  Social determinants of health (SDoH) have a significant impact on health
outcomes and well-being. Addressing SDoH is the key to reducing healthcare
inequalities and transforming a "sick care" system into a "health promoting"
system. To address the SDOH terminology gap and better embed relevant elements
in advanced biomedical informatics, we propose an SDoH ontology (SDoHO), which
represents fundamental SDoH factors and their relationships in a standardized
and measurable way. The ontology formally models classes, relationships, and
constraints based on multiple SDoH-related resources. Expert review and
coverage evaluation, using clinical notes data and a national survey, showed
satisfactory results. SDoHO could potentially play an essential role in
providing a foundation for a comprehensive understanding of the associations
between SDoH and health outcomes and providing a path toward health equity
across populations.
