Engaging Patients through Population Health

As primary care physicians work through the mechanics of delivering population health, they’ll have to improve their ability to engage with their patients if they want to make these efforts a vital and profitable area of their practice.

Population health is advancing at a time when primary care physicians are transitioning from a fee-for-service payment model to a value-based system where they are paid based on the quality of care they provide.

In this new pay-for-performance platform, doctors who embark on population health initiatives will have to rely heavily on technology to help them stratify patients that need care the most, and develop new procedures to closely monitor their patients’ health to help them avoid the emergency room.

What this means, said David Nash, MD, MBA, dean of Jefferson College of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is that physicians will have to retrain themselves on new processes and procedures that they never learned in medical school.

“Population Health at the basic office level is a complete transformation from the way small practice physicians were trained in the systems and processes that they use every day,” Nash said.

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