Category: Public Health

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 […]

Public Health and Urban Planning

The disciplines of public health and urban planning have a long tradition of working in symbiosis. Ancient Romans practiced sound public health when they built army barracks far from swamps to prevent insects from spreading diseases among the troops. During the medieval period in Europe, monasteries were models of cleanliness, built mostly on the outskirts […]

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 […]

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 […]

Maternal Mortality and PHM — Part 1

By now you’ve likely heard that the U.S. leads all wealthy nations in terms of maternal mortality rates. This statistic is hard to swallow, especially since two in three such complications are preventable. Given that the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, these outcomes are clearly not acceptable. We spend more per person […]

First Blog Post

Hi there. I intend this blog to be a place where I explore ideas related to topics like public health, population health management, and social determinants of health. I’m very open to different ways of tackling the upstream effects of bad health and negative health outcomes. This is where I’ll post my ideas about how […]