The Story of Socially Determined: Building the Future of Healthcare Analytics

The Story of Socially Determined: Building the Future of Healthcare Analytics

Two numbers tell the story behind Socially Determined: 63 and 525,537. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Trenor Williams explained these figures that drove him to reimagine healthcare analytics: “The average adult in the United States spends 63 minutes with a physician MP or physician assistant in an ambulatory setting in a given year… They spend 525,537 minutes outside of that person’s care.”

Those 525,537 minutes – the time patients spend navigating real-world challenges – became the foundation for a healthcare analytics company that’s now achieving 70% year-over-year growth.

The journey to this insight began in an unlikely place: behind a bar. “I started working in a bar restaurant when I was twelve years old, busing tables for $10 a night plus tips,” Trenor shares. This early experience working in his father’s bar – the first of 18 restaurants he would work in – taught him crucial lessons about human connection that would later shape his approach to medicine and business.

As a family practice physician, Trenor discovered something profound: “I learned actually how to be a better family practice physician by being a waiter and a bartender.” The ability to quickly connect with people, established in those early restaurant days, proved invaluable in the examination room where “somebody would close the door behind them as they come in the room and open up and tell you everything about their life.”

But the entrepreneurial bug bit early. During his residency in Los Angeles from 1998-2001, amid the dot-com bubble, Trenor started his first venture – a music-based company called Resonance MD. When the bubble burst, so did the company, but it planted the seed for future entrepreneurial endeavors.

The real turning point came from understanding a fundamental gap in healthcare delivery. While the medical system focuses intensely on those 63 minutes of direct patient care, the other 525,537 minutes – where patients face real-world challenges like food insecurity, housing instability, and transportation barriers – remained largely invisible to healthcare decision-makers.

Socially Determined was born to illuminate these blind spots. The company built an analytics platform that combines data from about 40 different public sources with information about every U.S. business and data on 270 million adults. “We take that public place and person level data, run it through algorithms that we developed and quantify food insecurity, housing instability, transportation risk, health literacy, financial strain at a person and at a community level,” Trenor explains.

The vision for the future is ambitious. “I see us as starting to acquire some of those different point solutions across the ecosystem,” Trenor shares. The company’s unique position at the intersection of healthcare stakeholders creates a powerful opportunity: “A provider thinks of them as a patient and a health plan thinks of them as a member and a life science as a clinical trial practitioner, somebody who takes their drug and employer as an employee, it’s the same people.”

This comprehensive view could revolutionize healthcare delivery. By understanding and addressing the challenges patients face during those 525,537 minutes, Socially Determined aims to create a healthcare system that sees and supports the whole person, not just their medical moments.

For Trenor, it’s a mission that brings together everything he’s learned – from those early days busing tables to his years as a physician, and now as a founder building the future of healthcare analytics. In an industry often resistant to change, Socially Determined is proving that by understanding the full context of patients’ lives, we can create more effective, equitable healthcare solutions.