aid in natural language processing (NLP). Methods: Each ACORN survey question was read to determine its concepts. Next, Solor was searched for each of the concepts and for the appropriate attributes. If no attributes or concepts existed, they were proposed. Then, each question’s concepts and attributes were arranged into subject-relation-object triples. Results: Eleven unique attributes and 18 unique concepts were proposed. These results demonstrate a gap in representing SDOH with terminologies. We believe that using these new concepts and relations will improve NLP, and thus, the care provided to Veterans.