Population Health and the Changing the World of Healthcare

Steve Adubato goes One-on-One with the President of Population Health at Hackensack Meridian Health, Patrick R. Young, to discuss the changing world of healthcare.

12/11/18 #2181

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"We're pleased to welcome Mr. Patrick R. Young, President, Population Health, Hackensack Meridian Health. Good to see you Pat. Good to see you. How are you? You are... I'm doing great. You are one of the nation's top experts when it comes to this thing called population health. This is part of our ongoing series on The Future of Healthcare. How are they tied together? Well, you know, I think... What is it by the way? What is population health? Yeah. Well population health is when you take a look at a grouping of individuals together, and try to see if there's commonalities about those individuals. And then how can you use data to improve the quality of care and lower the cost for those individuals. For example? So an example is that, you know, you can look at a population that doesn't have any signs of diabetes, but there are... will be indications that they could be what's called a rising risk. So by getting that information, you can start to manage that population. Or by using data analytics and algorithms, you can identify potential serious illnesses that haven't necessarily manifested themselves, but you can see that there's warning signs, and you use that data, and then you use care coordinators who intervene, working with the local primary care physicians or specialists to help manage the care better. Pat, doesn't that require being, quote, "out in the community" to do that? It does. So we actually have care coordinators who are now in the physician practices, who help the physician manage the care of those patients that are under our organization. You know, I'm curious about this. I've known your organization for a long time. I've done some leadership development there. Absolutely. And we talked about some communication issues sometimes. Why am I raising this? Because it strikes me that, as I talk to clinicians and other professionals, sometimes in the field, the jargon, the clinical jargon, and the language often gets in the way of the ability to communicate in a conversational, understandable fashion. A real challenge? Or is it just in my mind? No. It is. It is, because I think that, you know, primary care physicians and specialists have... their primary focus is to meet with the patients. That's right. And trying to get information to them that... to make their jobs easier is what we should be doing as an organization, and to try to make that data, not just providing data, but make it useful data actionable data, which really helps them... You keep talking about data? Mm hmm. Is it number driven? Some of it is clearly numbers driven, I mean it's... if we can at least provide a listing to doctors... who are the..."