Population Health: What, Why, and How?

It is hard to be involved in diabetes care and not hear about population health. Some of us are deeply entrenched in “pop health,” and others feel far removed and may not even quite understand the concept. Most of us are probably somewhere in the middle. There is a whole vocabulary used in pop health (starting with the terms population health and pop health) that we may hear but don’t really understand. Given that diabetes is often the case study used when people talk about pop health, it is an area that we should all start to get comfortable with and embrace as we move forward. So, what is pop health? Put most simply, it is the health of populations. In the past, we generally worked in diabetes care with the sole focus on the individual rather than a population. We still focus on the individual during day-to-day encounters but now include the concept of thinking about the very big picture of how our work is related to the whole population. In this issue of AADE In Practice and in an upcoming issue of The Diabetes Educator journal, you will see articles that help you better understand pop health. If you’re new to the topic, you can start to develop a sense of how pop health affects your work and how you fit into it. I expect you will start to realize that without realizing it, you are naturally incorporating some of the key concepts of pop health into what you do. For example, let’s consider the concept of social determinants of health (SDOH), a term that comes into play in pop health. When working in diabetes education with an individual or a group, we must consider the influence the external environment has on diabetes care and self-management. This can include such things as access to health care, the physical environment, availability of food and places to be active, social support, education, and economic stability, to name a few. We might not think of the terminology of SDOH but do consider how these areas influence the health of the people we serve. The concept of pop health is weaved throughout our PROJECT VISION, AADE’s vision for the specialty. Let’s look at each strategy of the vision with a lens on pop health.