Population Health from Above or Below
The innovation gurus have declared population health to be a key factor in health outcomes. As usual there are those who plan to help others while helping themselves. Can Big Data approaches make a difference? Are there other approaches? Do we trust consultants and corporations from afar to help diagnose and treat community wide health problems? Is there another approach that does not involve distant, different, and shipping scarce dollars elsewhere? Those who truly want to improve the health of populations might want to consider approaches local in focus, lower in cost, and of no benefit to anyone outside of the community not to mention decades of previous development. Community Oriented Primary Care and Asset Based Management are approaches that have been around for over 50 years. The history of COPC is quite revealing as Sidney Kark tried to go to South Africa to address trauma - but found what was needed was sanitation and public health. Such problems are common when...