Population Health Focus

Population health refers to the physical, social, cultural, and economic environment in which we work and live (Radzyminski, 2006)."

This has become a focus of many managed health care organizations as they work to reduce the risks to their local consumers by way of stress, environmental factors and other elements that have a direct impact on the consumer health concerns.

The goal of population health is to maximize the health of any given population. In doing so it contains elements of program development, development/evaluation of health care policy, and program and systems evaluation. It uses an approach that concentrates on predisposing, enabling, and reinforcing factors within a given population to develop therapeutic strategies designed to decrease behaviors associated with health risk, prevent habituation or the relapse and recidivism of behavior (Radzyminski, 2006)."

Conclusion

The world of managed health care is expanding and with that expansion comes improvements....

The use of cost containment, population focus, quality improvement, and health preventaion strategies all work to reduce the cost of overall care thereby allowing consumers to receive effective care at lower costs.
References

Jacobson, Peter (1995) Washington State Health Services Act: implementing comprehensive health care reform.(Medicaid and State Health Reform)

Health Care Financing Review

Exton, Lee (2002) Defined contribution health plans: cutting edge? (an Advertising Supplement: Staffing & Employee Benefits).(cost containment strategies for employee health care) Los Angeles Business Journal

Fletcher, Meg (1995) Managed care use rises for workers comp plans.

Business Insurance

Doty, Hilary E (2001) the Role of Performance Measures for Improving Quality in Managed Care Organizations.(Statistical Data Included). Health Services Research

Radzyminski, Sharon (2006) Population health as a framework for forensic nursing curriculum. Journal of Forensic Nursing