The Fund supports networks of state health policy decision makers to help identify, inspire, and inform policy leaders.
The Milbank Memorial Fund supports two state leadership programs for legislative and executive branch state government officials committed to improving population health.
The Fund identifies and shares policy ideas and analysis to advance state health leadership, strong primary care, and sustainable health care costs.
Keep up with news and updates from the Milbank Memorial Fund. And read the latest blogs from our thought leaders, including Fund President Christopher F. Koller.
The Fund publishes The Milbank Quarterly, as well as reports, issues briefs, and case studies on topics important to health policy leaders.
The Milbank Memorial Fund is is a foundation that works to improve population health and health equity.
The Future of Population Health (Volume 101)
Quarterly Article
Philip M. Alberti
Heather H. Pierce
September 2024
March 2024
Back to The Milbank Quarterly
Policy Points:
Though there is no definitive history of the “population health approach,”1 relevant methods and practice have been deployed for centuries. Although a common population health lexicon is still in development,2 in their seminal 2003 paper “What Is Population Health?,” Kindig and Stoddart define the “relatively new term” as “the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group.”3
More recently, the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS) has firmly placed health equity as a central focus of the field and on the development of a health-in-all-policies agenda to advance equitable health opportunity for all communities. IAPHS notes that population health involves:
an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach to producing knowledge about: population health levels & disparities; the intertwined & multi-level causes of health and disease, from genes, to behavior, to social and physical environments; the mechanisms through which health and health disparities are produced; and what policies and practices will improve population health and ameliorate health disparities.4
According to these definitions health care is but one of the “mechanisms” across many levels that contribute to population health, giving it a necessary yet insufficient role to play in developing (and being part of) the multisector and multilevel solutions that improve the health of populations generally and eliminate unjust, systematic, avoidable inequities in health between groups.
1. Szreter S. The population health approach in historical perspective. Am J Public Health. 2003;93(3):421-431. 2. Peek CJ, Westfall JM, Stange KC, et al. Shared language for shared work in population health. Ann Fam Med. 2021;19(5):450-457. https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.2708. 3. Kindig D, Stoddart G. What is population health? Am J Public Health. 2003;93(3):380-383. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.93.3.380. 4. What is population health. Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science website. https://iaphs.org/what-ispopulation-health/. Accessed September 9, 2022.
