Category: Population Health Management

Pharmacists and Population Health

In all the time I’ve been writing about population health, I’ve somehow managed not to discuss pharmacists or pharmaceuticals very much. Partly that’s because I associate the two topics closely and, apart from briefly mentioning efforts to make medications more affordable, I haven’t devoted much thought to how medications – or those who distribute them […]

Precision Medicine and Precision Public Health: A Genomic Approach to Improved Outcomes

While researching a separate blog post on artificial intelligence in healthcare, I kept running into articles about precision medicine, a relatively new field that holds much promise for optimizing patient outcomes. As I took a detour down the precision medicine rabbit hole, I soon happened upon a related approach to public health that I’d like […]

Tools for Addressing Inequality

I saw an interesting tweet recently that got me thinking about the paradox that sometimes exists in our most highly-tuned healthcare interventions: sometimes the very tools deployed to help people can end up making things worse. Let me say that I admire anyone who attempts to alleviate healthcare problems and the upstream negative social determinants […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]