Navigating Health Information Sharing to Address Social Needs: Practice, Research, and Policy Recommendations from Hospital-Based Violence Intervention

Hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) help survivors of violent injury to return to physical, psychological, financial, and social health by addressing a broad range of social determinants of health and reducing the risk of future injury. This work requires connections to a range of providers and services, which often requires the sharing of patient health information. While HIPAA gives providers more discretion to share information to address health-related social needs and care coordination than many providers realize, patients can and should be the ones deciding what health information is shared, with whom it is shared, and under what circumstances. Providers, patients, and programs like HVIPs would benefit from greater clarity on appropriate information-sharing practices. In this article, we consider the real and perceived barriers to information sharing to address social needs and we make recommendations for practice, research, and policy to improve how patient information is shared to address social needs, with relevance for a wide range of interventions.