The Center for SDOH Innovation Report: 2021-2023

THERE HAS LONG BEEN A DISCONNECT in the public perception of the role that health plans play—get claims, pay claims—and the reality of the many functions health plans perform, ranging from care management to quality improvement, network adequacy and provider contracting functions.

Those extra functions are what put the “managed” in “managed care.”

In recent years, MCOs have extended the scope of their management function substantially with the advent of efforts to address social drivers of health, or SDOH. These go beyond not only the public perception of what a health plan does, but what health care is thought to be. It’s more than medicine. The social drivers of health include food, housing, employment, education, and more.

Safety Net Health Plans have long known that significant value lies in addressing SDOH, and they took initiative to do so long before the term came into vogue in health policy circles. But as the idea of addressing SDOH moved from a disparate set of pilot projects that plans had undertaken as proofs of concept to key elements of state RFPs for health plans, it became clear that Safety Net Health Plans needed a platform to thoughtfully incorporate their SDOH programs and accelerate the pace at which they were learning and advancing their programs.

Accordingly, with help from our friends at Spring Street Exchange and approval from our Board of Directors, ACAP embarked upon an effort to stand up the entity now known as the ACAP Center for SDOH Innovation–or the Center, as we call it internally. In the three years since the Center’s launch, it has grown into a valuable platform for plans to learn from subject matter experts and one another— and in many cases, we are the subject matter experts.

It has been a hub for funding opportunities, competitive analyses, and the most comprehensive benchmarking of health plan SDOH activities in the country. Read about our first three years of work here. >>