What the Pandemic Taught Us About Value-based Care

By RICHARD ISSACS You’ll recall that we ran a long piece (pt 1, pt 2) about Medicare Advantage from former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson earlier this year. Here’s a somewhat related piece from the current head of the Permanente Medical Group about what actually happened there and elsewhere during the pandemic–Matthew Holt The COVID-19 pandemic has provided important lessons regarding the structure and delivery of health care in the United States, and one of the most significant takeaways has been the need to shift to value-based models of care. The urgency for this transformation was clear from the pandemic’s earliest days, as shelter-in-place orders caused patient visits to brick-and-mortar facilities to plummet. That decline dealt a financial blow to many fee-for-service health care providers, who are paid per patient visit, treatment or test performed — regardless of the patient’s health outcome. Prepaid, value-based health care systems, on the other hand, have demonstrated that they are better equipped to respond to a continually evolving health care landscape. Because they are integrated, with a focus on seamless care coordination, and they are accountable for both the quality of care and cost, these systems can leverage technologies in different ways to rapidly adapt to major disruptions and other market dynamics. Priorities are in the right place: the patient’s best interests. Value is generated by delivering the right lev...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Medical Practice Physicians Kaiser Permanente Medicare Advantage Pandemic Richard Isaacs value-based care Source Type: blogs