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Value-Based Health Care

Value-based health care is more than a concept. It is a rapidly emerging practice to transform health care and make it more sustainable by improving outcomes while maintaining or lowering total costs. BCG helps health care organizations adopt this transformative model.

Health care systems have a value problem, and the usual solutions—such as cost containment—are not solving it. For more than a decade, our value-based health care consulting experts have worked with health care innovators to help organizations develop cutting-edge value-based health care strategies in order to improve patient outcomes while maintaining or lowering total costs.


What is Value-Based Health Care?

Health outcomes vary widely across hospitals, regions, and countries. And this holds true irrespective of the amount of money invested in the systems: those that spend the most money do not necessarily provide the best care. There is growing evidence that a substantial portion of health care spending is, quite simply, wasted on avoidable medical complications or medically unnecessary treatments.

To address these problems, industry leaders have begun to embrace value-based health care. Health systems around the world are systematically collecting, sharing, and analyzing health outcome data by disease group and population segment. By making this data standard and transparent, clinicians can benchmark and compare performance across care sites, document variations in health outcomes, identify best practices, and steer resources toward interventions and practices that have the highest value for patients. At BCG, we believe this value-based approach is the best way both to improve the quality of care and to curb excess health care spending.


The Benefits of Value-Based Health Care

By focusing on—and tracking—the health outcomes that matter most to patients, health care organizations achieve many benefits:

  • Health systems deliver better outcomes more consistently.
  • Innovative, value-adding treatments are identified and disseminated more rapidly.
  • Total health care costs are controlled more effectively, because unnecessary procedures are eliminated, expensive complications occur less frequently, and repeat treatments are avoided.
  • Clinical research is accelerated because evidence is generated more quickly, enabling faster development of improved clinical guidelines.
  • Treatments are better matched to the needs and preferences of individual patients.

How We Support the Value-Based Health Care Agenda

We have partnered with pioneering organizations to uncover value-based health care insights and drive a common agenda for change.

  • Cofounder of ICHOM, the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement. The mission of ICHOM is to serve as a catalyst for the global value-based transformation of health care by defining standard sets of outcome measures that matter most to patients and supporting the definition and dissemination of best practices.
  • The Global Coalition for Value in Health Care. In 2019, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with BCG, formed the Global Coalition for Value in Healthcare, a public-private collaboration to accelerate the transition to value-based health care in health systems around the world. It serves as a global platform to share learnings, develop effective best practices, and guide the development of value-based health care models globally.
  • MedTech Europe. BCG and MedTech Europe, a European trade association representing the medical technology industry, have forged an ongoing collaboration on value-based procurement in medtech. They have partnered with leading procurers to develop a framework that helps contracting authorities in the health care industry make smarter procurement decisions based on an enhanced ratio of quality to price.

Our Proprietary Tools and Solutions

Our value-based health care consultants use a variety of proven benchmarks, tools, and frameworks to help track and drive progress toward value-based health care. Examples include:

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Our Value-Based Health Care Maturity Assessment Framework measures the progress of different countries or health care systems as they work to deliver greater value in health care.

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BCG’s Hospital Suite compiles hospital metrics across regions to facilitate global health care benchmarking in such areas as hospital infrastructure, performance, finance, quality, and contracts.

 

Our Insights on Value-Based Health Care

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Our New Book on Value-Based Health Care

"One of the best books on health care that I have ever read. It takes the concept of value-based health care from rhetoric to actionable frameworks for strategy and operations."

Thomas Lee, MD Chief Medical Officer of Press Ganey and Editor-in-Chief of NEJM Catalyst

"The Patient Priority is intelligent, insightful, and intriguing. Larsson, Clawson, and Kellar provide a fresh, well-documented, and inspiring investigation into how to make value-based transformation a moonshot target for national health systems."

Francesca Colombo Head of the Health Division of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

"Offers a compelling action plan for realizing a better future through the systematic tracking and continuous improvement of the health outcomes that matter to patients."

Jamie Heywood CEO of Alden Scientific and Founder, former Chairman, and CEO of PatientsLikeMe

"The Patient Priority lays out a compelling road map for the future in which public-private partnerships work together to accelerate the value-based transformation of the world’s health systems. Highly recommended."

Shyam Bishen Head of Health and Healthcare at the World Economic Forum and former Deputy Director of Global Health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

"An insightful read for anyone interested in learning more about the industry or in leading its transformation."

Bruce Broussard President and CEO of Humana, Inc.

"The Patient Priority combines a lucid analysis of the central issues that beset health systems with well-chosen case studies emphasizing practical approaches to addressing the challenges we face."

Chorh-Chuan Tan, MBBS, PhD Chief Health Scientist and Executive Director of the Office of Healthcare Transformation at the Singapore Ministry of Health

Meet Our Value-Based Health Care Consulting Experts

Our value-based health care consultants partner with leading companies to develop solutions in outcome measurement, health registries, value-based medical care, value-based payment models, value-based reimbursement in health care, value-based agreements, and more.

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