Posted: August 4th, 2022

Population Health Focus

Week 14-Discussion 1

Population Health Focus

What are the ways in which a population health focus might be applied in transforming the health care delivery system?

Population health is the health of a group of people as a whole, without taking into account the health of one person at a time. Population health focuses on the interconnected factors that affect the health status of a certain group of people and figures out how the occurrence pattern changes over time. When the pattern is known, policies and actions can be made and put into place to help the well-being of the identified population. Population health focus is used to change the way healthcare is given by dividing the patient population into groups, using value-based care instead of volume-based care, and figuring out what the risk factors are.

By dividing the patient population into groups based on age, gender, condition, risk stratification, behavior, and demographic factors, care can be improved. With the population under consideration, healthcare workers can be more precise than when they work with the general population. In the end, they can connect people to the desired and right health resources to improve healthcare delivery.

By switching from volume-based to value-based care, we’ve been able to put more attention on prevention, improve care, and cut costs. Before the change, the system didn’t think about how the cost of care affects the healthcare system and the patients (Click & Regueiro, 2019). Moving healthcare systems toward value-based implementation has helped to improve communication and the continuity of patient care (Jivraj, Barrow, & Listl, 2021).

The last thing to do is to look for the risk factors, because there are things that can make chronic diseases worse in communities. Identifying the first-degree causes of chronic diseases, such as an unhealthy diet, lack of physical activity, and drug abuse, which led to intermediate risks like diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure, can be a good way to stop diseases from happening. On the other hand, there are risk factors that can’t be changed, like age and genes, that contribute to a long life history and have been studied a lot. Chronic diseases are less likely to happen because there are ways to stop them (Ali et al., 2020).

Segmenting patients, using value-based care, and figuring out the risk factors are all important ways to change the way healthcare is given. So, health care workers will be able to figure out what is causing health problems in a certain group of patients and come up with the right solution. To get the most out of healthcare systems, these three ways should be used often.

References

Ali, F., El-Sappagh, S., Islam, S. R., Kwak, D., Ali, A., Imran, M., & Kwak, K. S. (2020). A smart healthcare monitoring system for heart disease prediction based on ensemble deep learning and feature fusion. Information Fusion, 63, 208-222.

Click, B., & Regueiro, M. (2019). The inflammatory bowel disease medical home: from patients to populations. Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, 25(12), 1881-1885.

Jivraj, A., Barrow, J., & Listl, S. (2021). Value-based oral health care: implementation lessons from four case studies. Journal of Evidence-Based Dental Practice, 101662.

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