HP challenge: How can we advance value-based care services?

Join us at SplashX Invent Health, co-hosted by HP on September 14 in Palo Alto

On the evening of September 14, 2017 down at Hewlett-Packard headquarters, I will be co-hosting, along with Bambi Francisco Roizen, an intimate gathering of very smart tech innovators, VCs, and healthcare incumbents to discuss the benefits and challenges of moving the healthcare ecosystem from a volume-based service to a value-based service.

You can see the event here: SplashX Invent Health, co-hosted by HP and Vator.

Employers, health plans, and government purchasers of healthcare are driven to transition to value-based system and payment models so that they can align physician and hospital rewards and penalties with cost, quality, and outcome measures. 

Yet only three percent of the value-based health systems provide more than half of the value-based contracts and only 27 percent of health systems have rolled out pilots of value-based payments.

With my role at HP, as faculty at Stanford and as a practicing provider, I have seen firsthand the benefit of a value-based solution. At the same time, we face many challenges. At this event I am co-hosting, I want to present a challenge to innovators, healthcare providers, payers and others in the ecosystem to think about how we can move forward. By presenting the benefits and the challenges, I hope we can walk away next Thursday evening with at least a couple of solutions and solid takeaways.

Impact of volume based to value-based:

For patient: a compassionate and convenient care that results in better functioning and decreased suffering while minimizing out-of-pocket expenses. 

For employer / health plan: a healthier, more productive workplace at an affordable cost.

For population: overall community well-being, ranging from physical, psychological and social indicators of health.

Challenges: 

For self-insured employers: It's difficult to assess true value-based health systems, also a lack of options of value-based systems in the country. There's a lag in health systems transitioning to value-based payment models. There's lack of clarity and certainty in federal policies. Higher utilization of high deductible PPO benefit plans driven by patient, and not by their primary care providers.

For patients: They lack the perception of value; They experience fewer options and the narrow networks; They have existing relationships that make it hard for them to move to high-value providers.  

For providers: Value-based compensations are low; There is a lack of reliable, timely and actionable tools like MU EHRs, for care-gap analysis, clinical protocols, data on care cost, interoperability, providers' care pattern and performance information, cost and quality information of specialists. Only 36 percent of providers have access to some of these tools.  

Image source: Corstrata