What is Population-based Healthcare?
Population healthcare focuses primarily on populations defined by a common need which may be a symptom such as breathlessness, a condition such as arthritis or a common characteristic such as frailty in old age, not on institutions, or specialties or technologies. Its aim is to maximise value and equity for those populations and the individuals within them.
The population healthcare methodology involves a collaborative working of multidisciplinary stakeholders to determine appropriate outcome measures for various systems, and getting populations reporting on these on an annual basis. Atrial Fibrillation, falls and fragility fractures, homelessness, chronic pelvic pain are some of the first set of systems being developed, and it is anticipated that this method will be used across all the 30 programmes and 100 recognised systems.
The first twenty of these programmes are based on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), arranged in order of programme budget expenditure.
Each of the twenty condition focussed programmes has a large number of rare diseases as well as the common problems.
Where appropriate, major symptoms are associated with one relevant programme, although more than one specialty may be involved with a particular symptom such as breathlessness.
The remaining ten programmes focus on populations defined by a common characteristic such as age or having more than one problem.