A doctor might ask for a patient's family disease history, or exercise or smoking habits, but whether they have trouble getting food onto the table or paying energy bills is unlikely to appear on any clinic questionnaire.
Those sorts of factors could have just as much, if not more, of an impact on a person's everyday health, argue the founders of a startup out of the Johns Hopkins University. Their company, Healthify, is giving clinics that serve largely low-income populations the means to gather and use that information.