SEnDAE: A resource for expanding research into social and environmental determinants of health

Social and Environmental Determinants of Health (SEDoH) are of increasing interest to researchers in personal and public health. Collecting SEDoH and associating them with patient medical record can be challenging, especially for environmental variables. We announce here the release of SEnDAE, the Social and Environmental Determinants Address Enhancement toolkit, and open-source resource for ingesting a range of environmental variables and measurements from a variety of sources and associated them with arbitrary addresses.

SEnDAE includes optional components for geocoding addresses, in case an organization does not have independent capabilities in that area, and recipes for extending the OMOP CDM and the ontology of an i2b2 instance to display and compute over the SEnDAE variables within i2b2.

On a set of 5000 synthetic addresses, SEnDAE was able to geocode 83%. SEnDAE geocodes addresses to the same Census tract as ESRI 98.1% of the time.

Development of SEnDAE is ongoing, but we hope that teams will find it useful to increase their usage of environmental variables and increase the field's general understanding of these important determinants of health.