Recently, the AMA (American Medical Association) has been urging schools to shift to textbooks that focus on the widely growing topic of population health management. The concept is simply the aggregation of patient data across multiple health information systems and technological resources. This would essentially expand the field of search to cover every aspect of a person’s medical information so they can receive the best possible care.
The end result would then be a single and accessible account of that information for doctors to research when they are trying to help a patient.
Currently, the systems that are used and updated across hospitals and practices around the country are rarely the same. Uniformity is the key for this idea to work.
Consider for a moment, you have a patient with an illness that needs to be diagnosed. The hospital uses their system to look at his history and personal information but can’t find anything indicative of his illness so they spend time, money, and resources on tests.
Meanwhile, a hospital a few miles away that diagnosed the same illness for his father uses a different system. This is a pretty simplified example, but you might begin to see the issue. A lack of uniformity with medical information i.e. how it’s kept and updated can result in some pretty disastrous effects for the entire population.
The textbooks that teach PMH use the concepts that draw from existing information to build a foundation for all institutions to use.
By implementing population health management structures and tendencies in medical schools then hospitals, new doctors will be completely immersed in the experience and will be more likely to stick with the best practices for collecting, gathering, and noting the information that could one day save more lives.
You can learn more about PHM by checking out the nation’s leader in population health management, Wellcentive.com.