To get our money’s worth in healthcare, we need to collaborate

This is the title of an interesting commentary in Modern Healthcare by my colleague Mark Linthicum. An excerpt is below.

In healthcare, different stakeholders have vastly different perceptions of value, with important implications for decisionmaking. An employer paying for healthcare may want to find solutions that decrease employee absences and prevent lengthy hospitalizations. A health insurer might prioritize reducing total costs in the short run, especially if it has frequent enrollee turnover. An insured patient—especially one of the increasing number of patients on high-deductible health plans—would likely care much more about out-of-pocket costs and impacts on their quality of life. The list goes on.

Every healthcare decision affects multiple stakeholders—most importantly, patients—but current value assessments tend to be conducted from a single perspective. There is currently no consensus on a scientifically credible and unbiased way to measure value in treatments and services. To make matters worse, current assessments of value often lack transparency, which makes it difficult to gauge accuracy or engage in constructive dialogue.

The Innovation and Value Initiative is working to change that.

In November 2017, the IVI launched the Open-Source Value Project to provide an objective, scientifically credible and truly collaborative way for all healthcare stakeholders to individually measure value in treatments and services. We’ve kicked off the project with a tool measuring value in treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, one of our nation’s costliest chronic diseases. As its name indicates, the Open-Source Value Project uses an open-source modeling approach to measure treatment value. Like open-source software, all of our tools and models are freely available for use by everyone and are continually evolving based on user feedback.

The article provides more detail on the challenges facing value frameworks, and how more open, flexible approaches to measuring value–such as those developed at the Innovation and Value Initiative–can help bridge the divide across stakeholder groups.

from Healthcare Economist http://ift.tt/2n3qS3E