Getting Started

The first steps in working to improve the health of a population; enhance the patient experience of care (including quality, access, and reliability); and reduce, or at least control, the per capita cost of care include:

Conduct an organizational self-assessment in order to understand where you are on the Triple Aim journey
Understand what is involved in planning and leading a Triple Aim effort in your organization or community
Begin to collect data that reflects the elements of the Triple Aim

Suggested Resources for Getting Started

Design of a Triple Aim Enterprise
This video explains five components of a Triple Aim initiative: Focus on individuals and families; Redesign of primary care services and structures; Population health management; Cost control platform; System integration and execution.

A Guide to Measuring the Triple Aim: Population Health, Experience of Care, and Per Capita Cost
This IHI white paper provides a menu of suggested measures for the three dimensions of the Triple Aim. The menu is based on a combination of the analytic frameworks presented in the paper and the practical experience of the organizations participating in the IHI Triple Aim prototyping initiative. The suggested measures are accompanied by data sources and examples. The paper also describes how the measures might be used along with increasingly specific, cascading process and outcome measures for particular projects to create a learning system to achieve the Triple Aim.

Populations, Population Health, and the Evolution of Population Management: Making Sense of the Terminology
The idea that the successful health and health care organizations of the future will be those that can simultaneously deliver excellent quality of care, at lower total costs, while improving the health of their population is taking hold. Ninon Lewis, a leader of IHI’s Triple Aim programs, helps bring clarity to the definitions of "population," "population health," and "population management".

A Primer on Defining the Triple Aim
The words "Triple Aim" and the terms that are part of its lexicon are often misused. This primer offers practical guidance on how to make sense of and use population-focused terminology and Triple Aim terminology (including “Triple Aim,” “IHI Triple Aim,” and “IHI Triple Aim Initiative”).

Pathways to Population Health
A collaboration among five organizations including IHI, Pathways to Population Health aims to help health care organizations accelerate their individual and collective efforts to improve health, well-being, and equity within communities.

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Building Improvement Capability

No matter what area of health or health care improvement one is working on, improvement capability is foundational and crucial to success.

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What Is the Triple Aim?

The IHI Triple Aim is a framework developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement that describes an approach to optimizing health system performance. It is IHI’s belief that new designs must be developed to simultaneously pursue three dimensions, which we call the “Triple Aim”:

Improving the patient experience of care (including quality and satisfaction);
Improving the health of populations; and
Reducing the per capita cost of health care.

Bellin Health: A Triple Aim Improvement Story
Bellin Health is an example that illustrates the evolution of a health system that began working on the Triple Aim with an enrolled population, built skills over time, expanded its Triple Aim work to include more populations, and eventually became involved with a multistakeholder group focused on a regional population.
Health Improvement Partnership of Santa Cruz County: A Triple Aim Improvement Story
This Triple Aim improvement story examines the work of one community pursuing a regional focus to improve population health, and the backbone organization that established the Triple Aim as its guiding framework for improving health outcomes of those served by safety net clinics, with a focus on vulnerable populations — in particular, low-income childless adults, undocumented people, and young entrepreneurs — all of whom had little or no access to health care.
Healthy Shelby: A Triple Aim Improvement Story
This Triple Aim improvement story examines the work of the Healthy Shelby Initiative in Tennessee, a community pursuing a regional focus to improve population health by linking public health, hospitals, health care providers, social service providers, academic institutions, the faith community, local government, and funders to work together to tackle some of the county’s most critical health problems infant mortality, chronic disease management, and end-of-life care.
Indian Health Service Chinle Service Unit: A Triple Aim Improvement Story
This Triple Aim improvement story on the Indian Health Service Chinle Service Unit is an example that demonstrates how an organization funded and directed by the US government can take on the challenge of the Triple Aim for a Native American population.
Signature Healthcare: A Triple Aim Improvement Story
By creating a process to improve care for the frail elderly Medicare population with complex needs, and by building the supporting infrastructure in primary care, Signature Healthcare was successful in decreasing emergency department utilization and reducing acute admissions while maintaining patient satisfaction. The organization was a participant in the IHI Triple Aim Community from 2012 to 2014.