Clinical population medicine: Integrating clinical medicine and population health in practice

The integration of clinical care and population health is a priority for health planners, researchers, and practitioners. Health care systems are judged against the Triple Aim challenge to improve patient experience and curtail health care expenditures while improving population health. Meanwhile, public health departments and agencies face growing pressures to not only to prevent disease, but to work with health care systems to address growing medical complexity, urgent health inequities, and an aging population. Planners and policy makers have called for “integrators,” institutions and practitioners equipped to deliver care that meets the needs of both patients and communities.

Some fear that blending population health with health care institutions and patient care imperatives might divert scarce public health resources into burgeoning clinical budgets. Others argue that attending to population health in clinical settings undermines patient-centered medicine, ushering in an era of rationed, bureaucratic care.