Adaptation of a social risk screening and referral initiative across clinical populations, settings, and contexts in the Department of Veterans Affairs Health System

Abstract

Identifying and addressing social risks and social needs in healthcare settings is an important step towards achieving health equity. Assessing Circumstances and Offering Resources for Needs (ACORN) is a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) social risk screening and referral model that aims to systematically identify and address social needs. Since initial piloting in 2018, our team has collaborated with clinical and operations partners to implement ACORN across multiple VA clinical settings while adapting and tailoring the initiative to meet the needs of different populations, specialties, and individuals administering screening. Given ACORN's complexity as a growing initiative with multiple partners and frequent real-time modifications within a large national healthcare system, we recognized a need to systematically document the rationale and process of adaptations over time. We looked to three implementation frameworks—RE-AIM, the Adaptome, and FRAME—to describe the rationale for adaptations, the nature of and context within which adaptations were made, and the details of each adaptation. In this manuscript, we uniquely interweave these three frameworks to document adaptations to ACORN across diverse VA clinical settings, with a focus on how adaptations support the promotion of heath equity in the Veteran population.