Population Health

Live Healthier, Longer, and Better

With Nova Southeastern University’s considerable investments in health education, health care, and biomedical research, the Dr. Kiran C. Patel College of Allopathic Medicine (NSU MD) has established the Department of Population Health Sciences (PHS), Chaired by Professor Julie Jacko, in collaboration with key community partners.

Mission

The Department’s mission is to drive health care transformation while serving as a hub of excellence in education, investigation, and expertise in health IT, health services, health disparities, social determinants of health, community health, cost, quality, outcomes, and health delivery systems research. In these ways, PHS advances human health, from scientific discovery to public impact, by improving population health and preventing disease.

Current projects: NSU MD Opioid Initiative

Strategic Goals:

1. Serve as a hub of excellence for impact-driven, translational research in population health science.

Tactics:

• Appointing faculty scholars in the Department of Population Health, who engage in extramurally-funded, faculty-initiated/led research.
• Focusing research on the health and well-being of large groups of individuals, with academic priority placed on aging, cancer, health equity, chronic diseases, mental and behavioral health, and substance and opioid abuse.

2. Implement a digital ecosystem that captures and harnesses population health data for purposes of research, analytics, decision support, and population health management.

Tactics:

• Partnering with health systems, hospitals, payers, clinics, and community health organizations for purposes of health data exchange.
• Leveraging State of Florida resources for health data exchange.
• Constructing unique data resources from a multitude of data sources, with front-end dashboards facilitating access and analytics.
• Augmenting our staff with data scientists in the Department of Population Health who design, build, implement, and maintain the ecosystem, providing efficient and secure data storage, while also providing additional analytics capacity to NSU MD and beyond.

3. Offer nationally recognized, one-of-a-kind educational programs that are comprehensive, flexible, transdisciplinary, problem-based, and team-based, exposing students to the full continuum of the U.S. health ecosystem – taking a look at the upstream, midstream, and downstream factors impacting the business of health, population health management, and value-based healthcare delivery in the United States.

Tactics:

• Implementing a pre-med program in partnership with the H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship, with dual tracks in population health and the business of health.
• Implementing certificate and graduate degree programs in population health
• Establishing dual degree programs in population health and other aligned disciplines/programs.

4. Serve as THE central population health data and analytics resource for NSU, the region of South Florida, and the nation. This digital ecosystem is the key to productive, innovative, data sciences aimed at addressing the grand challenges in population health. It has the ability to drive efficient and secure data storage, making data usable to as many people as possible, including researchers, clinicians, institutions, and the public. It also has the power, when integrated into the Center’s big vision, digital ecosystem, to influence the preparation of a workforce poised to capitalize on advances in data science and information technology; while influencing policies for productive, efficient, secure, and ethical data use.

From its inception, the PHS is being designed to serve as a disruptive, national model for population health, most notably through the construction of its sustainable digital ecosystem that keeps pace with the data demands of the health care delivery and research enterprises. PHS Faculty and students leverage the ecosystem to generate key findings to develop new pathways of care that improve health outcomes in diverse communities nationally and internationally, address the progression of chronic diseases, and effectively treat patients’ medical conditions.