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For patients, healthcare affordability is about more than the price of an individual service. It is also about whether the healthcare system meets their needs. Does the system help them find the right care at the right time to better treat or manage their conditions — or does it leave them to navigate a maze of appointments, specialists and disconnected information on their own, which can lead to more costly care needs in the future? In other words, patients experience affordability both through their direct financial obligations and through their ability to access timely, coordinated care.
Value-based care is a critical tool for achieving this aim and a core strategy in AHA’s recent report Making Health Care More Affordable: A Blueprint to Lower Costs, Improve Access and Enhance Quality.
Value-based care is a way of structuring and paying for care that can improve affordability through a better patient experience, improved health outcomes and stronger alignment across the services a patient needs and what will be covered. Instead of paying providers based primarily on the volume of services they perform, value-based care gives hospitals, physicians and other caregivers flexibility to change how they deliver care and shifts payments toward ensuring that care delivery better aligns with patients’ needs. The goal is to help patients receive the care they need while reducing fragmentation, avoidable complications and services that do not improve their health by enabling healthcare providers to be innovative in redesigning care.