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Reimagining medicine through population health and population health management

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Over the past 20 months, the Covid-19 pandemic has shone a light on underlying healthcare issues and inequalities in the UK. To add to this, our health and care needs are changing. Lifestyle choices are increasing our risk of preventable disease and affecting wellbeing, as we continue to live longer with multiple long-term conditions such as asthma and diabetes against a backdrop of an increasing health inequality gap.i

As we look to ‘build back better’ and deliver sustainable healthcare in a post-Covid world, this is a critical time to explore how we can move away from simply treating disease to identifying how we can prevent it in the first place.

How can we achieve this?

Innovative medicines, while critical to the future of healthcare, are not enough by themselves. Medical care is estimated to account for only about 20% of a person’s health outcomes, with the remaining 80% made up of the ‘wider determinants of health’.i These are health-related behaviours, alongside socioeconomic and environmental factors, that play a part in overall health. This is where we believe population health (PH) and population health management (PHM) can play an important role.

PH aims to improve physical and mental health outcomes, promote wellbeing and reduce health inequalities across the population. This includes focusing on those wider determinants of health.i

PHM fosters the use of data within a location and the development of collaborative models of proactive, rather than reactive, care. This allows local systems to better understand their community’s issues and begin to tailor care and solutions to unmet health and social care needs, while also making best use of resources by way of integrated care systems (ICSs).

Importantly, these partnerships involve different parts of the system working together, including the NHS, local authorities, other government organisations, academia, charities and industry.

For example, in Berkshire West, PHM data analysis of people with Type 2 diabetes pinpointed where poorer outcomes lay among specific communities and illustrated where there was poorer uptake of NHS diabetes education programmes.ii

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