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

In this episode, Stacey Richter talks with Fred Goldstein, president and founder of Accountable Health, LLC, about six essential steps to get population health right.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ How population health and precision medicine intersect

✅ Why defining and assessing your population is the essential first step

✅ How social determinants of health and behavioral economics are being incorporated into individual assessment

✅ What effective interventions and measurement look like in population health

✅ Why patient-reported outcomes matter, and Fred's advice to payers: forget pilots, build something scalable

WHY THIS MATTERS

Fred Goldstein walks through what "good" population health actually looks like, starting with correctly identifying and assessing a population before ever designing an intervention. He connects precision medicine to population health as a way to get more targeted interventions, and emphasizes that culture change, social determinants, and patient-reported outcomes all matter as much as the clinical metrics organizations typically track. His closing advice to payers is blunt: stop running pilots and start building programs that can actually scale.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

🔗 Healthcare Industry Acronyms and Terms

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00:00 Introduction.

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."