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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>The Gaps in the Terminological Representation of the ACORN Social Determinants of Health Survey</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Melissa P. Resnick</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Diane Montella</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Wilmon McCray</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Steven H. Brown</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Keith E. Campbell</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Jonathan Nebeker</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Frank LeHouillier</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Peter L. Elkin</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">3</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Department of Biomedical Informatics, University at Buffalo</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Buffalo, New York</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="US">USA</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Faculty of Engineering, University of Southern Denmark</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Odense</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="DK">Denmark</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, Office of Health Informatics</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Washington D.C.</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="US">USA</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff3">
          <label>3</label>
          <institution>U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, WNY VA</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Buffalo, New York</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="US">USA</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2022</year>
      </pub-date>
      <abstract>
        <p>Objective: Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) greatly influence health outcomes and healthcare utilization. Tools, such as the Assessing Circumstances &amp; Offering Resources for Needs (ACORN) survey, have been developed to screen for SDOH. The purpose of this study is to determine the level of terminological representation of the ACORN survey by the Solor terminology. Methods: Each ACORN survey question was read to determine its concepts. Next, Solor was searched for each of the concepts and for the appropriate attributes. If no attributes or concepts existed, they were created. Then, each question's concepts and attributes were arranged into subject-relation-object triples. Results: Eleven unique attributes and 18 unique concepts were created. These results demonstrate a gap in representing SDOH with terminologies. We believe that using the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) machinery to fill this gap will assist in bringing together the concepts to better represent SDOH.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>1 Social Determinants of Health</kwd>
        <kwd>ACORN Screening Tool</kwd>
        <kwd>Solor Terminology</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>
        There has been an increased interest in Social
Determinants of Health (SDOH) for over two
decades [1]. This is due to the fact that they
greatly influence health outcomes and healthcare
utilization, thus, contributing to health disparities
for disadvantaged individuals [2]. As noted by
Powell (2019), SDOH affect health, behavioral
health, and general quality of life [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">3</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Social Determinants of Health are the
conditions in which individuals are born, grow,
live, work, and age [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref2">3,4</xref>
        ]. These SDOH occur
across dimensions of functioning, such as, social,
economic, and physical dimensions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">3</xref>
        ]. They also
1ICBO 2022, September 25-28, 2022, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
EMAIL: mresnick@buffalo.edu (A. 1); diane.montella@va.gov
(A. 2); wilmon.mccray@va.gov (A. 3); steven.brown@va.gov (A.
4); campbell@informatics.com (A. 5); jonathan.nebeker@va.gov
(A. 6); fdl1@buffalo.edu (A. 7) ; elkinp@buffalo.edu (A. 8)
ORCID: 0000-0001-9699-852X (A. 1); 0000-0001-9396-8798 (A.
2); 0000-0001-6103-1845 (A. 4); 0000-0001-5355-5008 (A. 6);
0000-0002-2961-1273 (A. 7); 0000-0001-9616-6811 (A. 8)
️© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
      </p>
      <p>
        CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
occur in various environments and settings
including: schools, places of employment,
religious centers, and neighborhoods [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">3</xref>
        ].
Examples of SDOH include: (1) opportunities for
education and employment, (2) level of income,
(3) access to housing and affordable utilities, (4)
social and community support, and (5) access to
transportation, just to name a few [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3 ref4">5,6</xref>
        ].
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>World Health Organization and</title>
      <p>
        The World Health Organization (WHO) has
three areas of work: (1) building the evidence for
action; (2) promoting health in all policies and
intersectoral action capacities; and (3) special
initiative for action on social determinants of
health for advancing health equity [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">7</xref>
        ]. The area of
"special initiative for action on social
determinants of health for advancing health
equity" is most applicable to our work and will be
discussed in more detail. According to WHO, the
goal of this initiative is: "to ensure that health
equity is integrated into the development of social
and economic policies, including its gender
dimensions, to improve the social determinants of
health for at least 20 million disadvantaged people
in at least 12 countries" [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">8</xref>
        ]. To begin working
toward this goal, WHO appointed the
Commission on Social Determinants of Health
(CSDH) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7 ref8">9,10</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        The CSDH set out to identify how the structure
of societies are affecting population health, and
what governments and public health can do to
change it [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7 ref8">9,10</xref>
        ]. Through their work, the CSDH
determined that the circumstances in which
people live are shaped by the distribution of
money, power and resources at global, national
and local levels [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">11</xref>
        ]. Keeping this in mind, they
provided three key strategic directions for policy
work in SDOH: (1) the need for strategies to
address context; (2) intersectoral action; and (3)
social participation and empowerment [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">10</xref>
        ]. Thus,
health outcomes cannot be achieved by merely
acting in the health sector alone; actions in other
sectors are critical as well [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">11</xref>
        ].
1.2.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Healthy People and SDOH</title>
      <p>
        In 1979, Healthy People began as the Surgeon
General's report on Disease Prevention and Health
Promotion [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">12</xref>
        ]. This was followed in 1980 by the
first set of national 10-year objectives [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">12</xref>
        ]. Since
that time, successive objectives of Healthy People
2000 (released in 1990) and Healthy People 2010
(released in 2000) have identified emerging
public health priorities, which have been aligned
with health promotion strategies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">12</xref>
        ]. The
objectives of Healthy People 2020 were
broadened to include the influence of social
environment on health outcomes [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">12</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Four overarching goals were recommended by
Healthy People 2020 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">12</xref>
        ]. One of the four goals
is to: "create social and physical environments
that promote good health for all" [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref11">12,13</xref>
        ]. To meet
this goal, Healthy People 2020 began by
developing a framework specifically for social
determinants of health [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">13</xref>
        ]. This framework
consists of five determinants or key areas: (1)
economic stability; (2) education; (3) social and
community context; (4) health and health care;
and (5) neighborhood and built environment [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">13</xref>
        ].
Each of these five areas encompasses key issues
in SDOH as follows: (1) economic stability:
employment, food insecurity, housing instability,
poverty; (2) education: early childhood education
and development, enrollment in higher education,
high school graduation, language and literacy; (3)
social and community context: civic participation,
discrimination, incarceration, social cohesion; (4)
health and health care: access to health care,
access to primary care, health literacy; and (5)
neighborhood and built environment: access to
foods that support healthy eating patterns, crime
and violence, environmental conditions, quality of
housing [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">13</xref>
        ]. This framework was used starting in
2010 to establish new SDOH objectives, and to
identify the existing Healthy People objectives
existing at that time that were relevant to SDOH
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">13</xref>
        ]. Healthy People 2030 (released in 2020)
added a fifth overarching goal, and expanded the
wording of the goal addressing social
determinants of health to: “Create social,
physical, and economic environments that
promote attaining the full potential for health and
well-being for all” [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">14</xref>
        ]. Downstream, the Healthy
People SDOH objectives and the activities to
achieve them will aid in identifying important
resources and to enact public health policy at
federal, state and local levels [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">13</xref>
        ], and it is notable
that the fifth overarching goal newly added with
the release of Healthy People 2030 seeks to
engage leaders and other key people who can
design and promote “policies that improve the
health and well-being of all” [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">14</xref>
        ].
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>2. Screening Tools for SDOH</title>
      <p>
        Various tools can be used to screen individuals
for SDOH. These include, but are not limited to:
WellRx [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">15</xref>
        ]; Protocol for Responding to and
Assessing Patient Assets, Risks, and Experiences
(PRAPARE) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">16</xref>
        ]; and Assessing Circumstances
&amp; Offering Resources for Needs (ACORN) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">17</xref>
        ].
The ACORN survey is a relatively new tool for
measuring SDOH. As such, little is known about
the terminological representation of the questions
in this survey. The aim of this research study is to
begin to represent the questions of the ACORN
survey using the Solor terminology. First, we turn
to the ACORN screening tool.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>The ACORN Screening Tool</title>
      <p>
        One tool for measuring SDOH is the
Accessing Circumstances &amp; Offering Resources
for Needs (ACORN) survey. In 2020, a
13question survey to screen for SDOH was
developed by the Veterans Health Administration
(VHA) for use with Veterans [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">17,18</xref>
        ]. This survey
uses one question from the WellRx tool, one
question from the PRAPARE tool and five
questions from other sources. The remaining six
questions were developed by the VHA.
Veteranspecific topics on the ACORN survey include: (1)
needing information about educational benefits
for Veterans, and (2) setting up a video visit with
a member of the VA care team [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">17</xref>
        ]. Topics not
specific to Veterans and not from other sources
include: (1) legal issues, (2) feeling lonely or
isolated, (3) having access to and being able to use
a smartphone or a computer, and (4) having access
to reliable and affordable Internet [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">17</xref>
        ].
2.2.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>WellRx Screening Tool</title>
      <p>
        In 2014, there was no widely available
structured method intended or tested for
healthcare providers to identify and capture
SDOH in the outpatient primary care medicine
setting [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">15</xref>
        ]. WellRx, an 11-question screening
tool for SDOH, was developed and piloted at the
University of New Mexico for this purpose [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">15</xref>
        ].
The questions encompass such topics as: (1) food
insecurity, (2) access to housing, (3) affordability
of utilities, (4) transportation, (5) employment, (6)
education, and (7) safety [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">15</xref>
        ].
2.3.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>The PRAPARE Screening Tool</title>
      <p>
        The Protocol for Responding to and Assessing
Patient Assets, Risks, and Experiences
(PRAPARE) survey is a 21-question screening
tool for SDOH [19]. In 2013, the National
Association of Community Health Centers
(NACHC) and partners launched a project to
develop and implement a national standardized
patient social determinants of health risk
assessment protocol, PRAPARE [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">16</xref>
        ]. With its
implementation in 2016, PRAPARE provided a
way to assess SDOH and to expedite actions at the
individual, community, and health system levels
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">16</xref>
        ]. PRAPARE covers most of the same topics
as WellRx namely: (1) food security, (2) access to
housing and utilities, (3) transportation, (4)
employment, and (5) education [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">16</xref>
        ]. In addition,
PREPARE includes: (1) social and emotional
health; (2) being insured or uninsured; (3)
clothing needs; and (4) income, just to name a few
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">16</xref>
        ].
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>3. Representing the Screening Tools</title>
      <p>The use of these various screening tools for
social determinants of health produces a wealth of
data. These data are a valuable source of health
information, but currently are not fully utilized by
many clinicians [20]. In fact, knowing that a
patient has trouble finding transportation, has a
potentially unsafe relationship with someone
close, is currently unemployed, or various other
SDOH would assist healthcare providers to design
treatment plans to best help the patient [20].
Watkins and colleagues (2020) point out the need
for standardized SDOH for care delivery
supported by electronic health records: "these
SDOH must be gathered, represented, and stored
in a standardized way before they can be
leveraged by informatics tools designed for health
providers" [20]. Terminologies, such as the
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical
Terms (SNOMED CT), Logical Observation
Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC), and
RxNorm can be used to represent these SDOH
screening tools and their resulting data.</p>
      <p>
        Arons and colleagues (2018) performed
preliminary work to determine how well concepts
from six SDOH tools were covered in SNOMED
CT, LOINC, ICD-10, and CPT [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">6</xref>
        ]. These SDOH
tools included: (1) the NAM's 2014
Recommended Social and Behavioral Domains
and Measures report; (2) the PRAPARE survey;
(3) the Accountable Health Communities (AHC)
survey; (4) the Health Leads questionnaire; (5) the
SEEK tool; and (6) the WE CARE survey [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">6</xref>
        ].
They noted that although a large number of
concepts from these SDOH tools are covered by
standardized vocabularies, there exist some gaps
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">6</xref>
        ]. Not surprisingly, Arons and colleagues
(2018) demonstrated that the Education,
Employment, Housing, Safety, and Social
Connections/Isolation domains had particularly
high numbers of codes, as these are well covered
in SNOMED CT and LOINC [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">6</xref>
        ]. However,
domains such as child care, clothing,
incarceration, immigration/migration, and
Veteran status were found to be lacking codes [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">6</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>The ACORN survey was created two years
after Arons and colleagues published their work.
Thus, ACORN could not be included in their
analysis. In addition, RxNorm was not included as
one of the terminologies in their analysis. It is also
possible that additional terms were added to any
or all of the terminologies contained within the
Solor terminology within the ensuing years.
Therefore, the recent creation of the ACORN
survey and the possibility of newly added
SDOHrelated terms to SNOMED CT, LOINC and
RxNorm (Solor terminologies) provided the
impetus for this research.
3.1.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>The Solor Terminology</title>
      <p>Solor [21] is an integrated terminology system
created in collaboration with the U.S. Dept. of
Veterans Affairs (VA) that combines SNOMED
CT (representing diseases, findings, and
procedures), LOINC (representing laboratory test
results), and RxNorm (representing medications)
[22]. Solor has two fundamental building blocks:
concepts with their synonyms, and semantics
[22]. In this case, a concept is a medically-related
idea, such as heart attack, while a semantic is data
that provides contextual meaning to the concepts
[22,23]. Like SNOMED CT, Solor is built on a
logic model [22]. Most of the concepts are shared
by Solor and SNOMED CT and are arranged into
hierarchies using "is_a" relationships [22].
Therefore, the modeling is based on SNOMED
CT, LOINC, and RxNorm.</p>
      <p>As an integrated terminology system, Solor
provides many advantages. For instance, this
single consistent method of encoding clinical data
can allow this data to flow among clinical
documentation, decision support applications, and
order entry at the point of care [22]. Solor can also
support research, quality measurement, and other
secondary uses [22].</p>
      <p>At the current time, the Solor terminology is
used in three different contexts. As noted by
Resnick and colleagues (2021) it is used in a
research setting [22]. Solor also provides Clinical
Decision Support (CDS) modeling at the VA. In
the third context, Solor is part of the Sentinel
initiative at the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA). Sentinel is the FDAs national electronic
system which allows researchers to monitor the
safety of FDA-regulated medical products, such
as drugs, vaccines, biologics, and medical devices
[24]. The Sentinel Initiative leverages
organizational partnerships in informatics, data
science (using natural language processing and
machine learning) and other areas [24].</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>4. Methods</title>
      <p>The Assessing Circumstances &amp; Offering
Resources for Needs (ACORN) survey was
obtained [18]. Each survey question was read to
discern all terms.</p>
      <p>Next, Solor was searched for each of the
identified ACORN terms. For those ACORN
terms for which concepts were found to be present
in Solor, the codes and names were noted. If the
needed concept was not present in Solor, a "new"
concept was created.</p>
      <p>In the final step, Solor was searched for
appropriate attributes in order to form
subjectattribute-object triples. If no appropriate attributes
existed, they were created.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>5. Results</title>
      <p>A total of 52 terms relating specifically to
social determinants of health were identified from
the ACORN survey questions. During the
encoding process, 12 unique attributes were used:
1 unapproved SNOMED CT attribute and 11
newly created attributes (see Table 1).</p>
      <p>In Appendix A, two of the ACORN survey
questions with their triples are shown. As shown
in column 2, the subject of the triples are
represented by concepts from SNOMED CT or
LOINC. The same is true for the object of the
triples, as seen in column 4. For these two survey
questions, none of the created concepts, and three
of the 11 created attributes were used to form the
triples.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>6. Discussion</title>
      <p>Among the contributions of this work are the
triples. These triples can be leveraged with at least
two informatics tools: (1) Natural Language
Processing (NLP) tools, and (2) Clinical Decision
Support tools. In the case of NLP, the triples
provide increased accuracy in tagging the
unstructured text, which can influence other
activities downstream. Triples also allow for the
triggering of CDS rules, which in turn, can
improve the care given to patients. Hence, it is for
these reasons that the triples are created while
encoding the ACORN survey.</p>
      <p>The encoding of the ACORN survey questions
revealed three issues: (1) the need to create new
concepts; (2) concepts from more than one
terminology that represent any one question; and
(3) lack of appropriate attributes or relations. In
one of the cases, however, it appeared that
SNOMED CT attributes could be used. For
example, it seemed possible to utilize
"inheres_in" to create the triple: 267076002
feeling lonely (finding) "inheres_in" 116154003
patient (person). However, this is not possible, as
SNOMED CT dictates that the domain of
"inheres_in" needs to be an observable entity, not
a finding [25]. Thus, a new attribute
"experienced_by" was created.</p>
      <p>Almost all of the attributes were created (see
Table 1). This is most likely due to the fact that
the relations or attributes for social determinants
of health are not well represented in SNOMED
CT, and thus, Solor. The lack of appropriate
attributes demonstrates a gap in the representation
of relations between the SDOH concepts.</p>
      <p>A second issue involves the representation of
the concepts for each question. Many of the
questions are represented by concepts from two
different Solor terminologies: SNOMED CT, and
LOINC (see Appendix A). This, in turn, also
contributed to the difficulty in finding appropriate
attributes or relations to form the triples from
these concepts. In other instances, the concepts
do, indeed, exist in the same Solor terminology
(see Appendix A). However, as shown in
Appendix A, it is still necessary to use a created
attribute in order to form the triples.</p>
      <p>Finally, it was necessary to create some new
concepts (see Table 2). In viewing these concepts,
it appears that they represent housing, utilities and
education. Once again, this demonstrates that
there is a gap in the coverage of social
determinants of health by the Solor terminologies:
SNOMED CT, LOINC, and RxNorm.</p>
      <p>Before moving on, a brief note must be made
about the lack of RxNorm concepts. This is not
necessarily a function of a gap in coverage.
Rather, it is most likely due to the content of the
questions. In fact, none of the questions ask about
specific medications, thus, obviating the need for
concepts from this Solor terminology.</p>
      <p>There are at least two solutions to the
previously discussed issues. First, the created
attributes and concepts could be submitted for
inclusion in SNOMED CT, which would also be
included in Solor. Second, the Basic Formal
Ontology (BFO) could be used to represent the
created attributes and concepts. Once this has
been accomplished, the remaining concepts from
the different terminologies for each question
could be brought together using the BFO
representations of the newly created attributes. By
using the BFO machinery in this way, we would
be able to fill in the gaps created by lack of
appropriate SNOMED CT or Solor attributes.</p>
      <p>The BFO is a realism-based, formal and
domain-neutral upper level ontology that is
designed to represent, at a very high level of
generality, the types of entities in the world and
the relations that exist between them [26]. Since it
is intended to provide only the most basic building
blocks for constructing domain-specific
ontologies, it is very small [26]. In addition, it
provides a starting point for the logical
descriptions of the types of entities in a specific
domain [26]. Thus, an advantage of utilizing the
BFO is that the domain ontologies are, to a degree,
interoperable [26].</p>
      <p>A part of this research involves representing
relations with the BFO. BFO has three basic
relations: (1) those between two universals (as
within the ontology itself); (2) those between a
universal and a particular; and (3) those between
two particulars [27]. Relations between a
particular and a universal are used in cases where
the ontology is applied to a portion of reality, as
in the annotation of medical records for a group of
patients [27]. Relations between two particulars
are used when asserting that Mary's leg is a part
of Mary [27].</p>
      <p>Relations between universals have been
further categorized as: (1) foundational relations,
(2) spatial relations, (3) temporal relations, and (4)
participation relations [27]. These have been
formed into the relation Ontology, which has been
used in many of the ontologies of the OBO
Foundry [27,28]. This provides interoperability
between many of the OBO Foundry ontologies
[27].</p>
      <p>Currently, we are beginning to investigate how
the BFO can be used to represent the concepts and
relations that we have created and identified. One
of the challenges is that terminologies such as
SNOMED CT and LOINC are concept-based
[29], while BFO is realism-based [26,27]. As
such, many of the terms representing the questions
of the ACORN survey, along with the created
terms and attributes, might not fit into the BFO
framework. However, by expressing the identified
terms and created terms and attributes in a
realism-based way, it is believed that they can
then be represented by the BFO framework. An
example is discussed below.</p>
      <p>
        Question six (6) of the ACORN survey reads:
How often do you feel lonely or isolated from
those around you? a. Often b. Sometimes c. Never
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">17</xref>
        ]. Concepts for this question were found in
SNOMED CT, and are as follows: (1) 116154003
patient (person); (2) 267076002 feeling lonely
(finding); and (3) 307048004 feeling isolated
(finding). For the reason previously discussed, the
attribute “inheres_in” could not be used. Thus,
since other appropriate attributes to express the
triples were not found, two new attributess were
created: “experienced_by”, and “has_frequency”.
This allowed us to form such triples as: (1)
267076002 feeling lonely (finding)
“experienced_by” 116154003 patient (person);
and (2) 267076002 feeling lonely (finding)
“has_frequency” LA10044-8 often. Using the
BFO framework would allow us to express these
triples without forming new concepts and
attributes.
      </p>
      <p>Using the BFO framework, “feeling lonely”
would be a quality universal of which instances
inhere in human beings. At every temporal region
t at which there exists an instance x of “feeling
lonely”, there must exist a human being y in which
x inheres. Temporal region t has two
temporalparts: temporal region t1 and temporal region t2.
Here, t1 is composed of temporal intervals such
that during these intervals there exists an instance
of feeling lonely that inheres in a human being.
Next, t2 is composed of temporal intervals such
that if at least one instance of feeling lonely exists
during the interval, none of these instances inhere
in a human being. The temporal-part of t2 in
which none inheres in a human being represents
"a human being never feels lonely. In the case of
a human being "feeling lonely often" t1 is larger
than t2. The representation for "a human being
sometimes feeling lonely" is similar, except that
t1 is smaller than t2. A similar representation can
be used for "feeling isolated".</p>
      <p>Another ontology that may be helpful in our
research is the Ontology of Medically Related
Social Entities (OMRSE). The OMRSE is built
upon the BFO, thus, conforming to the best
practices of the OBO Foundry [30]. The OMRSE
was originally developed to represent
demographic data, but additionally includes
representations for organizations, roles, facilities,
demographic data, enrollment in insurance plans,
and data about socio-economic indicators [30].
Currently, of particular interest are
representations for "healthcare facilities",
"households" and "housing units". The OMRSE is
designed to bridge the gap between BFO and more
specific domain ontologies, as well as providing
various classes for reuse in other ontologies [30].
As we move forward in our research, ontologies
such as the OMRSE will assist in representing the
information in and produced by the ACORN
survey.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-13">
      <title>7. Conclusion</title>
      <p>In conclusion, social determinants of health
are not well represented by the Solor
terminologies: SNOMED CT, LOINC, and
RxNorm. This gap in representation is especially
apparent with the attributes or relations. We
believe that using the BFO machinery to represent
these relations will assist in bringing together the
concepts, even those from different terminologies,
to better represent SDOH.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-14">
      <title>8. Future Work</title>
      <p>In the future, we will submit the new attributes
and concepts to SNOMED. In addition, we will
begin to use BFO to properly express the
information in the newly created concepts. As a
part of this process, concise definitions and
appropriate hierarchies will be created. From
here, we will use the BFO to represent the
information from the questions of the ACORN
survey. Finally, it is hoped that this work will lay
the foundation for conversations regarding the
process of bringing SNOMED CT, LOINC, and
RxNorm together to be represented by the BFO.
This will require collaborations not only with
those who understand BFO, but also those who
understand SNOMED CT, LOINC, and RxNorm.
By doing so, we can make strides toward
interoperability between these three
terminologies, and ultimately improve the care
that we provide for patients.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-15">
      <title>9. Acknowledgements</title>
      <p>The research reported in this publication was
supported in part by the National Library of
Medicine of the National Institutes of Health
under award number T15LM012595 to the
University at Buffalo. This work has been
supported in part by grants from NIH NIAAA
R21AA026954, R33AA0226954 and NCATS
UL1TR001412. This work has been supported in
part by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Office
of Health Informatics and Knowledge Based
Systems.
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      <p>Appendix A
Two ACORN Questions with Encodings and Triples</p>
      <p>ACORN Subject</p>
      <p>Survey Question (SNOMED / LOINC)
(6) How often do
you feel lonely or
isolated from those
around you?
a. Often
b. Sometimes
c. Never
[SNOMED] 267076002 feeling lonely (finding)
[SNOMED ]307048004 feeling isolated (finding)
[SNOMED] 267076002 feeling lonely (finding)
[SNOMED] 267076002 feeling lonely (finding)
[SNOMED] 267076002 feeling lonely (finding)
[SNOMED] 307048004 feeling isolated (finding)
[SNOMED] 307048004 feeling isolated (finding)
[SNOMED] 307048004 feeling isolated (finding)</p>
      <p>Attribute
(NEW [from Table1])
"experienced_by"
"experienced_by"
"has_frequency"
"has_frequency"
"has_frequency"
"has_frequency"
"has_frequency"
"has_frequency"</p>
      <p>Object
(SNOMED / LOINC)
[SNOMED] 116154003 patient (person)
[SNOMED] 116154003 patient (person)
[LOINC] LA10044-8 often
[LOINC] LA10082-8 sometimes
[LOINC] LA6270-8 never
[LOINC] LA10044-8 often
[LOINC] LA10082-8 sometimes
[LOINC] LA6270-8 never
(7) How often does [SNOMED] 3030701001 person in the family "has_behavior"
anyone close to you (person)
physically hurt you
or threaten you with [SNOMED] 394863008 non-family member (person) "has_behavior"
harm?
a. Often
b. Sometimes [LOINC] 95619-3 hurts, insults, threatens, and
c. Never screams (hits)
[LOINC] 95619-3 hurts, insults, threatens, and
screams (hits)
[LOINC] 95619-3 hurts, insults, threatens, and
screams (hits)
[LOINC] LA10044-8 often
[LOINC] 95619-3 hurts, insults, threatens, and
screams (hits)
[LOINC] 95619-3 hurts, insults, threatens, and
screams (hits)</p>
    </sec>
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