Author: admin

Improving Population Health Through Housing

For a while now I’ve been meaning to write a post about the connection between housing instability and health. Of late, this topic has drawn a good deal of coverage in high-profile news outlets, and organizations across the healthcare spectrum are taking notice. The idea is buoyed by the notion that addressing negative social determinants […]

PHM and Rural Healthcare — Part 2

In a post last month, I explored the current state of rural healthcare in America. Building on that theme, I now want to look at how the concept of population health management (PHM) can play a key role in improving health outcomes in rural areas. While it might not be the first setting one thinks […]

PHM and Rural Healthcare — Part 1

With the recent passage of the bipartisan fiscal year 2023 omnibus appropriations legislation, and considering its positive impact on rural healthcare, I figured this was a good time to focus on rural population health. In this first of a two-part series, I’ll focus on the state of healthcare in rural America, and in the second […]

Top Posts of 2022

To round out the year, I thought I’d choose my favorite blog posts in a “Best of 2022” post. This year brought so many interesting aspects of U.S. healthcare to light, from the unclear future of multiple plans meant to help folks through the pandemic, to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s research highlighting how maternal […]

Maternal Mortality and PHM — Part 2

Since the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report titled “Maternal Health: Outcomes Worsened and Disparities Persisted During the Pandemic,” I thought this would be a good opportunity to write the promised follow-up to my first blog post about maternal mortality and population health. After doing further research since I first published that […]

Vox Populi

Can a population health approach to healthcare exist beyond the bounds of organized medicine and public health? Technically, at least right now, the answer appears to be no. Although there is no single agreed-upon definition of population health, the one many point to was posited by Kindig and Stoddart in their seminal 2003 paper titled […]

Social Prescribing

I recently learned about an approach to addressing negative social determinants of health (SDOH) called “social prescribing,” and it has the potential to be a complete game-changer. The movement, if I can call it that, seems to have caught fire in places like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and, to a lesser extent, the […]

Payment Models and Metrics

Healthcare quality measures are a study in contrasts. Their overall purpose is straightforward enough: quality measures incentivize physicians and other healthcare workers to provide cost-effective care that ideally leads to better patient outcomes. But the sheer number of them can seem overwhelming. What’s more, figuring out the interplay between these measures and healthcare payment models […]

Quality Measure Development

I’ve been looking into how to develop Patient-Reported Outcomes-based Performance Measures (PRO-PMs) lately, and I figured I’d list some helpful resources here. Quality metrics are important in medicine, in that they incentivize physicians to accomplish the IHI Triple Aim: Improving the patient experience of care (including quality and satisfaction); Improving the health of populations; and […]