Population Health: Back to the Fundamentals

In our population health journey as an industry, we need to follow the example of all great sports movies: Hoosiers, The Mighty Ducks, Glory Road, and so many more. In each of these films, the team that is challenged consistently has a coach that points the team one way--back to the fundamentals or back to basics. A good basketball coach knows that you have to get the fundamentals right before you can move to more advanced skills.

The First Basic Step in Pop Health

The first fundamental step toward having an effective population health strategy is the process of getting the data into the system, cleaning it up, normalizing it, and making it digestible. Having one data source, (for example, an EMR with clinical data) presents one picture of the patient. However, providers say that having more data sources helps them create a more complete picture to work with. 

Having that wholistic picture of their patients then allows providers to take better care of their patient population. So, to take their population health game to the next level, organizations must have their data right before doing anything else. Doing so enables better stratification of populations and results in a more complete picture of each individual patient so that you can help provide better care to individuals on a greater scale.

Go get your whistle, coach. It's time to nail down the fundamentals.