The recent COVID-19 pandemic has had employers focus on basic issues like keeping their business operating and keeping employees, customers, and visitors safe. There’s been an intense focus through the lens of the virus, how it spreads, and its impact.

Solving these issues has required utilizing a population health approach.  A population health framework I like to use is:

• Identify
• Assess
• Stratify
• Engage
• Intervene
• Measure
• Revise

First, the company Identified its employees, customers, and visitors. Then they Assessed them for risk to be infected or be impacted more severely if infected. This risk assessment should have included things like job type, industry, location, facility layout, air handling, age, interactions with customers, etc. Many looked to testing for infection as an assessment and risk mitigation tool.

The company could then Stratify them into risk categories from low to high, to engage and apply appropriate interventions.

The next step would be to Engage, getting the employees, customers, and visitors engaged in whatever the company was planning to do for interventions; using tools such as communications (posters, emails, reminders, videos), and perhaps incentives, etc.

Interventions included work from home, split shifts, mask requirements, distancing requirements, changes to the workplace layout and structure, air handling, cleaning, scheduling, safety, and other rules, etc.

Then one needed to Measure and monitor the situation. Was the company seeing more infections, fewer infections, where were they coming from, were certain situations more likely to expose someone? And many, many more.

The results of these measurements were then used to Revise the system in an ongoing Quality Improvement process. The company then changed the assessments, risks, engagement, and interventions as more was learned from outside sources such as the CDC and scientists as well as the measurements and monitoring they did of their own organization.

COVID-19 was a classic high intensity, rapidly changing example of using a Population Health framework to seek to solve a health problem.

As the vaccines are distributed and hopefully we achieve Herd Immunity for some period of time, we can take this same framework and apply it to other employee health issues in a more effective manner in the future.

If you’d like to discuss how Accountable Health can help you beyond just COVID, schedule a call.  We’d be happy to discuss your situation and provide some ideas.

And as always feel free to leave your comments and thoughts.