SEnDAE: A resource for expanding research into social and environmental determinants of health

Background and Objective: Social and Environmental Determinants of Health (SEDoH) are of increasing interest to researchers in personal and public health. Collecting SEDoH and associating them with patient medical record can be challenging, especially for environmental variables. We announce here the release of SEnDAE, the Social and Environmental Determinants Address Enhancement toolkit, and open-source resource for ingesting a range of environmental variables and measurements from a variety of sources and associated them with arbitrary addresses.Methods: SEnDAE includes optional components for geocoding addresses, in case an organization does not have independent capabilities in that area, and recipes for extending the OMOP CDM and the ontol-ogy of an i2b2 instance to display and compute over the SEnDAE variables within i2b2.Results: On a set of 50 0 0 synthetic addresses, SEnDAE was able to geocode 83%. SEnDAE geocodes ad-dresses to the same Census tract as ESRI 98.1% of the time.Conclusion: Development of SEnDAE is ongoing, but we hope that teams will find it useful to increase their usage of environmental variables and increase the field's general understanding of these important determinants of health.(c) 2023 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

Social and Environmental Determinants of Health (SEDoH) are gaining attention in personal and public health research. The release of SEnDAE, an open-source toolkit, aims to facilitate the collection and association of various environmental variables with patient medical records by ingesting them from different sources and linking them to arbitrary addresses.