Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality, despite the hard work of well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Health care leaders and policy makers have tried countless incremental fixes—attacking fraud, reducing errors, enforcing practice guidelines, making patients better “consumers,” implementing electronic medical records—but none have had much impact.
It’s time for a fundamentally new strategy. At its core is maximizing value for patients: that is, achieving the best outcomes at the lowest cost.
In this Harvard Business Review article by Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee, they write about a strategy for moving to a high-value health care delivery system comprising six interdependent components:
- organising around patients’ medical conditions rather than physicians’ medical specialties,
- measuring costs and outcomes for each patient,
- developing bundled prices for the full care cycle,
- integrating care across separate facilities,
- expanding geographic reach, and
- building an enabling IT platform.
The transformation to Value Based Health Care (VBHC) is well under way. Some organisations, such as the Cleveland Clinic and Germany’s Schön Klinik, have undertaken large-scale changes involving multiple components of the value agenda.
The result has been striking improvements in outcomes and efficiency, and growth in market share.
Read more at Harvard Business Review…