Population Health Strategies

Thursday, August 27, 2015 | MedAxiom

When asking programs about their population health strategy, the typical answer is something to the effect of, “We don’t have any (population-based) contracts in our market yet,” or “We’re waiting for ‘the (hospital) system’ to determine what our population health strategy is.” The result has been little progress in the understanding and pursuit of population health strategies.

Population Health as a Transformational Delivery Model

The aim of population health is to provide high-value care to patient populations, with reliable, consistent, and transparent quality outcomes measured at the population level. A primary tenet of population health is the provision of services across the care continuum—a comprehensive or almost holistic approach in which programs purposely knit together distinct services, including prescribed transitional care. Because cardiovascular services are routinely delivered to patients in both ambulatory and facility settings, they are among the best suited to pursue population-based strategies. Although there are excellent examples of programs succeeding at providing cardiovascular care more holistically, the real gains promised by this approach have not yet been realized.

Some of the typical features of a population-based clinical strategy include:

• Coordinated, full-care continuum—physician, staff, and other resources deployed consistently and purposefully to patients with similar conditions
• Adherence to agreed upon clinical standards, protocols, and pathways
• Utilization and patient-selection metrics
• Predictable, high-value care delivery with measured outcomes
• Success defined by outcomes that matter to patients
• Clinical and cost performance transparency

These and other population-based program features are detailed in Figure 1, which illustrates a full-care continuum delivery model, the distinct stages, and clinical activities involved in each stage.

One example of successful population-based strategies being deployed in programs today is in re-envisioning the concepts of centers of excellence. Many programs have started their population health journey by embracing subspecialization and creating “centers of excellence” sites focused on specific disease states. Physicians who have expertise in treating a certain patient population (e.g., those with heart failure or atrial fibrillation) are empowered to determine the appropriate care standards using evidence-based medicine and interdisciplinary consensus, which is disseminated throughout the system.

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Excerpted from Cardiac Interventions Today magazine.
Learn more about Population Health Strategies—read the full article HERE.