Population Health in Practice

Population Health in Practice is a project that was created in 1986 with joint funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1992, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation joined the program. Over a 10-year period, 33 academic health centers across the United States and Canada participated. KU School of Medicine-Wichita introduced PHP as a course in the fall of 1998. The goal in this course is to assist medical students to practice population-based medicine in these dynamic and changing times. The PHP focus is on defining, assessing, and providing health services for a specific population.

For Students

• Log in to Sharepoint

For Clinical Sites

• The QI projects from the clinical site perspective

About the course and its mission

The PHP course teaches about improving the health of populations.

• Students learn by executing Quality Improvement projects at regional inpatient and outpatient clinical facilities.
• Students learn about careful literature searching to guide population management and summarize the recommendations from their searches in evidence-based edits at WikiDoc (see list of edits).
• Students learn about institutional change and positive organizational psychology.
• Students learn about the funding, delivery, and ethics of population health. Each project includes a projected financial analysis.

Students use tools such as LucidCharts and the collaboratively developed open QITools to help analyze existing clinical processes.

For more information:

• KUSM-W profile: Medical school course emphasizes importance of quality improvement in real world medicine
• KUSM-W profile: Medical students propose 'interventions' for local health care institutions
• List of presentations and publications about the course
• Months available for this year: October, February and April

Highlights from prior months

Pareto analysis after chart review of barriers to delivering counseling to prevent smoking.

SPC chart of an intervention bending the curve in the final days of the course (usually impact is not this fast).