Healthcare redesign and population health

Abstract

Healthcare systems across the globe face the challenge of redesigning services to respond to their population’s changing health needs. Existing models of care are often outdated, fragmented, and imbalanced towards treating illness rather than preventing it upstream. This chapter provides a broad framework for thinking about healthcare redesign for improving population health—from understanding population health needs and setting shared objectives, to designing and testing new services—focusing in particular on the role of healthcare systems in disease prevention, and working with other services and sectors to address the wider determinants of health. While greater policy attention on the role of healthcare systems in disease prevention is welcome, the chapter emphasizes that healthcare systems can only do so much: broader policy decisions will continue to shape the underlying social and economic conditions that fundamentally determine population health.