# Systematic Design and Evaluation of Social Determinants of Health Ontology (SDoHO)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01941 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01941/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Multi-Stage Large Language Model Framework for Extracting Suicide-Related Social Determinants of Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05003/) (2025)
- [Comparing LLM and Fine-Tuned Model Performance on NVDRS Circumstance Extraction with Varying Prompt Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21845/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.