From Patients to Policy: Population Intervention Effects in Epidemiology.

Interest in implementation science and recent calls for consequentialist epidemiology urge epidemiologists to produce work more immediately applicable to public health practice. A clear vocabulary for such approaches is lacking. Here, we present a potential taxonomy of causal effects, distinguishing between "exposure effects" more relevant to patients and individuals; and "population intervention effects" more relevant to public health policy. We discuss this range of effects using figures and a simple numerical example.