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Dr. Steven Safyer became CEO of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in 2008 after three decades in the system, where he made his name treating inmates at Rikers Island and tackling New York City's HIV and tuberculosis epidemics. Today, Montefiore Health System's four hospitals, 1,200 employed physicians and 125 health clinics have won plaudits for their efforts to tackle the obesity, diabetes and asthma epidemics affecting the borough's mostly Hispanic population. Modern Healthcare editor Merrill Goozner recently interviewed Dr. Safyer in his Bronx headquarters. The following is an edited transcript.
Modern Healthcare: How do you define population health management?
Dr. Steven Safyer: Population health has become a common phrase, and if you quiz people, it will have different meanings. Most people will go to the Triple Aim, and I think that that's a reasonable approach. The recent history of healthcare over the last 40, 50, 60 years was very focused on the individual and on specific diseases.
But it was out of context sometimes with the family, the community, and other social services that complement and make a person's well-being easier to manage. Pensions, the ability to retire, actually having insurance for your healthcare, jobs, education, an intact family, a community that works--all these things maximize the outcomes.
We don't do so well on outcomes compared to Europe. It's my contention it's not because of the care that's given in a hospital or in a medical center. It has much more to do with the social services and the family context, which tend to be weaker in this country. So population health to me is, in the most general of terms, recalibrating and retargeting what...