Health Systems Science - population health by another name?

In my book review of this textbook in the June 2018 issue of Family Medicine, I took the opportunity to comment not only on the strengths and weaknesses of the text, but the broader movement to incorporate population health concepts into medical education. Here are some excerpts:

Since Abraham Flexner published his report on the state of American and Canadian medical education in 1910, the pillars of medical education have been the basic and clinical sciences. Although in the past century both pillars have experienced dramatic changes, this educational structure has remained the same. Increasingly, however, medical educators have recognized that mastery of the basic and clinical sciences alone is insufficient preparation for clinical practice. In the early 20th century, there were no health maintenance organizations, continuous quality improvement processes, clinical informatics, or population health management—all concepts that are essential for today’s physicians to know.

In 2013, the American Medical Association formed the Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium, a group of 11 medical schools tasked with developing innovative curricula to encompass the additional knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to prepare students and residents for 21st-century practice. Although my home institution was not part of the consortium, as director of a required first-year course in health disparities and health policy, and as advisor for our population health scholarly track, I have followed its work with great interest. In a series of papers in Academic Medicine, consortium leaders proposed adding a third pillar of medical education called “health systems science. ...

A concluding chapter suggests structural reforms to make it easier to integrate this content into medical education, such as preferentially admitting students with well-developed teamwork skills, teaching with simulation and in community-based settings, and involving students in real-life practice improvement and health care delivery transformation.

Whether or not this collection of topics truly constitutes a new “science” rather than a blending of existing fields is debatable, but it is certain that in the future, more physicians will be caring for populations within health systems rather than individual patients one at a time.