Integrating Social Needs Into Health Care: A Twenty-Year Case Study Of Adaptation And Diffusion

The US health care system has recently begun to account for patients’ unmet social needs in care delivery and payment reform. This article presents a twenty-year qualitative case study of five stages of diffusion—testing and learning, standardization, replication, shifting from doing to enabling, and catalyzing broad adoption—of a practical approach for integrating social needs into clinical care. This case study of Health Leads and its funders confirms the importance of focusing on a clear aim, investing in model testing and standardization to enable subsequent responsiveness to the market, and the willingness of innovators and their investors to cede control of a model to allow local adaption and accelerate broad adoption.