The Fusion of Public Health and Population Health Management
Healthcare providers can achieve value-based care by following the basic components of population health management platforms, including individual responsibility and clinical risk. Population health and public health are both concerned with the well-being of whole communities or groups of individuals as opposed to individual patient care. Both work together to take measures to keep people protected and healthy by preventing illness. Both the terms are similar, however the distinctions between population health and public health should be taken into account as social and health determinants are involved.
Understanding Public Health The field of protecting and enhancing people's health as well as the communities' healthcare is known as public health. Instead
of focusing on one individual at a time, public health concentrates on protecting and promoting health for the entire population. To keep people healthy by avoiding injury, sickness, and premature death, public health carries out activities through various programs, services, and policies aimed to safeguard and improve the health of entire communities. Following are the public health activities,
Vaccination and infection control Ensuring traffic safety Ensure workplace safety Ensure food quality and safety Water sanitization Perinatal and infant health Family planning Chronic illness prevention
Understanding Population Health Population health can be defined as “health outcomes of a group of people, along with the allocation of such outcomes within the group.” It is divided into three parts: health outcomes, health-social determinants, and policies. The goal of population health is to improve health outcomes for a large number of individuals by detecting and tracking specific individuals within those groups. To achieve this goal, there are population health management solutions to analyze community's health needs, disparities, and results as well as to align improvement activities. With the help of population health management software, care providers evaluate the data to track and improve clinical outcomes while reducing healthcare costs.
The Fusion is Crucial Population health is integrally related to public health activities because improving population health is the key goal of public health. For obligatory reporting, caregivers employ electronic health records and health information exchange service which is a secure central database for patient data collected from different hospitals. These are important sources on which public health authorities rely on to obtain data from healthcare providers. This procedure assists public health authorities in assessing disease frequency and transmission, maintaining high vaccination coverage rates, managing epidemic assessments, preparation and responding to public health emergencies. Moreover, insurance costs and reimbursements must be correctly set for value-based care to substitute volume in the healthcare industry. Population health management for payers wouldn’t be able to meet the demands of this new age of healthcare unless there is significant insight into the needs of caregivers and patient groups.