Creating Incentives to Move Upstream: Developing a Diversified Portfolio of Population Health Measures Within Payment and Health Care Reform

I examined the feasibility of developing a balanced portfolio of population health measures that would be useful within the current deliberations about health care and payment reform. My commentary acknowledges that an obstacle to the selection of population health metrics is the differing definitions of population health. Rather than choosing between these definitions, I identified five categories of indicators, ranging from traditional clinical care prevention interventions to those that measure investment in community-level nonclinical services, that in various combinations might yield the most promising results. I offer concrete examples of markers in each of the categories and show that there is a growing number of individuals eager to receive concrete recommendations and implement population health pilot programs.