Utilizing Social Determinants of Health for Better Care with Dr. Maria Raven

Story in the Public Square

The social determinants of health—how living conditions, family life, poverty, homelessness and other factors affect human health—have emerged as key factors in understanding health outcomes. Dr. Maria Raven shines a critical light on the complexity of cases she sees every day in one major city’s emergency room.

Raven is a practicing emergency medicine physician and health services researcher and is the Chief of Emergency Medicine at UCSF and a Vice Chair in the UCSF Department of Emergency Medicine. She co-directs the Section of Social Emergency Medicine and Health Equity and is on faculty at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. Maria researches and speaks locally and nationally about caring for complex populations, frequent emergency department users, and the link between homelessness and health. She has published and peer-reviewed extensively on these and other topics. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the Oregon Health and Sciences University for her MH/MPH, she completed her residency training and Master’s in Clinical Research at the NYU-Bellevue Hospital Center. She is co-editor of the first Social Emergency Medicine textbook and works on multiple funded initiatives to address social and behavioral needs in emergency departments including emergency department-initiated treatment for alcohol use disorder. Since March 2020, she has also focused on emergency department operations/preparedness in the face of COVID-19, and related research including a CDC/NIOSH-funded study on N95 reuse.

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