_{By the Playbook staff}

How can health systems improve care for patients with complex needs? They can start by asking, “Who?” Jose Figueroa, MD, MPH, a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a health services researcher at Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, has been researching this question: Who are patients with complex needs?

Dr. Figueroa was part of a team convened by the National Academies of Medicine (NAM) that created a model for identifying population segments within the broad category of high-need, high-cost patients.

Unsurprisingly, they found that high-need, high-cost patients are not a monolithic group. In the following video presentation, Dr. Figueroa explains more. Watch each segment in order for the full presentation, or skip to the bottom to watch the full 16-minute video uninterrupted. You can also browse the segments to find the piece that interests you most. Click here to read the full report from the NAM. 

Part 1: Why is it so difficult to improve outcomes and lower costs for patients with complex needs?

Part 2: Patients with complex needs are not a monolithic group.

Part 3: One segmentation model identifies six distinct patient cohorts.

Part 4: How likely is a patient in each cohort to be high-cost?

Part 5: What types of health expenses do different patient cohorts incur?

Part 6: How would you segment patients by modifiable costs?

Part 7: What do we learn from this segmentation model?

Full Presentation