Analysis reveals associations between social determinants of health codes and survival in Medicare cancer patients, suggesting implications for healthcare strategies.
SDOH Z-codes are rarely submitted with billing claims for Medicare patients with cancer. Whether Z-codes reflect the social needs of patients with cancer remains unclear. With current coding, any SDOH Z-code is associated with poor survival in these patients, but individual Z-codes are not consistently associated with survival. Further studies should determine whether SDOH Z-codes enable effective risk adjustment in a value-based healthcare system.
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Herb et al. (2026) studied this question.
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