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In the healthcare world, everyone wants to achieve better outcomes at lower costs. But this is much easier said than done, pointed out Dr. Patrick Runnels, chief medical officer at Cleveland-based University Hospitals.
“We’ve been pursuing better outcomes at a lower cost without changing the fee-for-service expectations, which means we’re adding a bunch of stuff on top of the stuff we’re already asking physicians to do — that’s what value-based care has been so far,” he declared in an interview at a recent conference.
In other words, the way value-based care is currently practiced at health systems results in hours of new administrative tasks for physicians, including increased responsibilities for documentation, care coordination, patient engagement, preventive care outreach, and the tracking of financial and population health metrics. Without addressing this problem, value-based care models will never be able to reach true scale, Dr. Runnels said.