I just finished attending two very good days at Health Datapalooza in Washington, DC. The conference organizers did a great job putting together an interesting and engaging conference that touched on a lot of areas including Big Data, predictive analytics, behavior change, investment, mobile health and start-ups to name but a few.  As at other conferences of health and heath care organizations, the words “population health” came up quite often in presentations and discussions.  During one demo of a new health app, the presenter said “We do population health.”
This led me to tweet out the following:

An app is a tool to assist population health management, but it is not in and of itself "Population Health Management" #HDPalooza @PHAVoice

— Fred Goldstein (@fsgoldstein) June 2, 2014

Its important to understand the distinction, Population Health is a very broad approach to improving the health of individuals and the entire population. The underpinning of population health is data. Without data  you can’t do Population Health Management; but, data, analytics, mHealth, coaching, identification algorithms, assessment tools,  stratification systems,  interventions and outcomes measurement systems are just some of the tools required to operate a population health management program.
To gain a better understanding of this, I refer you to my prior post discussing the Framework for Population Health as developed by the Population Heath Alliance (formerly Care Continuum Alliance).
Here is the graphic..
 

And if you really want to understand Population Health, join the Population Health Alliance to network with and learn from the leaders in the industry and plan to attend the PHA Forum 2014 December 10 -12 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Now doesn’t this look like the place to be in December…..