In June, AcademyHealth convened the 2014 Delivery System Meeting, "Transforming Health and Health Care – Focus on Southern California," the third in a series of meetings sponsored by AcademyHealth in advance of the 2014 Annual Research Meeting. A summary of this symposium written by Bruce Steinwald, Ellen Albritton, and Margo Edmunds was recently published and is available on the AcademyHealth website.
The meeting provided a unique opportunity to bring together local health care leaders and national health services researchers, policy analysts, and other experts to discuss issues of mutual interest in payment and delivery system reform and population health, such as transforming health care into a system that achieves the Triple Aim.
The summary focuses on three themes that emerged during the symposium:
- The positive policy climate to support change, which included discussion about placing greater emphasis on coordinating social services and cultural changes with health services in order to achieve the program’s health improvement goals;
- Shared value and community engagement, a theme that emphasized the necessity of a level of unity with respect to health system goals and approaches as well as the importance of social factors to eliminate health disparities; and
- Data infrastructure to support and document change, necessary for effective delivery system transformation, productive data analysis, and to target areas of greatest disparity.
These themes emerged from the meeting’s panel discussions and the diverse southern California region, which accounts for 40 percent of California’s total population and just over 5 percent of the total U.S. population.
