Maverick's Update

Another instruction booklet — the “Grail Diary” — is central to the plot of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. That’s the film where Steven Spielberg and George Lucas decided that the only person who would be believable as Harrison Ford’s father is Sean Connery — despite only one of them having a decidedly Scottish accent. Sean Connery’s professorial character kept a diary of his painstaking and life-long research of the Holy Grail, which includes a map that leads the characters on a quest to find the cup that can bear the gift of eternal life. This week, the ONC released its Grail Diary, with a name that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as neatly: Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Information Exchange Toolkit. It is an impressive 77-page instruction book — a roadmap — for people “on the ground” who are trying to figure out how to incorporate information about social issues (challenges posed by low income, housing and food insecurity, educational barriers) into the health care system. Why is this important? Without knowing how to identify and use this non-medical-but-impacts-medical care information, all the great health care the American system has to offer may be rendered quite useless for a lot of people. So, after many talks and much advice from experts, the ONC offered this guide, with examples and stories and graphics, to help people and organizations that do not normally collaborate or share information about social issues that impact health to do just that. It may be that the pathway to data sharing as described in the SDOH toolkit is the health care system’s equivalent to the search for the Holy Grail: “The quest for the Grail is not archaeology, it’s a race against evil.”