PRACTICE AREA - POPULATION HEALTH

Understanding the people the service exists to serve

Population health is the discipline of understanding, planning for and improving outcomes for the populations that health and care services serve. It is where every good service strategy starts and where every serious health inequality intervention lives. We help systems do it properly.

Six connected services covering the arc from population analytics through to strategy and delivery. Most engagements begin with one and grow into two or three, depending on where the pressure is.

Our services

Six services across the population health arc

Service

Population health management & analytics

Population health management (PHM) is a discipline, not a slogan. Done well, it lets systems see their populations clearly, target intervention where it will do most good, and demonstrate that they have. We help clients build PHM capability that actually changes decisions.

What's covered
  • Population segmentation - building and interpreting segmentation models across whole populations, by need, risk, and service utili…
  • Risk stratification - identifying the cohorts that will most benefit from targeted intervention, with defensible clinical and anal…
  • Predictive analytics - where the data supports it, forward-looking modelling of demand, cost, and outcomes across cohorts.
  • Population dashboards and boards packs - bringing PHM insight into the language non-executive directors and system leaders can act…

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Service

Health inequalities & prevention

Health inequalities strategies fail more often than they succeed - not because the science is wrong, but because the strategies never bridge the gap between data and delivery. We help systems build inequality and prevention strategies that clinicians, commissioners and communities can actually put into practice.

What's covered
  • Health inequalities diagnostics - evidence-based diagnostics of the inequalities in your population, their drivers, and the levers…
  • Core20PLUS5 and equivalent frameworks - grounded, practical application of national frameworks to local context, without box-ticki…
  • Prevention strategy - clinical and non-clinical prevention strategies that link population data to delivery capacity, workforce an…
  • Wider determinants strategy - working across health, local authority and VCSE partners on the determinants of health that sit beyo…

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Service

Value-based care & outcomes

Value-based care is a discipline for designing and paying for services around the outcomes that matter to patients - not the activity that fills a schedule. Done properly it reshapes commissioning, pathway design and clinical practice. We help systems make it real.

What's covered
  • Outcome framework design - building clinically meaningful, patient-relevant outcome frameworks for services and populations.…
  • Value-based commissioning - commissioning models and contracts that reward outcomes rather than activity.
  • PROMs and PREMs strategy - practical implementation of patient-reported outcome and experience measures that clinicians will actua…
  • Pathway redesign for value - clinical pathway redesign that starts from outcomes and works back to activity, workforce and cost.…

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Service

Population-informed service design

Most service redesign starts with the wrong question - "what does the activity data show?" Population-informed redesign starts with a better one - "what does the population actually need, and what would meet that need well?" We help systems ask, and answer, the better question.

What's covered
  • Population needs assessment - rigorous needs analysis for a service, population segment or geographic footprint.
  • Pathway design from population need - clinical and operational pathway design driven by need, not by current configuration.
  • Service model options - worked-up options for how a service could be delivered to meet population need, with trade-offs made expli…
  • Access strategy - designing access, referral and triage that account for the diversity of the population using the service.

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Service

Patient experience & involvement

Patient involvement is often the weakest strand of a health strategy. It shouldn't be. We help systems build patient experience, involvement and public engagement work that shifts real decisions - delivered in partnership with the UK's most respected specialists in the field.

What's covered
  • Patient experience strategy - organisation- or system-wide strategies for how experience data is captured, understood and acted on…
  • Patient and public involvement - meaningful involvement of patients and communities in strategy, service design and transformation…
  • Statutory consultation - support for the formal consultation processes required for major service change, delivered through our pa…
  • Community engagement in inequalities work - engagement with communities affected by health inequalities, done in a way they trust.…

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Service

Population health strategy

Population health is a leadership discipline as much as an analytic one. Directors, ICB executive teams, place-based partnership boards and Directors of Public Health all need clear thinking about how population health fits into the wider strategy of their organisation. That's what this service provides.

What's covered
  • Population health strategy - organisation- or system-level strategies that place population health at the heart of the wider servi…
  • Operating model for population health functions - how the ICB, place or provider population health team should be structured, reso…
  • Independent strategic reviews - board-commissioned reviews of population health functions, strategies or programmes.
  • Board and executive team development - helping boards understand and lead in population health, without turning them into epidemio…

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Delivered in partnership with Olovus

Where population health engagements need serious patient, community or public involvement - asset-based engagement with communities affected by health inequalities, a co-produced piece of service design, or a statutory public consultation on a major service change - we deliver alongside our partner Olovus. Olovus is one of the most respected UK teams in patient involvement and public consultation for the NHS; the accountable client relationship stays with Health Dynamics.

Where this practice meets the others

Population health work rarely lives in isolation. A serious inequality strategy needs the workforce to deliver it (our workforce practice); a population-informed service redesign eventually becomes a delivery programme (our transformation practice). Many of our best engagements draw on more than one practice at once - with a single accountable client relationship across all of them.

Working on a population health question?

We are happy to talk through a brief before any engagement is on the table - including for teams still shaping their population health function.

Talk to our population health lead