Patients with complex needs are often described as the five percent of patients who account for 50 percent of health care spending. Behind that often cited statistic are the individuals who make up that population — all of whom have their own stories and needs.

Shares insights and guidance on how to use findings from a recently released report from the National Academy of Medicine, which explores the key attributes of patients with complex needs and how to improve care for this patient population.

Marit Tanke, MD, PhD, a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow, walks us through her research to analyze high-need, high-cost patients across four countries — including her methodology, how costly these patients are, who these patients are, and how they use health care.

Jose Figueroa, MD, a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a researcher at Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, has been researching who patients with complex needs are and helped created a model for identifying population segments within this broad category.