After more than a decade of extraordinary progress, the international movement for value-based health care needs to embrace a new strategic ambition.

Authors: Stefan Larsson, MD, PhD, Jennifer Clawson, MBA, and Robert Howard

NEJM Catalyst February 24, 2023

In this article, we propose a framework for understanding value-based health care as an organizing principle for health system transformation and call for a public-private “moonshot”⁵ in which governments, in cooperation with industry stakeholders, invest in the value-based transformation of national health systems. The goal of such an initiative would be to develop coordinated public policies, regulations, and shared infrastructure to encourage multi-stakeholder cooperation and value-based innovation across all sectors of the global health care industry and to support the emergence of dynamic provider ecosystems that deliver high-value care. In particular, the moonshot should focus on three especially critical tasks:

• Institutionalize the systematic collection and sharing of comprehensive data on health outcomes that matter to patients, ideally on a global scale.
• Align the many current initiatives in the domain of value-based payment with the continuous improvement in the health outcomes delivered to patients.
• Invest in the creation of digital standards and open platforms that will transform the health sector into a genuine learning system.

We acknowledge that this is a visionary agenda. But the fact is, each of these steps is already happening in some form in countries around the world. The challenge for the future: government policy makers and health care leaders need to take collective action to accelerate these emerging trends.

READ MORE