Pathways to Population Health Compass

While health care leaders recognize the opportunity to improve the health of the communities they serve, the pathways to do so remain the roads less traveled. The Pathways to Population Health Compass (the Compass) is intended to help your organization catalogue existing improvement efforts, as well as identify new opportunities to make practical, meaningful, and sustainable advances in population health. Be sure to check out our companion resources, the Pathways to Population Health: An Invitation to Health Care Change Agents (the Framework) and the Getting Started Guide at http://www.ihi.org/p2ph. 

This resource is ideally suited for individuals or teams with the agency to advance population health improvement efforts within their organization. We recommend engaging a multidisciplinary team, representing various roles across your entire  organization, in taking the Compass to capture a variety of perspectives. Conversations about where answers vary between individuals can help break down silos and create a shared language around population health. Here are two ways that your team might utilize the Compass—the main objective is to include diverse voices in the selected responses and explicitly learn together as you share results and reflect.

1. Have all stakeholders take the Compass individually and generate a group report. Have a discussion about where there was synergy, where there wasn’t, and agree upon final scores. Take the Compass again with final, agreed upon scores to obtain a report that reflects the group responses.
2. Take the Compass together as a multi-stakeholder group with discussion around each question and answer option. Select answer choices as you agree upon final scores.

The Compass takes approximately 20 minutes to complete and you are encouraged to review and update your responses quarterly to track progress over time. The tool includes a series of statements to identify the current state of your organization’s activities to advance eight different components of the Pathways to Population Health Framework:

• Stewardship
• Equity
• Payment
• Partnerships with People with Lived Experience
• Portfolio 1: Physical and/or Mental Health (Data, Team-Based Care, Behavioral Health Integration, Care Management)
• Portfolio 2: Social and/or Spiritual Well-Being (Data, Social Determinant Screening/Referrals)
• Portfolio 3: Community Health and Well-Being (Data, Community Partnerships, Community Benefit)
• Portfolio 4: Communities of Solutions (Data, Leveraging Nontraditional Roles, Policy)

As you consider your organization’s journey toward improving population health, please select descriptions that best represent the attitudes, behaviors, or actions currently underway. The responses represent examples of the types of activities an organization may be undertaking. The purpose of completing the Compass is to provide a snapshot of your organization’s current activities and suggest some possible next steps to help your organization progress to where it wants to be.

Please select one response per statement. The score for each of the eight components will help your organization evaluate the balance of activities across portfolios. By downloading your report after clicking "complete," you will be able to see your scores as well as how to interpret them.

How many people's perspectives were used to determine this submission?

If you are filling this out as an individual, input "1." If you are filling it out as a final, agreed upon submission, input the number of people who were involved.