Value-Based Health Care

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 value-based health care models provide the best path towards improving the quality of care and curbing 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 medical care in health systems around the world.
• 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.