Our Mission
The Gravity Project exists to serve as the open public collaborative advancing health and social data standardization for health equity.
The Gravity Project exists to serve as the open public collaborative advancing health and social data standardization for health equity.
The idea for the Gravity Project originated in 2017, following a multi-stakeholder meeting convened by the Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network (SIREN) and EMI Advisors, LLC. The group championed a grassroots approach for creating a collaborative that could build social needs data for integration in clinical care.
Today our members advance and promote equitable health and social care by leading the development and validation of consensus-driven interoperability standards on social determinants of health.
Build and promulgate consensus driven social determinants of health (SDOH) data standards for health and social care interoperability and use among multi-stakeholders.
The Gravity Project empowers members to determine the projects on which the collaborative will work. Members decide upon projects according to a series of core criteria.
Gravity Project activities and outputs are managed under one of three workstreams: Terminology, Technical, and Pilots.
The goal of the terminology workstream is to create words and respective meanings for social risk and social needs so they can be applied and understood across the health and human services ecosystem. The terminology workstream collectively crafts a representative data set for each social risk domain. The Gravity Project divides each data set into four activities–screening, diagnosis, goal setting, and interventions–in order to represent clinical processes and associated coded terminologies.
The technical workstream expands available social determinants of health (SDOH) data within electronic systems for interoperability and accelerates standards-based information exchange using HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®). The technical workstream addresses the question of how to record, document, and exchange SDOH information across the health and human services ecosystem and across the four primary activities of care, while promoting individual privacy, safety, security, and accountability for patient records.
The pilots worksteam is facilitated through a peer-to-peer Gravity Pilots Affinity Group where entities are invited to test evolving Gravity Project terminology and data exchange standards and share lessons learned with each other. The goal is to validate the use of Gravity-identified coded terminologies and FHIR Implementation Guides through real-world testing across clinical, social services, payer, and government electronic systems.
The following infinity model demonstrates how a Gravity Project is executed using the three workstreams (Terminology, Technical, and Pilots).
Join us in working toward the shared goal of health equity across cultural, institutional, and social contexts.