EP261: Six Essential Steps to Get Population Health Right, With Fred Goldstein, President and Founder of Accountable Health, LLC

Today I speak with Fred Goldstein. Fred knows a lot about population health. His credentials, in fact, are about as long as my arm, so I’m just going to call him president and founder of Accountable Health, LLC and also co-founder and lead co-host at PopHealth Week—a podcast you should check out. Today Fred and I get into not just what ‘good’ looks like when it comes to population health, but also the six steps to achieve it. If you are looking to deploy some population health or if you are currently engaged in pop health and are looking to evaluate or benchmark what was done and how it was done, then, yeah, you might find this conversation helpful.

Fred Goldstein is the president and founder of Accountable Health, LLC, a health care consulting firm focused on population health, health system redesign, new technologies, and analytics. He has over 30 years of experience in population health, disease management, health maintenance organization (HMO) and hospital operations. Fred is considered an expert in population health, care management, behavioral health, risk management, health information technology (HIT), and health system design and development.

During his career, he founded a disease management company that provided services to employer groups and ten state Medicaid programs, operated a Medicaid/commercial HMO that was ranked the highest-quality Medicaid health plan in Florida, developed an award-winning mobile health app, and worked with employers, health systems, and vendors to develop population health programs, services, and platforms. He was also directly responsible for the inclusion of the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit in the Affordable Care Act.

Fred is an instructor at the John D. Bower School of Population Health at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and an adviser to the Validation Institute. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Population Health Management and the founding advisory board of Population Health News and is past chair of the board of directors of the Population Health Alliance. Fred has testified before the legislature in the states of Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, and Texas on disease and population health management and their application to state employees and Medicaid. He is also the co-founder and lead co-host of PopHealth Week, a weekly podcast featuring thought leaders and companies working in population health.

Fred received his master’s degree in health care administration from Trinity University and a BA in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley.

01:20 Population health vs precision medicine. 02:46 “What precision medicine allows us to do in population health is to get an even more precise and better intervention.” 03:16 Pop health as precision medicine. 03:30 “We need to first note who our population is... and we take that group and we then assess them.” 04:57 The variation in care, and how this effects outcomes and care. 05:46 How assessing individuals has improved over the years. 06:28 What the goal of assessment is. 06:46 “What does ‘good’ look like?” 09:18 The purpose of stratifying individuals. 10:50 The impact of social determinants and how this is being incorporated into individual assessment. 11:15 How the use of behavioral economics has helped. 11:37 “It’s really about changing the culture.” 12:57 Interventions and what these look like in population health. 17:03 Measurement in population health. 18:45 Population health outcomes, and what these might look like to patients. 19:38 Promising population health outcomes. 21:10 The importance of patient-reported outcomes. 24:47 How providers can tell if they’re doing population health well. 26:15 Fred’s advice to payers. 27:29 “Forget pilots, build something scalable.”