The Gravity Project

Gravity Sponsor Matching Campaign to Launch the Digital Inequity/Access & Digital Literacy Domain

The Gravity Project presents an opportunity to launch the first national digital access and digital literacy domain standards development in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, and others! Kaiser Permanente has shared a letter of support here endorsing the work and encouraging Gravity stakeholders and potential funders to join us in initiating the domain in 2023. Contact jillian.annunziata@emiadvisors.net to solicit matching funds. 

Gravity Pilots Affinity Group Meeting, Mar 30, 2023

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our Gravity Pilots Affinity Group! This group, sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), AARP, and IHE USA, is a peer-to-peer learning forum for real-world testing of Gravity terminology and technical standards. We designed these meetings for participants to share successes and challenges, seek partnerships, and ask questions. We look forward to meeting with many of you next week at our fifth Gravity Pilots Affinity Group Meeting on Thursday, March 30 at 2:30 pm ET. We welcome questions about Gravity’s Social Determinants of Health Clinical Care Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource Implementation Guide (SDOH CC FHIR IG) to support office hours during the call. URL: http://hl7.org/fhir/us/sdoh-clinicalcare/STU2/ Learn more about participating in our Pilots Affinity Group here. It’s an opportunity you won’t want to miss! 

Gravity HL7 FHIR IG STU2 Publication

The Gravity Project Team is pleased to announce the formal STU2 publication of the HL7 FHIR SDOH Clinical Care Implementation Guide (IG) which can be found here. 

Gravity SME Outreach Letter

Help us recruit subject matter experts (SMEs) for our upcoming domains! The Gravity Project will address the domains of digital access and digital literacy, neighborhood safety, and food access, and we are looking for a wide range of community engagement. Please send notice within your communities of a need for SMEs, we have written a letter to assist here.

Gravity Value Set Authority Center (VSAC) Screening Assessment Value Sets

In response to requests from implementers, Gravity Project is happy to announce the publishing of value sets including Gravity Project selected screening panels. The first release includes all Social Determinants of Health panel value sets (in line with USCDI) and screening panel value sets for our first domains of food insecurity, housing instability, homelessness, inadequate housing, and transportation insecurity. Over the next months the terminology team will build the remaining sets for our other domains. Each of these sets align with recommendations on our confluence and in our SDOH IG supplemental guide.

Domain Code Dashboard

The Gravity Project has created a dashboard which shows the status of domain specific codes across our four activities (Screeners, Diagnosis, Goals, and Interventions). Each domain has a spreadsheet that lists the codes available to date. The spreadsheets will be updated after major release dates. View the dashboard here.

NIDDK RFA-DK-22-038: Pilot Interventions to Integrate Social Care and Medical Care to Improve Health Equity (R01—Clinical Trial Required), Letter of intent due Sep 19th.

This NIDDK Funding Opportunity Announcement will support pilot and feasibility trials to test interventions that involve screening for and addressing adverse SDOH, also called social risks, during a health care visit. The overarching goal of this FOA is to develop pragmatic approaches that can be used in healthcare settings to reduce health disparities in diseases within the mission of NIDDK and achieve health equity, especially among individuals from racial and ethnic minority groups, rural populations, sexual and gender minority groups, and other socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved communities. A letter of intent is due Sep 19. Learn more here.

The Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN), with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and in partnership with EMI Advisors, LLC, launched the Gravity Project in May 2019. The Gravity Project convenes stakeholders across the country through an open and transparent collaborative process where they develop and test consensus-based standards to facilitate SDOH data capture and exchange across a variety of systems and settings of care and social services. 

The Gravity Project seeks to identify data elements and associated value sets to represent SDOH information documented in electronic health records (EHRs) across four clinical activities: screening, diagnosis, goal setting, and intervention activities. The Project deliverables are:

• Develop use cases that guide the development of standards to support SDOH data capture and exchange; 
• Identify common data elements and their associated value sets to support the use cases;
• Develop a consensus-based set of recommendations on how best to capture and group these data elements for interoperable electronic exchange and aggregation;
• Collaborate with coding and terminology organizations to address coding gaps identified and apply for new codes;
• Develop, test, and ballot HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide(s) based on the defined use cases and coded data sets; and 
• Develop Reference Implementation(s) to support real-world pilots and implementations.

Project objectives will be accomplished through bi-weekly virtual meetings and collaborative project product development through the HL7 project confluence page.

Updated 11 Nov 2022

Gravity Project Community Collaborative and FHIR IG Workgroup Meetings have been postponed. We encourage community members to remain engaged with the Gravity Project via our Gravity Pilots Affinity Group.

CLICK HERE FOR A FULL MEETING SCHEDULE
Click here for project documentation and deliverables.

The success of the Gravity Project depends on the contribution of volunteers who are eager to make rapid progress on the standardization of social determinants of health data.  We need experts to contribute to and validate definitions for SDH related data elements and value sets. Participants are asked to join the project at any time either as a Committed Member or Other Interested Party as part of the HL7 Consensus Process.  To join the project, sign up here.  

• To check your project membership status, click here.  If you wish to change your membership from Other Interested Party to Committed Member, please send an email request to Gravityproject@hl7.org.
• NOTE:  Both member types can submit comments on project documentation.  However, only Committed Members may vote on final documentation.  If you would like to have voting rights, please change your membership status or join the project as a Committed Member.