Population Health is Transforming the Healthcare System: A Conversation with Dr. David Nash (Podcast # 45)
HealthX Co-President Ryan O’Keefe sat down with Dr. David Nash, distinguished physician and Founding Dean Emeritus of Jefferson College of Public Health, to hear about his personal path within the field and the current impact of population health.
Dr. Nash’s Path to Population Health
· Dr. Nash majored in Economics at Vasser before attending the University of Rochester for medical school. He completed residency in Philadelphia.
· During his youth, the concept of “physician leaders” was first pioneered by Dr. Sam Martin at Penn Medicine, who became Dr. Nash’s mentor starting in high school.
· Post-residency he completed his MBA at Wharton School of Business on full scholarship as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Fellow
· Dr. Nash joined Penn Medicine Faculty in general medicine for four years before moving to Jefferson in 1990 to create the Office of Health Policy.
· In 2008 he founded the first school of Population Health in the US at Jefferson.
Population vs. Public Health
Dr. Nash discusses three key differences that set population health apart from its roots of public health:
1. The public health community had no language to describe quality and safety and did not fully grasp that medical error is a leading cause of death in America.
2. Health economics and outcomes research were not highly discussed in the public health community.
3. After he founded the school of Population Health at Jefferson, health policy in the public health space wasn’t yet focused on the newly passed Affordable Care Act.
Future Direction of Population Health
· Population health will ultimately help us cultivate a deeper understanding of unexplained clinical variation. According to Dr. Nash, “The biggest challenge we have is unexplained clinical variation, and that comes from medical training.” Medical professionals leave training with anchoring heuristics specific to their institution of training, regardless of whether or not they are evidence-based.
· The ultimate goal of population health is to close the feedback loop to give practitioners timely and actionable information for the improvement of clinical care.
· Tools of AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics harness data and turn it into actionable information at the bedside.
COVID-19 Crisis: “We are going to have to re-tool [out healthcare systems] for the future.”
· The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed unbelievable failures of the healthcare system, hopefully forcing a frank and candid self-evaluation on the other end of the crisis. For example, hospital systems were not built to effectively manage pandemic capacity.
· Population health stands to be at the center of an impending candid national conversation: in the words of Dr. Nash, we need to go upstream to shut off the faucet instead of downstream to mop up the floor.
Quotes
“Public health is the central pillar that holds up the roof”
“We ought to have more people with varied backgrounds going to medical school”
“I could not have [founded the school of Population Health] without my Wharton training.”
