Philips publishes Position Paper on implementing Value-based Healthcare

Faced with multiple challenges, including the aging population, endemic chronic disease, rising patient demands, clinician burn-out and the soaring cost of care, healthcare systems worldwide are increasingly being stressed to their limits. As a result, patient outcomes often remain sub-optimal, not through want of trying but simply due to lack of effective resources. Yet the transition to value-based care (allocation of resources based squarely on patient experiences and outcomes), which is widely seen as the solution to many of today’s problems, has been slow to materialize. A new positioning paper from Philips, titled ‘Value-based care – Turning healthcare into a dynamic and patient-focused reality’ offers a perspective on why this is the case and proposes a set of measures to accelerate the implementation and scale up of value-based care.

Central to the position paper’s argument is the belief that all stakeholders, including industry and policy makers, need to work together and share the risks in order to build a successful and sustainable future for value-based healthcare – one that achieves the quadruple aim of better health outcomes, improved patient experiences, better staff satisfaction and lower cost of care.

In order to facilitate the required ecosystem of stakeholder collaboration and scale up new initiatives, it proposes the need for standardized ways of measuring patient-reported outcomes against which resources can be optimally allocated. It also proposes greater use of health informatics and digital innovation to connect clinical processes and end-to-end workflows, and the use of artificial intelligence to help healthcare professionals better understand and make optimum use of the ever-increasing volume of patient data available to them. Coupled with reform of reimbursement models, moving away from the current fee-for-service model to outcome-based remuneration models, the position paper argues that adopting such measures is key to turning much of today’s value-based care theory into a dynamic patient-focused reality.

To illustrate what can been achieved, the paper highlights numerous examples of how Philips is already helping healthcare organizations worldwide to implement value-based care strategies.