Dive Brief:
- Simply measuring overall population health leads stakeholders toward reaching for the low-hanging fruit—those patients most easily accessed and influenced to improve their behavior, argues a recent Harvard Business Review article by Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health.
- This approach widens health gaps, the article argues, because it helps those who are already in the best position to improve their health while leaving the more marginalized groups behind.
- Efforts to improve population health should include some sacrifices to efficiency, ease and expense in order to reach out across socioeconomic levels for the sake of greater equity, the article argues.
Dive Insight:
Aside from the concepts of equity and credibility, Galea's article notes that another reason to bridge the socioeconomc divide is that "in an increasingly interconnected world, it is impossible to separate social groups." It details how health threats in specific groups become health threats to all.
It goes on to suggest a number of ways to change the focus of in health measurement from "absolute achievement" to one that accounts for inter-group differences.
These include making closing health gaps a prime objective, and establishing incentives toward that goal. Galea also suggests that population health management include relative indicators of health, which would require providers to measure factors such as race, ethnicity, and income, to look at relative improvement across groups.
"Payers and providers could broaden their expectations about outcomes to include equity, which ultimately benefits everyone," Galea says.