Clinic–Community Linkages for High-Value Care

"The increasing emphasis on improving health outcomes and controlling health care costs puts pressure on (...) health care systems to deliver value. One essential strategy for improving population health is linking the delivery system, the community, and the patient in an integrated effort. Although complex interactions between neighborhood-level determinants of health and individual patient characteristics occur primarily outside the delivery system, they have a profound effect on how patients interact with the system and ultimately on the quality of the care they receive and their health outcomes.

(...) A promising approach to achieving this linkage is community-based performance measurement — reporting and acting on clinical performance measures at the community level, rather than at the level of delivery-system units such as hospitals or physicians. Using this measurement approach, a delivery system can gain a better sense of where its patient population clusters within communities and how their environment affects their health outcomes..."

This article addresses this approach.