Keeping Communities Healthy
Maryland’s hospitals are embracing an innovative, far-reaching model of health care delivery that holds the promise to keep people healthier, improve the direct care experience for those who are sick, and reduce the overall cost of providing care for all.
Population health management is the future of modern health care. Its goal is simple: to keep people as healthy as possible to minimize the need for expensive interventions like emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and diagnostic procedures.
Achieving that goal, however, is challenging. Maryland’s hospitals each serve vastly different populations, with vastly different medical and psychosocial needs. And hospitals cannot be successful on their own — keeping people healthy will take deep commitments from other stakeholders, like primary care physicians, nursing and assisted living centers, patients’ families, and the patients themselves.
The benefits that could be realized with a successful population health management model are well worth these efforts. Physicians will have greater analytic, data-driven tools to empower their clinical decisions (this data will be shared across all health care providers); hospitals and other care providers will make a greater investment in, and take greater responsibility for, their patients’ well-being, rather than focusing on just their illnesses; and patients will come to more fully understand the outsize impact they have on their own lives.