While revising policy and regulatory frameworks is indeed crucial to enable and promote the transition to a value-based care model, there is another important factor to consider.

Dr Tamara Sunbul, medical director of clinical informatics at Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare in Saudi Arabia, demonstrated at HIMSS24 APAC what a successful value-based population health programme looks like. She spoke at the session, "Smart Hospitals, Shaping Population Health and Value-Based Care with Digital Mastery."

"This is not only the doctors, it's not only the nurses, it's not only the hospitals," she said about Johns Hopkins Aramco's CarePlus programme. That programme was shown to meet, and even surpass, its targeted outcomes for patient experience and health outcomes, credited to multi-stakeholder collaboration.

"It's actually the community, the governments, everybody coming together to make this happen. It's about creating green spaces, exercise facilities, wellness programs across."

"We need collaboration, such as private-public partnerships, for value-based care models to happen. It cannot be done in isolation. You cannot just do this as a healthcare system. You need your community and everybody to be together," Dr Sunbul emphasised.

She maintained, though, that revising policies and regulations and aligning payment methods are all important in pursuing a value-based care model at the health systems level. 

"If you're only going to compensate people for when they see a patient at the hospital, how is that going to help? Nobody's going to ever do population health because that requires compensating people for when they're taking care and preventing disease to start off with."

"The current way of getting [hospitals] paid to make profits for somebody visiting a hospital… needs to change if we want to improve population health and implement value-based care," she urged.