Beyond the biological mechanisms of disease, social, environmental, behavioral, and psychological factors play a critical role in human health. These factors – that we collectively call the “sociome” – interact with human biology to cause or exacerbate disease and injuries and may disrupt wellness. But in contrast to genomic and clinical data, sociome factors have not been comprehensively collected, codified and quantified for the large-scale data mining and analysis techniques transforming modern healthcare.

This collaboration will build the scalable and extensible infrastructure and architecture that will ultimately assemble, quantify, and organize the entirety of social context experienced by every individual. Once catalogued, researchers can link this information to biologic and clinical data at individual and population scale to understand, predict, and treat health and health-related outcomes. A paradigm project will use this approach to build predictive models for children with asthma on the South Side of Chicago, hopefully leading to better immediate and long-term interventions to minimize disease severity.