Population Health

Population health is an approach to medicine that focuses on treating the patient population as a whole. It aims to prevent disease and improve the quality of life of patients by providing care in a coordinated, team-based manner. Population health requires the use of clinical quality measures (CQMs) to track how well medical practices are meeting their goals, as well as chronic care management (CCM) and care gaps to identify patients at risk for poor outcomes or who need additional services. 

Clinical quality measures are metrics used by medical practices to assess how well they’re meeting their own goals and identifying areas where they can improve. CQMs are often used in conjunction with chronic care management and care gaps assessments to evaluate how well medical practices are actually treating the population they serve. 

Chronic care management is a process for identifying patients whose conditions may be progressing or have already progressed so far that they need more frequent or intensive treatment than what could be offered in traditional primary care settings. Chronic care management involves coordinating resources across different healthcare providers so that all aspects of each patient’s treatment plan can be handled by one group instead of having to coordinate between different doctors’ offices for each aspect of their care plan. Care gaps assessments help identify which patients within a specific population