What is Population Health? Why Is it Important?

Healthcare Careers,Population Health
Written by
Miranda Kay, RN
December 14, 2022

When managing a healthcare facility, you're aware that numerous factors come into play when considering ensuring your facility's success and providing patients with efficient and quality care. As healthcare continues to develop, more studies are coming through every day to improve our healthcare further. This brings us to a relatively new term: population health. Population health is the study of outcomes within particular groups of individuals and the distribution of and what leads to these outcomes. The population health definition and model are broad and customizable to fit a facility's specific needs and the areas it wishes to focus on the most.

Due to the wide range that the act of focusing on population health has, it exists to serve not only those most likely to require consistent healthcare but also groups outside of this category, along with healthcare workers and managers themselves. A focus on population health strives to better healthcare treatment while lowering facilities' costs in unison. It does just that by addressing the needs of every single person. The overall goal of this study is incredibly straightforward, looking to promote even better patient outcomes while allowing facilities to keep up with the pace of our ever-changing healthcare.

Population Health Management

All while this term is still fresh in everyone's minds with even more developments to come as new healthcare plans go into the light, the only way for these developments to occur is for facilities to begin taking up on the importance of population health right now. So what is population health management, and how does one begin to consider improving the results you can find from studying population health? If you manage a facility, you're already quite aware that you must remember the types of patients that come into your facility and how to better patient care for these specific demographics. By taking up population health management, you can do this even more. Thus, population health management studies how healthcare is administered to patients so we can create plans to improve care for specific groups of individuals referred to here as a population.

Facilities can cut costs by studying and concluding just how much equipment and medical items will be required to tend to specific populations, along with developing new equipment and tools to ensure swifter and more efficient care for these particular patients. They are improving overall outcomes in large groups of individuals and how their facility runs and provides care. Contributing to the ongoing study of population health as it is now will pave the way for future facilities that will also focus their studies on specific populations.

Why is Population Health Important?

After all, mentioned here, why is the study and management of population health so important? By keeping track of healthcare results and the demands and struggles that patients face, healthcare managers and facilities can understand what to improve o change in their care. Studying population health is critical to ensure quality care for everyone across the states.

How to Aide in Ensuring Ideal Population Health

Even though it may seem like a confusing concept at first, the more you learn about the study and goals of population health management, the easier to understand it becomes, highly promoting that you and your facility should be zeroing in on the focus of population health. You are furthering the fact that the study of population health is more important than it looks. Playing a significant example of why this study is so critical to healthcare is the ongoing surge of COVID-19. Although the pandemic is actively putting every human at risk, individuals categorized in specific populations, such as those already suffering from medical conditions, are at a significantly higher risk for a severe case of the virus.

However, along with the struggles the pandemic has brought to the populations we are striving to assist, healthcare facilities continue to take hits of insufficient staffing and many more daily challenges. Luckily, numerous solutions have come out that can provide immediate relief to your facility. Offered right here at Nursa, we are the home of a leading and pioneering on-demand healthcare staffing app, a center for healthcare workers and facilities to connect quickly. This way, you can ensure that your patients have the utmost care and that your facility has sufficient staff to provide that care. Not only will this method of hiring staff benefit you and your facility, but it also offers freelance nurses and healthcare workers the work they deserve; plus, with no hidden contracts or subscription fees, we'll always be here, and you can come back only when you need us.

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Miranda Kay, RN
Blog published on:
December 14, 2022

Miranda is a Registered Nurse, Medical Fact Checker, and Publishing Editor at Nursa. Her work has been featured in publications including the American Nurses Association (ANA), Healthcare IT Outcomes, International Living, and more.

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