Linking the social determinants of health and disease process using concept mapping in pre-clerkship problem-based learning courses: a pilot study.

The Social Determinants of Health significantly impact patient care, and understanding their role in the disease process and patient management is essential to high-quality healthcare. Several barriers exist to integrating social determinants of health into medical curricula, including the lack of consensus on evidence-based teaching methods. In this context, our study investigated the impact of integrating social determinants of health into pre-clerkship problem-based learning courses using concept mapping on the clinical problem-solving process. Fourteen pre-clerkship medical students voluntarily participated and were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. The experimental group education intervention included two problem-based cases with social determinants of health-informed probes to promote linking those determinants to the disease process and develop a treatment plan using concept mapping. The control group participated in the same cases without the education intervention. Students in both groups completed post-session assignments that included two new cases, individual concept maps, and recorded reflections. Concept maps were scored using a scoring rubric. The scores of both groups were compared using the Mann-Whitney