Emerging Trends in Public Health
Sharing Session - 60 Minutes
Diane Stollenwerk, MPP, Harvard University (health care emphasis)
AHRQ QI Consulting Team Member, and President, StollenWerks LLC
Organizational Affiliation: HHS/Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Diane Stollenwerk, MPP, Harvard University (health care emphasis)
AHRQ QI Consulting Team Member, and President, StollenWerks LLC
Organizational Affiliation: HHS/Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Public health leaders have been working on population health since the dawn of time, yet hospitals are now required to look beyond their own walls to address community health needs. Too often, public health and hospitals seem like different worlds: misaligned terminology and metrics, and potentially incompatible perspectives and interventions. Some hospitals try to improve community health on their own and that has limited impact. Learning from successful efforts in MN, MD and MO, public health leaders can use some of the same tools as hospitals to speak the same language, assess community problem areas together, and create shared accountability for improving population health and reducing unnecessary hospitalizations.
The Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs) from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) are a set of measures that hospitals understand and public health leaders should get to know, too. The PQIs are available at no cost from Health and Humand Services /AHRQ and can be used with hospital inpatient discharge data to identify and measure the rate of ‘ambulatory sensitive conditions’ – that is, conditions like heart disease and diabetes for which better public health can help prevent hospitalization. Because of public and private sector payment incentives, hospitals already use and trust the evidence-based AHRQ PQIs. Using AHRQ PQIs, health officials can be more effective in getting hospitals to the table to align efforts and resources in addressing social determinants of health that impact population health and drive results on national measures that are also important to hospitals and health systems.