I am pleased to bring our readers this special issue of the Journal for Healthcare Quality (JHQ), which is the culmination of nearly 18 months of work from the team collaborators at the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) and the Jefferson College of Population Health (JCPH), in addition to the work of our colleagues from across the country and overseas.

Population health is certainly a popular term today, propelled to a position of national prominence by its inclusion as a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act's drive toward achieving the "Triple Aim." Although there are many extant interpretations and definitions of population health, healthcare leaders are charged with one primary directive. Simply put, we must find ways to operationalize the Triple Aim to improve the health of the population, reduce per capita costs, and improve the individual experience of care. I believe that this special issue of JHQ represents an important step in that direction by reporting on the outcomes of recent research in this area.

There is heartening, albeit, slow progress toward achieving the Triple Aim. The six articles in this issue represent a snapshot in time on our journey. The order of the published articles is significant, moving from a national review of progress toward implementation of population-based programs, all the way to the practice level with an article specifying improvement in certain tests and procedures. Please allow me, then, to outline the six outstanding articles as they appear in the pages ahead.

Perez et al contribute greatly to our understanding of population health programs at the national level by their review of 121 initiatives across a key group of public hospitals and health systems in our country known as "America's Essential Hospitals." My take is that we are on the way toward establishing a true culture of health, at least in these critically important institutions.

Arsenault et al broaden our understanding of teamwork because it relates to improving colon cancer screening rates-surely an important population health metric. They demonstrate that by engaging with community health workers at a very local level, we actually can dramatically improve colon cancer screening rates. With the advent of community health workers, care navigators, care managers, and others, Arsenault et al have given us new ammunition to prove that an expansion of the team approach to healthcare is warranted.

Peracchio provides a close look at the actual practice setting to show that through an educational program to improve the screening for chronic lung disease, we can improve the individual experience of care and reduce per capita cost.

Wickramasinghe and Gururajan in Australia have demonstrated a unique mobile solution to connect data from patients suffering with gestational diabetes to their caregivers in an efficient and rapid manner. This type of mobile solution can allow us to more readily create a population registry at the local level. Such registries certainly will be more prevalent in the near term as we implement population-based programs.

Population health also means changing our daily work flow. The final two papers emphasize the importance of this work at the ground level. Kroch and his colleagues from the Premier Healthcare Alliance demonstrated that we still have a lot to learn about the factors predicting readmission. Using a very large national data set, his team has demonstrated that readmissions are a complex process and while the index clinical condition (the reason for admission) is important, we cannot deny that socioeconomic factors, race and payer status, all play a role in this process. Hospital leaders embarking on a population health strategy should pay heed to these findings.

Finally, Mitchell and her colleagues have taken the well known RED system, Re-Engineering Discharge, and tested this tool in 10 representative hospitals from across the nation. In this powerful piece of scholarship, they demonstrated, yet again, that even a widely accepted and validated tool like RED cannot work without a supportive hospital culture and leadership engagement.

There you have it! These six teams from across the globe demonstrate that the scholarship of population health is thriving. Kudos to the leaders of NAHQ for allocating resources for the publication of this special issue of their important journal. Compliments, as well, to the members of NAHQ from across the nation who made important contributions to the literature as noted above.

As the guest Editor-in-Chief, I want to thank some specific individuals who made this special issue possible, starting with Stephanie Mercado, Executive Director of NAHQ, for her leadership and dedication to our field. Also, special thanks to Deborah Meiris at JCPH, stalwart Managing Editor for our scholarly journals, Population Health Management and the American Journal of Medical Quality. We simply could not have created this special issue without her expertise.

In closing, once again, I'm very proud of NAHQ and JCPH. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on any of the articles in the pages that follow. Also, I would encourage our readers to continue to promote the scholarship of population health, which will enable us to improve health outcomes.