Population health strategies: The untapped importance of clinical labs

Population health strategies focus on enhancing the overall health of a larger target population, rather than addressing individual patient needs.¹ In simple terms, they aim to help combat broader health issues and deliver care more fairly, enabling equitable access to healthcare services and reducing health disparities across different population groups.² This may include incentives that promote everything from patient education to healthy lifestyles through various nutrition and vaccination-based programs.¹

However, while these strategies are no new thing, the critical role of clinical labs in ensuring their successful implementation is often overlooked.  

Here, we take a closer look at exactly why laboratories are indispensable in developing population health management strategies and how their role looks set to evolve moving forward. 

First things first, it’s important to understand more about what a population health strategy is and what it sets out to achieve within healthcare. 

While many people believe that population health is synonymous with public health, the two do have their differences — albeit small.²

• Public health: According to the World Health Organization, public health aims to “provide maximum benefit for the largest number of people.”³ In other words, it aims to protect and improve the health of various communities by focusing on disease prevention, health promotion strategies, and protection from health threats — such as during the response to COVID-19.²

• Population health: Population health involves more of a collaborative approach among various organizations, including healthcare providers, community groups, local authorities, and governing bodies.² Unlike public health, population health strategies aim to help improve the health status and outcomes within a specific group or “population” of people defined by a certain similarity — whether that be a specific diagnosis, location, or health provider.³

Clinical laboratories are instrumental in carrying out health research, providing vital information about disease trends and risk factors, and assessing the effectiveness of public health interventions.⁴ However, they are also integral to the successful implementation, management, and delivery of population health strategies — and here’s how: 

• Data collection and analysis: Through their research findings, labs can collect and analyze vast amounts of health data to provide statistical insights into disease prevalence and health disparities within a population.³

• Early disease detection and prevention: Thanks to various advances in diagnostics and technology over the years, labs play a crucial role in early disease detection, facilitating timely interventions and implementation of preventive measures in specific populations.⁵

• Monitoring and reporting: By being able to continuously analyze data, labs can not only track the effectiveness of public health interventions but also assess the costs associated with healthcare delivery by extracting various insights.³

• Collaborative encouragement: Population health strategies are a team effort, and labs are an important cog in the machine, working alongside healthcare providers and public health organizations to help develop a coordinated yet comprehensive approach.²

Since population health strategies mainly focus on the indirect aspects of medical care that don't require physician-level expertise, and aim to streamline care delivery, the role of clinical laboratories in data analytics and public health surveillance is crucial.⁶ However, the inverse is also true — having the right form of population health management strategy in place can help optimize lab workflows and improve the quality of healthcare delivery.²

Population health tools and population health management software are important for enabling lab personnel to leverage laboratory data effectively. These tools come in all shapes and sizes, with each offering a unique role in what they can deliver.⁷

For example, certain data management platforms enable care providers and clinicians to coordinate care services for individuals, specific cohorts, and entire populations.⁸ For individuals, they can help by consolidating patient records and creating personalized treatment plans. For specific cohorts, such as patients with diabetes, they can help to identify trends and create targeted programs. For populations, they can make it easier to manage public health initiatives by tracking and analyzing high quantities of health data. Across all three, they can not only identify and mitigate risks but also improve clinical decision-making processes.⁸

There are several other tools and pieces of software that labs can use to help boost population health strategies.⁷ These include electronic health record integration tools, which can help optimize the sharing of patient data between labs and providers, and data analytics, which can analyze population-based trends and support the development of more targeted programs.  

While slightly less lab-associated, certain other tools and approaches have also shown a lot of promise in recent times — especially in supporting the delivery of population health strategies.⁶ The gradual rise of remote monitoring, for example, as well as the integration of home-based care and the development of multidisciplinary care teams, have all helped to reduce certain population health disparities — a key issue that these strategies look to address.^3,6

By integrating laboratory data with these approaches and the population health management software listed above, healthcare providers can make more informed decisions and, ultimately, improve the overall effectiveness of the strategy being delivered.⁹

It is clear that clinical laboratories are indispensable in the development and implementation of population health strategies — a role that is only likely to grow as time goes on.⁹

The contributions that laboratories make towards improving our understanding of health trends, identifying risk factors, and — ultimately — supporting both healthcare providers and public health initiatives are invaluable in their own right. But, combined with the growing integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into various lab-based processes, these contributions look set to become even more significant moving forward.