Author: admin

As the second installment in my “New to Me” series (see the first one here), I’d like to say a few words about an intriguing new idea put forward by the Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network (HCP-LAN, or “LAN” for short) called State Transformation Collaboratives, or STCs. According to the LAN website, STCs […]

I mentioned in a past blog post that the word “population” in the term “population health management” is open to interpretation. The PHM projects I’ve worked on have mostly considered the word “population” to denote clinical populations, whether they be current or future patient populations. This approach has the advantage of viewing populations as somewhat […]

Something I’ve become interested in lately is quality measure development. Measuring quality is a high priority these days not just for CMS, but for many private payers as well. But how should one go about developing measures that not only providers value, but patients as well? This seems to be the key question, and it’s […]

When it comes to optimizing medical reimbursement, particularly in an environment where the payer mix skews toward Medicare and Medicaid, making the transition from a fee-for-service (FFS) environment to one that aims to deliver value-based care on a population level is no easy matter. When looked at through a population health management lens, adopting alternative […]

I was reading a recent article in Fierce Healthcare about how an accountable care organization (ACO) has partnered with a population health management company to expand value-based care in rural Colorado, and it got me thinking: what is a population health management organization? And I don’t mean societies or trade organizations ‐‐ I mean companies […]

I just became aware of an interesting program that works to repair homes in Southeast Washington, DC and Maryland. The initiative, called the Healthy Housing Virtual Home Visiting (VHV) Program, seeks to improve the living conditions of residents in some of the lowest income parts of the District and surrounding areas. Since this program is […]

In a recent Harvard Business Review article titled “Enlist Medical Specialists in the Drive to Improve Population Health,”  authors Ryan Howard and Michael Englesbe make a compelling argument with respect to population health management: recruit specialties to become entry points into the population health management ecosystem. The issue they highlight is straightforward, if not challenging […]

Something I’ve often wondered while reading up on population health and PHM is if they’re really new concepts, or if they’re just different names for older ideas. Updated branding, if you will. After all, the concept of patient-centered care has been around since at least the 1980s, if not since the dawn of medicine. So […]

I’m finishing up an online course on PHM, so I figured I’d publish my final paper here. It’s called “Addressing Healthcare Disparities in Tuscrawas County, Ohio” and the idea was to propose an intervention targeting a real population health indicator/social determinant of health that, if improved, would bring about an attendant improvement in a related […]

Those of you who have worked in the public health field for a while are probably already familiar with the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) program. A joint effort of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the CHR&R program “works to improve health outcomes for all and […]