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For many health systems and groups, episodes are esoteric. Providers often think of them only in context of risk-based payment models like bundled payments and capitation. Navigating Value-Based Health Care contracts, providers analyze and model performance under Fee-for-Service and episode-based payments to decide their course of action. Or, if already in Value-Based reimbursement, they use them as targets for costs to pinpoint physicians who exceed the targets.
These strategies are shortsighted and limited. Even at best, they do nothing to address what is actually driving cost of care. By using payer-constructed episode specifications, such strategies potentially obscure valuable clinical and cost information from evaluation. These are lost opportunities for providers to direct their own clinically driven cost control initiatives. Analyses of patient care episodes are tailor-made for providers to conduct inquiries of costs and cost drivers, resource use, patient outcomes, and inequities in health care. But to do that, we need to look at them differently than payers do.