|
“The definition of ‘population health’ is really important. Many people talk about population health in terms of the population coming through their health system. They’re often thinking about the patients in the neighborhoods and areas they take care of.
At Dartmouth-Hitchcock, we think about what the population at large needs. This includes issues like housing and nutrition and other things we don’t get paid to do. They’re way upstream, but they’re the most pressing problems when we think about the real needs of society in this country.
We’re going way upstream to people who don’t even come to us — such as babies, teenagers and kids who have single-parent homes — as well as broader subjects, like gang issues, where the best food stores are located and where the educational opportunities are. All of those issues are about population health.
There’s also the issue of payment. We have very non-traditional payment struggles. In New Hampshire, we have Medicaid expansion, but it pays 20 to 30 cents on the dollar. Our state has the lowest Medicaid reimbursement in the U.S. We have very altruistic goals, and want to do things outside the health system, but we also want to get paid when we care for that 15 percent of our population.
What we’re doing is creating an industrial revolution. I have a book coming out soon on this very issue that talks about what I think the next industrial revolution for our country will be, which is in healthcare. We have to change the models, methods and payment systems to create a sustainable health system — not healthcare system. We want to design our delivery system and create payment models that allow for those systems to be sustained.”
|
