Teaching Population Health: Considerations for Educating the Future Healthcare Administration Workforce

Managing population health is essential to the success of our reformed healthcare system since it allows for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery, and evaluating accountability, while striving to improve quality of care and reduce costs. The overarching goal of population health management is to keep patient populations healthy via preventive measures. Since healthcare organizations are unable to implement this approach alone, a collaborative approach is required. In response to this new approach to deliver and assess care, as educators we need to prepare future healthcare administrators at the undergraduate and graduate levels with the skills to be adaptable in this new era of healthcare. As we embark on delivering healthcare in a reformed system, population-based healthcare is becoming even more important and innovative teaching approaches are needed to provide a solid population health foundation for the healthcare management student today. The purpose of this paper is to describe the content, pedagogy, competency areas, and resources for teaching population health and its management in the undergraduate and graduate curricula.