The Upstream Doctors: Medical Innovators Track Sickness to Its Source (Kindle Single) (TED Books)

For those interested, a more comprehensive list of policy solutions and opportunities to advance an upstreamist approach can be found at healthbegins.org

“A conceptual model that includes partialists, comprehensivists, and upstreamists makes sense for the work of population health management in health care. Each of those three key functions must be performed. For this to be wieldy, though, there would also need to be coordination among those three functions. But the nature of how we currently segmen

from David M. Lawrence, former chairman and CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals:

*For more insight on this type of model, I recommend two articles published in 2010: “A Framework for Public Health Action,” by Thomas R. Frieden, in the American Journal of Public Health, and “A Conceptual Framework for Action on the Social Determinants of Health,” by the World Health Organization.

There are three basic elements of this cultural challenge: a lack of sociocultural competence; the skewed demographic composition of our health care workforce and its cultural implications (that is, a lack of diversity); and a lack of mentorship.

When clinicians don’t reflect the communities they serve, it becomes that much more difficult to understand health in its social context.

first began to understand health as a social phenomenon that starts and ends outside the clinic walls.

In our shared imagination, the concept of health has been shaped by this downstream activity, where doctors and nurses discover and treat disease.

California, for instance, recently launched a Health in All Policies initiative to factor health into a wide swath of state decisions.