Vision for a systems architecture to integrate and transform population health

Abstract

Entities involved in population health often share a common mission while acting independently of one another and perhaps redundantly. Population health is in everybody’s interest, but nobody is really in charge of promoting it. Across governments, corporations, and frontline operations, lack of coordination, lack of resources, and lack of reliable, current information have often impeded the development of situation-awareness models and thus a broad operational integration for population health. These deficiencies may also affect the technical, organizational, policy, and legal arrangements for information sharing, a desired practice of high potential value in population health. In this article, we articulate a vision for a next-generation modeling effort to create a systems architecture for broadly integrating and visualizing strategies for advancing population health. This multipurpose systems architecture would enable different views, alerts, and scenarios to better prepare for and respond to potential degradations in population health. We draw inspiration from systems engineering and visualization tools currently in other uses, including monitoring the state of the economy (market performance), security (classified intelligence), energy (power generation), transportation (global air traffic control), environment (weather monitoring), jobs (labor market dynamics), manufacturing and supply chain (tracking of components, parts, subassemblies, and products), and democratic processes (election analytics). We envision the basic ingredients for a population health systems architecture and its visualization dashboards to eventually support proactive planning and joint action among constituents. We intend our ambitious vision to encourage the work needed for progress that the population deserves.