Representing Residence, Living Situation, and Living Conditions: An Evaluation of Terminologies, Standards, Guidelines, and Measures/Surveys

Social determinants of health play an important role in diagnosis, prevention, health outcomes, and quality of life. The objective of this study was to examine existing standards, vocabularies, and terminologies for items related to Residence, Living Situation, and Living Conditions and to synthesize them into model representations. Sources were identified through literature and keyword searches, and an examination of commonly used resources. Each source was systematically analyzed by two reviewers, mapped to topic area(s), and further mapped to a model representation. A total of 27 sources were identified and reviewed. Seven of the sources had no items, i.e. concepts, elements, or values, related to the three topic areas while SNOMED-CT had the most items at 436 followed by the US Census at 174. While none of the identified sources encompassed a complete representation for documenting the three topic areas, their synthesis together results overall in more comprehensive representations.