What qualifies as “quality” healthcare vastly differs depending on your location and primary patient demographic. To provide the best care possible for your patients, you need to understand who they are, where they come from, and what unique challenges they face.
That way, you can customize your services accordingly, offering exactly what your community needs. This information also helps prevent you from a negative return on investment in unnecessary services.
Defining Population Health
Population health is the overall health outcomes of a specific demographic. Demographic classifications can be based on wide-ranging factors, such as age, physical environment, social environment, genetics, and personal behaviors such as eating habits and activity level.
Understanding the community your clinic serves will help you determine which treatments and medication patients are more apt to need. It will also allow you to prepare for the most likely emergency scenarios.
In your research, it’s important not to differentiate between population health and public health. Population health looks at the overall health of a set demographic who share behavior and biological similarities such as age, gender, and ethnicity.
On the other hand, public health works on a much broader scale and covers the entire population of an area, state, or country. Public health is systematic in nature, often with official regulations dictating it rather than individuals or clinic owners.
Practical Implications for Your Practice or Clinic
By better understanding your patient demographics, you benefit your patients by providing them with healthcare services they’d most likely need. That also includes making better and quicker diagnoses because you know which conditions and ailments to look for.
While you can look at general data, the best you can do is collect your own data using an electronic medical records (EMR) system. Still, collecting the data is vastly different from analyzing it. You may want to hire EMR consulting services that can help you draw accurate and informative conclusions from the EMR and practice management data you collect to make strategic changes to benefit you and your patients.
In addition to making strategic and logistical changes to how you run your clinic depending on your population health, another essential component is having adequate staff and staff training. Your employees need specialized training that educates them on their community’s healthcare requirements. That way, they can provide attentive care to your patients and increase satisfaction rates and service quality.
Public and Population Health at Large
By collecting and analyzing patient data accurately and authentically, its purpose can reach far beyond your clinic and location populations. Outside experts can use it as reporting on public health.
When implementing population health research, keep “meaningful use” a top priority, so the data is useful to you and others. With enough data from multiple clinics that have the same or similar results, there could be systematic changes to the public healthcare system, which results in overall better healthcare for everyone.
In some cases, the results could be useful on a global scale in areas that have populations similar to your community. Alternatively, you could also make use of research and data collected on populations similar to yours. In addition to feeding a global healthcare cycle, you’d have a shortcut to understanding your patients better.
Patient Awareness and Education
The data and information you get from your EMR not only benefits your clinic and the public healthcare sector, but it can also improve patient lives on an individual level. After all, if you’re well-versed in your patient population’s lifestyle and eating habits, you can provide more actionable and useful medical advice when they need it.
Your research would point you at the area where they lack the most—it could be exercise, proper diet, sunlight exposure, work conditions, or a wide range of other factors—and fill in that gap with logical advice that meets their unique needs.
Also, caring for your patients isn’t limited to providing them with the care and medication they need when they get ill or injured; it also means helping them prevent these ailments. Knowing your patients allows you to raise their awareness of common health issues.
Understanding population health helps you and your staff educate patients on early symptoms they might experience, how to prevent them, and how to learn to live with them without sacrificing their quality of life.
Work Towards a Better Future for Healthcare
For healthcare to evolve, it needs data of concrete evidence of the direction it needs to go. To encourage systematic changes that lead to better healthcare nationwide, researchers need the proper data.
While healthcare quality has come a long way in recent decades, there’s more work to be done. Clinics and private practices across the country using advanced clinical software, such as EMR, can make great progress in transforming healthcare to be more attainable, affordable, and evidence-based.
