The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care

Excerpt From the Masters of Strategy- Porter & Lee

In health care, the days of business as usual are over. Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality despite the hard work of well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians.

Health care leaders and policy makers have tried countless incremental fixes—attacking fraud, reducing errors, enforcing practice guidelines, making patients better “consumers,” implementing electronic medical records—but none have had much impact.

It’s time for a fundamentally new strategy.

At its core is maximizing value for patients: that is, achieving-

The Best Outcomes At The Lowest Cost.

·       Healthcare providers must move away from a supply-driven health care system organized around what physicians do and toward a patient-centered system organized around what patients need.  

·       Shift the focus from the volume and profitability of services provided—physician visits, hospitalizations, procedures, and tests—to the patient outcomes achieved.

·       And replace today’s fragmented system, in which every local provider offers a full range of services, with a system in which services for particular medical conditions are concentrated in health-delivery organizations and in the right locations to deliver high-value care.

Making this transformation is not a single step but an overarching strategy. We call it the “value agenda.”

 It will require restructuring how health care delivery is organized, measured, and reimbursed.

In 2006, Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg introduced the value agenda in their book Redefining Health Care. Since then, through our research and the work of thousands of health care leaders and academic researchers around the world, the tools to implement the agenda have been developed, and their deployment by providers and other organizations is rapidly spreading.

The transformation to value-based health care is well under way. Some organizations are still at the stage of pilots and initiatives in individual practice areas.

Other organizations, such as the Cleveland Clinic and Germany’s Schön Klinik, have undertaken large-scale changes involving multiple components of the value agenda. The result has been striking improvements in outcomes and efficiency, and growth in market share.

There is no longer any doubt about how to increase the value of care. The question is, which organizations will lead the way and how quickly can others follow? The challenge of becoming a value-based organization should not be underestimated, given the entrenched interests and practices of many decades. This transformation must come from within.

Only physicians and provider organizations can put in place the set of interdependent steps needed to improve value, because ultimately value is determined by how medicine is practiced.

Yet every other stakeholder in the health care system has a role to play. Patients, health plans, employers, and suppliers can hasten the transformation—and all will equally benefit!