Bringing experts together to understand the future of Population Health Management

As the UK government looks to define the next 10 years of health and care , how can we better understand the need of our population? How can we understand where to focus resources to improve wellbeing? To reduce health inequalities? Population Health Management (PHM) offers us solutions to these questions, but what will that look like over the next 10 years?

The Health Economics Unit hosted a summit of PHM experts from the UK and beyond to explore the current impact of PHM in health and care, and what the future holds for this vital data-driven approach to improving population health.

Speakers included experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), NHS England , University College London , the Health Innovation Network (HIN) and Unity Insights .

Lord Darzi’s investigation recommendations, backed by Health Secretary Wes Streeting have described the future of the NHS as a “neighbourhood health service” , and both NHS England and the WHO emphasised the importance of PHM at a local level, reducing the focus on hospitals as the main point of care for many.

Jose Cerezo , Health Policy Analyst at the WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care, said: “We need to invest more in methods to evaluate the impact of PHM, and on incentives to shift care from hospitals to the community.”

Both NHS England and the WHO shared examples of the potential of the neighbourhood PHM approach to both reduce healthcare inequalities and also to better address specific healthcare needs of populations in ways that can then be replicated or scaled up. There was fruitful discussion on how to assess the impact of PHM projects at a local PCN level, as demonstrating the value of PHM to non-analysts remains vital to its adoption as an approach to decision making.

The main challenge outlined however, was ensuring that PHM experts are included from the start of any project.

Rachel McIlroy, Senior Programme Lead at NHS England, said: “There is a need for cultural readiness of organisations to embrace PHM fully.”

Andi Orlowski, Director of the Health Economics Unit, said: “We have done some fantastic work with PHM techniques, from Risk Stratification to Data Linkage and Theographs , but now the focus is on how we help system leaders to implement the changes that these insights produce. To this point it was great to see so much discussion from both NHS England and the WHO focused on the importance of getting analysts ‘in the room’ from the off, helping decision makers define the question that actually needs answering.

“One thing that came through loud and clear from the teams is that the next ten years are going to see more focus on system working at a neighbourhood level, and how we can help smaller geographies with PHM. Also, universal agreement that there will be little or no new money for the ‘left shift’ and the need for practical techniques, such as allocative efficiency , to enable systems to move resources.”

The day ended with organisations sharing examples of their work to improve population health, and the techniques they have used to achieve impactful results.

Léa Quentin, Lead Analyst at Unity Insights, said: “It was great to be able to meet with other organisations working in the data analytics, PHM and health economics space and to exchange on common aspirations and challenges.”

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