The value-based care model is gaining momentum in the healthcare industry, and it is not hard to see why. After all, value-based care – which rewards healthcare providers with incentives based on the quality of care they provide to patients – has been shown to improve healthcare outcomes and reduces costs for patients. On paper, value-based care should be an easy sell for hospitals. However, the application of such a care model is not as straightforward as it sounds.

Speaking at Hospital Management Asia 2022, Morris said: “Implementation (of a value-based care model) is incredibly hard, and I think it represents, in this region, the difficulties where you have a private-public relationship. The majority of care for patients in the long-term is outside of the hospital. If we can manage our patients in that pre-illness phase, they may never get to the point where they actually have to be in the hospital. That's quite a difficult concept when you're a provider who's looking at your bottom line – how do you manage that?”

Implementing a value-based care model with a patient-centric view, however, is not just about reducing the cost of care for the patients, but also using an evidence-based approach to improve healthcare outcomes.

Morris explained: “If you're only reducing cost, using that to improve patient value is not necessarily the same thing. We often think of the patient as a customer, and that's perhaps the wrong view of the patient. When a patient is a customer, they'd potentially want the most expensive drug because it's perceived to be the best. It won't necessarily be based on evidence. 

“It's essential that when we start developing our value-based care models, we think of the patient, but we also think about how do we provide the best possible care, the evidence-based care, relevant to that as well. Elsevier spends a lot of time developing evidence-based content to try and improve outcomes, and oftentimes, the evidence says we do not intervene. We reduce the amount of treatments. We may not do surgery; we may do something different.

So, a patient-centred view of care needs to take into account the patients' values, their needs, and their express wishes. But you need to do that within the construct of the value that you're trying to achieve for your population.”

In order to get the best outcomes for patients, healthcare providers have to look at adopting a multi-disciplinary approach to their value-based care model – this means combining the knowledge and experience of the physician within the hospital with the primary care physicians, as well as working with nurses in the community, and working with the patient themselves.

Morris elaborated: “It's an interdisciplinary approach in terms of developing those measures that you want to put in place for health outcomes, and then actually learning from them.

“Unless you're looking at the cost across all of the healthcare elements – into the primary care, the home care elements – you won't have a full understanding of the total cost of care. Once you have this framework in place, you can then expand that across larger populations, and the more hospitals you have engaged in value-based care model, the better the success will be.”

The value-based care model can also help to reconnect clinicians with their patients as healers. This allows clinicians to think of their patients as a whole, rather than just being responsible for a particular disease. This, according to Morris, can reinvigorate clinicians, as he said: “If our doctors start to think of themselves as healers of their patients, then we start to reduce burnout in clinicians, and we can start to help clinicians engage again in their future role. 

“We know we have a crisis across the globe – we don’t have enough physicians, nurses, and allied healthcare workers. But if we can engage them, and give them value back to their roles, then we can reduce the number of people who are leaving.”

Learn more about how the healthcare industry can address pressing and emerging challenges, and the skills clinicians need for the future in our latest report.