The Cleveland Clinic Pharmacy Population Health Management Summit

Population health and population health management (PHM) are relatively new terms. Despite a general understanding of the importance of PHM principles among pharmacists, we still lack a unifying professional vision of what we hope to achieve by PHM. In 2003, Kindig and Stoddart1 defined population health as “the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group.” While this definition is a good start, its broad, nonspecific nature does not easily translate into a call to action for pharmacy leaders. The triple aim of improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita costs of healthcare, as articulated in 2008 by Berwick et al.,2 has been at the center of our attempts over time to reform healthcare delivery in the United States. To accomplish these PHM principles, government and private payers have been shifting the reimbursement paradigm from one of volume to a more value-based system. Models currently run the gamut from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance to fully at-risk models, such as the self-insured employee health plans that many of our hospital systems administer.