Michael Griffin on Aligning Payers With Population Health and Social Determinants

By aligning payers to care about population health and social determinants of health, it will help improve the health of the community as a whole, said Michael Griffin, president and CEO of Daughters of Charity Services.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What would be the outcome of better alignment of payers with population health? And what steps can be taken to achieve this?

Better alignment of payers with population health is what we’re striving for. I think that will better access and better coverage for our patient population, but it will also help us to look at things such as social determinants and really focus on the disparities of healthcare in the areas that the disparities are taking place, and not worry so much about getting a patient in the door to be seen in the old antiquated way of taking care of our patients.

We really are starting to focus on things such as diet and education of patients, and some of the other things that determine their health more so than the healthcare delivery itself: their home environment, some legal issues. We actually have a medical-legal partnership within our health center. So having payers that look at some other things besides just the clinical code and clinical disposition of why a patient walked in the door, and look at all of the things that surround that patient and help us to better structure our services to take care of those other things, will keep those patients a lot healthier and improve our health status of our community.