Frontiers of Health Services Management - Summer 2014 - (Page 1)

Editorial C onnie J. e vashwiCk , LFaChe He alt hc a r e t h o u gh t l ea d ers in all sectors are actively discuss- Connie J. Evashwick, ScD, LFACHE, CAE, is a guest editor for Frontiers of Health Services Management. C onnie J. E va s hw ic k, L FAC H E * 1 e D I t o r I A l ing and promoting population health. one of the challenges to implementing a population health approach, however, is the lack of consensus on exactly what population health is. this issue of Frontiers of Health Services Management explores the term's meaning and how the concept is being interpreted and applied by hospitals and healthcare systems. the first feature article, by David a. Kindig and george isham, reviews the recent history of population health. as it has been used in the United States over the past decade, the term population health has meant "the total health of a population, including the distribution of health outcomes within the population," as noted by Kindig and Stoddart in 2003. Mcalearney, also writing in 2003, identified six types of population health management, all of them with well-developed, concrete applications. Here, Kindig and isham suggest that the phrase total population health (Jacobson and teusch 2013) offers a more encompassing framework appropriate for the advent of health system change. in their article, they call for new forms of collaboration within communities to address the breadth of factors affecting the health status of their residents that are beyond the purview of doctors or hospitals alone. in the second feature article, thomas f. Zenty iii, facHe; eric J. Bieber; and elizabeth Hammack describe the proactive approach to population health undertaken by University Hospitals Health System (UH) in cleveland, ohio. Beginning prior to passage of the affordable care act (aca), UH has developed two accountable care organizations (acos)-one for employees and one for children-and a Medicare Shared Savings Program for seniors. Zenty and his colleagues attribute their success to focusing on governance, building scalable infrastructure, and engaging leaders and stakeholders while attending to quality. the authors conclude, with an optimism worthy of clayton christensen's (2014) concept of disruptive innovation: "the employee aco has provided UH with a means to further center our medical care around our patients such that we can deliver on this promise through reimagined pathways."

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Frontiers of Health Services Management - Summer 2014

Table of Contents

Frontiers of Health Services Management - Summer 2014