March 2023 - The Gravity Project Executive Committee-led refreshed Gravity Project Strategic Goals, please find them here


Project Overview


The Gravity Project is striving to create a world where health and social care organizations readily share the information needed to effectively meet the social needs of individuals and advance health equity and improve health outcomes in communities by using standard terminology and technology.

The Gravity Project is envisioned as a diverse collaborative of relevant experts centered on solving the information exchange needs that advance health equity and improve population health.  The mission of the Gravity Project is the development and advancement of open data standards using HL7® FHIR® and associated terminologies that form the basis of modern social care interoperability.

The Gravity Project has grown into a leading multidisciplinary community that has successfully introduced a nationally recognized set of open data standards-based terminologies to support care across 17 social risk domains and a complete closed loop referral Implementation Guide.  Gravity will continue to advance its mission by leveraging its core standards to address national healthcare interoperability priorities related to social care delivery and quality reporting.

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 Timeline 

Updated 11 Nov 2022

2023 Coming soon


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