Population Health Sciences
UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health

David A Kindig MD, PhD Population Health Advocate

David Kindig

Position title: Emeritus Professor; Emeritus Vice-Chancellor

Email: dakindig@gmail.com

Phone: (608) 345-6944

David Kindig, MD, PhD

Curriculum Vitae

David A. Kindig is Emeritus Professor of Population Health Sciences and Emeritus Vice-Chancellor for Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Medicine. He was founding Co-Chair of the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Population Health Improvement and Co-Directed the Wisconsin site of the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program. He was an initial Co-PI on the Robert Wood Johnson MATCH grant under which the County Health Rankings were developed and was the Founder of the RWJF Roadmaps to Health Prize. From 2011 to 2013 he was Editor of the Improving Population Health blog.

He received a B.A. from Carleton College in 1962 and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1968. He completed residency training in Social Pediatrics at Montefiore Hospital in 1971.

Dr. Kindig served as Professor of Preventive Medicine/Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin from 1980-2003. He was Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1980-1985, Director of Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center (1976-80), Deputy Director of the Bureau of Health Manpower, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (1974-76), and the First Medical Director of the National Health Services Corps (1971-73). He was National President of the Student American Medical Association in 1967-68.

He served as Chair of the federal Council of Graduate Medical Education (1995-1997), President of the Association for Health Services Research (1997-1998), a ProPAC Commissioner from 1991-94 and as Senior Advisor to Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services from 1993-95. In 1996 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. He received the Distinguished Service Award, University of Chicago School of Medicine 2003. He chaired the Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Literacy in 2002-2004, chaired Wisconsin Governor Doyle’s Healthy Wisconsin Taskforce in 2006, and received the 2007 Wisconsin Public Health Association’s Distinguished Service to Public Health Award.

He lives with his wife Margi, has three children and eight grandchildren, enjoys wood splitting, carving and fly-fishing, spending time in his Wisconsin Driftless woods and prairie, and reading political biography and western literature.

Improving Population Health Blog

Between 2010 and 2012, Dr. Kindig blogged weekly on population health topics at Improving Population Health: Ideas and Action. While some are dated, others remain relevant today.

Improving Population Health Blog Collections

Browse by category:

Population Health Resources

1 . Preventing Chronic Disease MATCH Essay Collection

Based in part on a proposed “pay-for-population-health” performance system advanced in 2006 (Kindig D. A pay-for-population health performance system. JAMA 2006;296(21):2611-3), the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation commissioned 24 essays to critique the assumptions underlying such a system and to suggest approaches for overcoming potential barriers to its implementation in the categories of metrics, incentives, and partnerships.  We worked with these authors, MATCH and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation staff, and several guests in a 2-day meeting in late 2009 in Madison to discuss the essays and develop an agenda for future practice and research activities for improving population health. The CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease published each set in three consecutive issues, and then produced a single e-collection. It remains relevant today as a virtual free population health textbook. The table of contents and all of the articles can be accessed here. https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/collections/pdf/PCD_MATCH_2010_web.pdf

2. A POPULATION HEALTH BOOT CAMP. 

In the summers of 2017 I hosted a Population Health “Boot Camp” for a second year medical student and a small group of staff in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Population Health Institute. Of course there is no precise way to identify the most important contributions to this literature…any selection will have substantial personal bias. The only similar effort I am aware of was done by the faculty of the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars program in 2016 titled “What is Population Health Research” (http://www.healthandsocietyscholars.org/143124/143629), but this was not widely disseminated.  During this COVID isolation time I put together my own list…of course including many identified by HSS. I hope it will mainly be useful to new scholars and faculty members who may not be fully aware of the late 20th century origins (some would say rediscovery) of the field 30 or 40 years ago.  As the list got longer, and since population health requires choices, I marked with an asterisk(*) those I would choose in a Boot Camp if limited in time to only 12.
https://iaphs.org/a-population-health-boot-camp/

3. National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine Population Health Roundtable

In 2012 my colleague George Isham and I founded this Roundtable, with senior NASEM staff Rose Martinez and Alina Baciu. Over the past 7 years this Roundtable has sponsored a large number of Workshops on many population health topics….another virtual free and ongoing textbook for the field. The list of topics can be found here, and the link to videos and reports and other Roundtable resources is here:

https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/roundtable-on-population-health-improvement

4. Population Health Performance Index (PHPI) Interactive Tool

National and state health goals are often framed in terms of improving the overall health of the population (often measured as a mean) and reducing disparities within the population. We created a Population Health Performance Index (PHPI) for US states, which combines performance on both the population mean and disparity for two measures: infant mortality by race and unhealthy days by education. We report PHPI values assuming that mean and disparity are equally important but allow users to see how the results change if either mean or disparity are considered more important. We hope that the PHPI metric will be useful to state and national policy makers and others as they evaluate performance on these two population health outcome and disparity measures. We also provide detailed information about our methodology for those who wish to extend this approach to other measures of interest. The interactive tool can be accessed here:

http://match.wisc.edu/phpi/index.php

and the published manuscript here:

David Kindig, Nicholas Lardinois, Yukiko Asada and John Mullahy. Considering mean and inequality health outcomes together: the population health performance index. International Journal for Equity in Health(2018) 17:25.

Relevant Publications

My population health journey began during my Pediatrics internship at the University of Chicago when my Department Chair refused to let me have a one month rotation in a university operated community health center as a PGY2 , stating it was   “not a legitimate academic experience”. This triggered my move in 1970 to the South Bronx to create the Montefiore Social Medicine Residency and become  the initial resident.

In that program we never discussed epidemiology or numerators/denominators per se but clearly came to understand from experience that the health of the community was as influenced by those who didn’t come to the center as those that did, practiced with first family health workers, and experienced what we would call today Health in All Policies….. job training, legal advocacy, school health. I may not have used the population  health term until first reading the Evans Stoddart paper in the early 1990s (Evans RG, Stoddart GL. Producing Health, Consuming Health Care. Soc. Sci Med 31(12),1347-1363, 1990)…but I have always thought all my later population health  health scholarship and advocacy was a return to the Bronx in a clearer and more mature way .

My 14 years in public and private management as well as lessons from being a Medicare ProPac Comissioner made me intensively aware of the role of finances and financial incentives and how dominant they were in health . I was also strongly influenced when the OEO health center grants funded less social determinant services they went away…as opposed to formulas such as for crop subsidies and mortgage interest deductions or Medicare GME resident training to hospitals that “just keep giving” every day.

Also the dominance of managed care and capitation thinking in medical care had a strong influence…the bundling of payments rather than simple fee for service such as like combining hospital and outpatient services into a DRG bundle or even Social HMOs bundling with home/Long term care.

So the leap in my first explicit pop health 1992 essay for Donna Shalala when she was UW Madison Chancellor in her quarterly Unconventional Wisdom faculty column was based on this…“imagine if a significant part of a health care organizations income was tied to the improvement of their patient’s health and functional status….such incentives would unleash the same capitalistic creativity toward HEALTH that currently exists for HEALTH SERVICES. Thus the subtitle of the 1997 sabbatical book to come Purchasing Population Health:Paying for Results.

  1. Kindig, D.A. The Health Care System Should Produce Health. On Wisconsin, September/October, l992, p.25. https://pophealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/office-depot-scan.pdf
  2. Kindig, D.A. Purchasing Population Health: Paying for Results. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI, 1997. https://www.press.umich.edu/15670/purchasing_population_health
  3. Kindig, D. Purchasing Population Health: Paying for Results. Chinese Edition 2001. Hong Wang Translation, Milbank Memorial Fund/Chinese Health Economic Institute Publisher
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1308399/
  4. Kindig, D.AHSR Presidential Speech: Beyond Health Services Research. Health Services Research 34:1 (April 1999, Part II).pp 205-214. https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC1088995&blobtype=pdf
  5. Kindig, D., Wang, H., Remington, P. How Fast Can the Racial Gap in Life Expectancy between White and Blacks be Eliminated? (MedGenMed, September 23, 1999, Medscape, Inc.) www.medscape.com/Medscape/GeneralMedicine/journal/1999/v01/mgm0923.wang/mgm-923
  6. Kindig, D., Stoddart, G. What is Population Health? American Journal of Public Health 93(3): 380-383, 2003. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.93.3.380
  7. Size T, Kindig D, MacKinney C. Population Health Improvement and Rural Hospital Balanced Scorecards. J Rural Health 22:93-96, 2006 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1748-0361.2006.00015.x
  8. Kindig, DA. A Pay-for-Population Health Performance System. JAMA 296:2611-2613, 2006. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/204338
  9. Kindig, DA. Understanding Population Health Terminology. Milbank Quarterly 2007 85 (1) 139-161. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690307/
  10. Kindig DA, Asada, Y, Booske B.A Population Health Framework for Setting National and State Health Goals. JAMA 299 (17) 2081-2083, 2008. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18460667/
  11. Peppard PE, Kindig DA, Dranger E, Jovaag A, Remington PL. Ranking Community Health Status to Stimulate Discussion of Local Public Health Issues: The Wisconsin County Health Rankings. American Journal of Public Health 98(2): 209-212, 2008. Accessed 06/26/2008. http://www.ajph.org/cgi/reprint/98/2/209
  12. Kindig, D. Beyond the Triple Aim: Integrating the Non Medical Sectors. Health Affairs Blog May 19, 2008. https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20080519.000393/full/
  13. Booske, BC, Rohan AM, Kindig DA, Remington PL. Grading the 50 states on health and health disparities. Preventing Chronic Disease 7(1), 2010 https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2010/jan/08_0235.htm
  14. Kindig, DA, Peppard PE, Booske BC. How healthy could a state be? Public Health Reports 125(2): 160-167, 2010. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821842/
  15. Kindig, D and Mullahy, J. Comparative Effectiveness-Of What?  Evaluating Strategies to Improve Population Health.  JAMA. 2010;304(8):901-902. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20736476/
  16. Kindig DA, Booske BC, Siemering KQ, Henry BL, Remington PL. Observations and recommendations From the Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health (MATCH) Expert Meeting. Prev Chronic Dis 2010;7(6). http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2010/nov/10_0132.htm.
  17. Cheng ER, Kindig DA. Disparities in premature mortality between high- and low-income US counties. Prev Chronic Disease 2012 (9):110-120. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22440549/
  18. Casper, T. and Kindig, D.  Are Community-Level Financial Data Adequate to Assess Population Health Investments? Prev Chronic Dis 2012;9:120066. DOI: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22877572/
  19. Bakken, E. and Kindig D. Is Hospital Community Benefit Charity Care? Wisconsin Medical Journal 111 (5): 215-219, 2012 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23189454/
  20. Kindig, D and Cheng, E.  Even as Mortality Fell in Most US counties, Female Mortality Nevertheless Rose in 42.8 percent of Counties from 1992 to 2006. Health Affairs 2013 32 (3): 451-458 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23459723/
  21. Bakken, E and Kindig, D. Could Hospital Community Benefit Enhance Community Health Improvement? Wisc. Med J 2013: 113 (1): 9-10 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24712214/
  22. Isham GJ, Zimmerman DJ, Kindig DA, Hornseth GW. HealthPartners adopts community business model to deepen focus on nonclinical factors of health outcomes. Health Aff (Millwood). 2013 Aug;32(8):1446-52.
  23. Kindig, D., Isham, G. and Siemering, K. 2013  IOM Population Health Roundtable Perspective. The Business Role in Improving Health: Beyond Social Responsibility2103 http://www.iom.edu/Global/Perspectives/2013/TheBusinessRole.aspx
  24. Kindig, D. Improving Population Health: Ideas and Action. 2014 electronic blog collection (43 posts). https://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/other/blog-collection-final-2014-04-05.pdf
  25. Bakken, E and Kindig D. Can Data From Nonprofit Hospital Tax Returns Improve Community Health? In Cytron, Pettit, Kingsley. What Counts: Harnessing Data for Americas Communities. Copyright © 2014. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Urban Institute.
  26. Asada, Y and Kindig D. Health Affairs blog September 17, 2014 Should We Be Done with Describing Health Disparities? http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/09/17/should-we-be-done-with-describing-health-disparities/
  27. Asada, Y., Whipp, A. Kindig D et al. Inequalities in multiple health outcomes by education, sex, and race in 93 US counties: Why we should measure them all. International Journal for Equity in Health 2014, 13:47  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24927805/
  28. Kindig, D and Isham, G. Population Health Improvement: A Community Health Business Model That Engages Partners in All Sectors. 2014 Frontiers in Health Services Management 30 (4): 3-20. This paper won the 2014 ACHE Dean Conley Article of the Year Award.
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25671991/
  29. Bakken E, Kindig D. Does nonprofit hospital community benefit vary by state? J Public Health Manag Pract. 2015 Jan-Feb; 21(1):18-22.
  30. Kindig, D and Bakken, E. Health Affairs blog May 8, 2014 Is NonProfit Community Benefit Equally Distributed Across States?http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/05/08/is-non-profit-hospital-community-benefit-equally-distributed-across-states/
  31. Kindig D.  From Health Determinant Benchmarks to Health Investment Benchmarks. Prev. Chronic Disease 2015 Prev  Chronic Dis 2015;12:150010 https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2015/15_0010.htm
  32. Kindig, D. 2015. Can There Be Political Common Ground for Improving Population Health? Milbank Quarterly Volume 93, Issue 1 (pages 24–27) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25752346/
  33. Kindig, D. 2015. Improving Our Children’s Health Is An Investment Priority. Milbank Quarterly Volume 93, Issue 2 Pages 255–258 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26044628/
  34. Kindig D. 2015.  What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Population Health? Does Population Health Mean in 2015?  Health Affairs blog April 6 2015 https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20150406.046151/full/
  35. Rosenbaum, S., Kindig, D, Byrnes M et al.  2015.  In 2011, the Estimated Size of the Nonprofit Hospital Tax Exemption Surpassed $24 Billion. Health Affairs 2015 34:7;1225-1233 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278791305_The_Value_Of_The_Nonprofit_Hospital_Tax_Exemption_Was_246_Billion_In_2011
  36. Kindig D, Lardinois N, Chatterjee D. 2016 Can States Simultaneously Improve Health Outcomes and Reduce Health Outcome Disparities? Prev Chronic Dis 2016;13:16012 https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2016/16_0126.htm
  37. Kindig David. 2016 To Launch And Sustain Local Health Outcome Trusts, Focus On ‘Backbone’ Resources. Health Affairs Blog February 10, 2016 https://iaphs.org/improving-population-health-continuing-journey/
  38. Kindig, David. 2017. Population Health Equity: Rate and Burden, Race and Class.  JAMA 2017; 317(5):467-468. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28097326/
  39. Kindig, David. Feb 3, 2017.Improving Population Health: Continuing the Journey. IAPHS Blog. https://iaphs.org/improving-population-health-continuing-journey/
  40. Kindig, David, Nobles,Jenna,  Zidan, Moheb. 2018  “Meeting the Institute of Medicine’s 2030 US Life Expectancy Target”, American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): pp. 87-92. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2017.304099 This paper was Editors Choice 2018 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5719677/
  41. Givens, M, Kindig, D, Tran, P, Faust, V.  Power: The Most Fundamental Cause of Health Inequity? Health Affairs Blog February 1, 2018 10.1377/hblog20180129.731387
  42. Kindig D, Lardinois N, Asada Y Mullahy J. Considering Mean and Inequality Health Outcomes Together: the Population Health Performance Index. 2018 International Journal for Equity in Health (2018) 17:25 DOI 10.1186/s12939-018-0731-2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816551/
  43. Kindig, David. Population Health Performance Index Calculator. UW Population Health Institute. http://match.wisc.edu/phpi/index.php
  44. Kindig, D and Milstein, R. A Balanced Investment Portfolio For Equitable Health And Well-Being Is An Imperative, And Within Reach. Health Affairs April 2018 37:4        https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.1463
  45. Keith P. Gennuso, PhD, David A. Kindig, MD, PhD, and Marjory L. Givens, PhD, MSPH        Join-point Trend Analysis of Infant Mortality Disparities in Wisconsin, 1999–2016   Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print March 21, 2019: e1–e5. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018. 304945) https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304945
  46. Sanne J. Magnan, MD, PhD, and David A. Kindig, MD, PhD 2019  Purchasing Population Health – Revisited . POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT Volume 22, Number 2, 2019 https://www.liebertpub.com/toc/pop/22/2
  47. Kindig, D and Magnan, S. 2019.Can Academic Population Health Departments Improve Population Health ? JAMA Network Open. 2019;2(4):e192205. doi: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2730467
  48. Kindig, D. 2019. Using Uncommon Data to Promote Political Common Ground in Reducing Infant Mortality. Milbank Quarterly ahead of print. 10 December 2019   https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.12441
  49. Kindig, David. January 20, 2020. Did You Read Any if These Pop Health Policy Articles? IAPHS Blog  https://iaphs.org/did-you-read-any-of-these-pop-health-policy-articles/