New York Academy of Medicine

While great scrutiny has been placed on the coverage expansion provisions of federal health care reform, important prevention and population health provisions have received less attention and are not widely understood by New York State policymakers, providers, and payers.

Much of the focus related to implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been on the delivery system reform innovations spurred by federal reform; largely absent from the debate was discussion of how these strategies can be implemented in a way that maximizes population health. The timing is ideal for considering how new opportunities could be used to create incentives for improvements in prevention and population health. To maximize prevention and population health opportunities and reduce spending, the New York Health Foundation (NYHealth) awarded New York Academy of Medicine a grant in 2011 to produce a State resource for organizing its implementation of federal health care reform provisions.

NYAM developed a roadmap for implementing prevention and population health provisions, which included an analysis of clinical prevention, community prevention, and public health infrastructure provisions enacted by Federal health reform. NYAM also developed recommendations to leverage delivery system reform to maximize prevention and population health, and convened health services delivery innovators, including those with expertise on accountable care organizations and primary care medical homes, to identify strategies for incorporating preventive and population health as goals in delivery system reform.

Read the report associated with this grant, “Federal Health Care Reform in New York State: A Population Health Perspective”.