Population health focuses on the specific health needs of an individual within a defined population.
“In order to truly measure a patient’s health outcomes and identify best practices, providers must evaluate a group of people with similar health needs,” explains Joseph Damore, vice president of population health management for Charlotte-N.C.-based Premier, Inc. “Once we understand a population’s outcomes, we can then target the individual.”
Fundamentally, population health is about individualized care and intervening earlier in order to get a better outcome based on what generally works for the population. It’s also about identifying populations that need specific, targeted care, such as diabetic and oncology patients.
Back in 2003, David A. Kindig MD, PhD, and Greg Stoddart, PhD, defined population health as “the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group.”1
In order to achieve population health, according to Nick Fitterman, MD, SFHM, vice chair of hospital medicine for the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine in Hempstead, N.Y., “it is necessary to reduce health inequities or disparities among different populations due to, among other factors, the social determinants of health, which include social, environmental, cultural, and physical factors.”
Even though the concept of population health emerged more than 25 years ago, Dr. Fitterman points out that, until recently, the U.S. healthcare system has looked at an individual’s episodic illness rather than at population health, which focuses on wellness, prevention, and coordinated care across the continuum.
Dr. McPherson
Marianne McPherson, PhD, MS, senior director of programs, research, and evaluation for the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality in Boston, says it is important for hospitalists to focus on both the patient and the population.
“You need to understand the particular factors facing the patient in front of you and understand that that individual is a product of a variety of different circumstances,” she says. “If you only look at an individual’s health, you can miss important trends across a group of patients within a population or community.
“By looking at both the individual and entire population, you can provide the most effective healthcare and health promotion.”
Government Spearheads Initiatives
Joshua D. Lenchus, DO, RPh, FACP, SFHM
With passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, the U.S. government helped accelerate the movement toward population health. According to Joshua D. Lenchus, DO, RPh, FACP, SFHM, a veteran hospitalist, president of Jackson Health System Medical Staff, and associate professor of clinical medicine and anesthesiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, the act’s provisions aim to improve the quality of care and create accountable care organizations (ACOs).
“The idea was to provide patients with insurance coverage, which would improve the access to care of which they were previously deprived,” he says. “With better access, they may receive quality healthcare and the identification and mitigation of disease at an early stage, thereby reducing overall healthcare costs, with the commensurate benefit of a healthy patient population.
“Of course, this is fraught with naïveté, because it explicitly dismisses nonmedical health determinants (i.e., socioeconomic status, education, literacy rate, transportation availability, employment status, individual patient responsibility, and so forth).”
Now, with ACOs, a hospital or healthcare system can manage patient risk with a potential financial gain—if they manage it well. The government shifts the episodic cost of care to an ACO, charges it with achieving health outcome metrics, and allows it to reap the reward of doing so in a cost-effective manner. More risk equals more reward, potentially. But to affect positive change in patient outcomes (e.g. health) in this manner requires acknowledging such external determinants. Hospitals, hospitalists, and physician leaders must seriously consider health determinants and how they impact patients if they are going to adequately address population health.