“Population health:” what does it mean? The term is being newly used in the health space, but what it actually means depends on whom you ask. Population health impacts health care costs, outcomes, and systems management, and not all health administrators’ priorities are created equal. The term was defined by David Kindig and Greg Stoddart in 2003 as “the health outcome of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group.”
MHA@GW, the online master of health administration at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University, asked health care professionals to provide their definition of population health to start a conversation about the many ways people define it. They found that, while some health care leaders closely maintained Kindig and Stoddart’s original definition, many others focused on different indicators of population health and successful healthcare management, such as costs, accountability, and more. Read “What is Population Health?” to learn about how a variety of different professionals define the term and what population health means for care in the future. I encourage readers to add their own definitions in the comments below.
