Objectives: Population health describes a new method of providing care by identifying a population and predicting what their health needs may be, and providing customer care pathways for high-risk members prior to them needing to receive care at an acute hospital. The idea is to produce a healthcare service that doesn’t start and finish at the hospital door, but intertwines all aspects of community and primary care.

Method: Designers are using predictive analytics in population health to reconsider the traditional hospital model, by reducing footprints and moving outpatient clinics into the community.

Acute hospitals and ambulatory organisations need innovative solutions to help them transition to value-based models, and their success will depend on how well they manage the health of their populations. Providers will need to co-ordinate high-quality care across the continuum, increase patient engagement, improve health outcomes, and reduce costs. This will depend on them having the right technology solutions.

Results: A sound population health technology will help improve health outcomes and reduce costs by identifying high-risk patients, and enabling efficient co-ordination of evidence-based care through automated workflows and access to patients’ longitudinal records.

The same technology can be used to provide information for care team members and decision-makers when and where they need it. As we need to build hospitals that lend themselves to acute patients only, our current design standards/ratios must be reimagined around a new definition for outpatient care. The functional programme must change to accommodate this new reality for true savings to be achieved.

Conclusions: There has been a rise in general practitioners wanting to be ‘inside’ a continuum of care – standalone emergency departments as part of an overall system approach, standalone radiology to hospital visits, and standalone day surgery centres. What is the business case for realising savings and what are the key drivers to make the outpatient approach affordable?