Moving Away From Sick Care

There is a saying that goes, “America doesn’t have a healthcare system – we have a sick-care system.” I don’t know whether that quote is attributable to an individual or not, but the connotation is that what for decades has served as a healthcare delivery system belies the underlying premise that the individuals benefitting from that system’s value proposition are, indeed, healthy.

Of course, they are not – at least at the time service is required.  They are sick, ill or afflicted by a myriad of chronic diseases and conditions. Whatever we want to call it, a system that addresses the needs of these individuals is critically important. But the study in ironic contrast serves to raise awareness of the need to address population health as the best hope of reigning in the unabated march of healthcare’s gobbling up the nation’s GDP.

Last week a new Health Policy Brief, The Relative Contribution of Multiple Determinants of Health, was released by Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that looks at factors and considerations impacting individual and population health. These are commonly referred to as health determinants and can be summarized into five major categories: genetics, behavior, social circumstances, environmental and physical influences and medical care.

Researching and understanding how specific factors and considerations within these categories impact individual and population health is very challenging because of complex, interdependent, bidirectional relationships – and because the timeframe over which meaningful measurement must take place can often be decades. But if the US delivery system is to make a paradigm shift away from having a sick care system, efforts must continue to understand whether and how health policy interventions and choices, as well as the efficient use of limited resources, can achieve better outcomes.

This, in turn, requires the adoption of a more holistic understanding of health: the roles social and environmental (i.e., nonclinical) determinants play in impacting individual health. Human behavior, for example – a primary concern in understanding poor health outcomes – must be understood and assessed, “according to multiple dimensions and at various points of intervention.”

Despite the challenges, progress continues on understanding the role nonclinical determinants play in individual and population health outcomes. The continued advancements in Big Data should accelerate these efforts. The policy brief referenced above provides a nice overview of these efforts with resources that should be noted by healthcare providers wanting to better understand how their competitors are seeking to become strategically aligned with population health management.

There are currently a lot of major healthcare providers touting in the press their foray into population health, as if the opportunity for impact is ripe for harvesting. But having recently become more educated and aware of the myriad issues and complexity of population health, I do have to wonder if their strategies are too narrowly focused on how to creatively redeploy existing assets and resources – rather than making a candid and honest assessment whether either can be productively leveraged in the context of a holistic approach to healthcare.

Cheers,
  Sparky