  Social determinants of health are societal factors, such as where a person
was born, grew up, works, lives, etc, along with socioeconomic and community
factors that affect individual health. Social Determinants of Health are
correlated with many clinical outcomes, hence it is desirable to record SDOH
data in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Besides storing images, text, etc.,
EHRs rely on coded terms available in standard ontologies and terminologies to
record observations and analyses. There is a substantial amount of research on
understanding the clinical impact of SDOH, ranging from screening tools to
practice based interventions. However, there is no comprehensive collection of
terms for recording SDOH observations in EHRs. Our research goal is to develop
an ontology that covers the terms describing SDOH. We present a prototype
ontology called Social Determinant of Health Ontology (SOHO) that covers
relevant concepts and IS--A relationships describing impacts and associations
of social determinants. We describe the evaluation techniques that we applied
to SOHO, including human experts review and algorithmic evaluation.
