Report: U.S. Near Last in Value-Based Healthcare

value-based healthcareA Boston Consulting Group study found that the United States ranked behind eight other industrialized nations in value-based healthcare adoption.  The global management consulting firm assessed the progress of twelve countries toward this end, an approach which could reduce the industry’s expenses while improving patients’ health outcomes.

The report, “Progress Toward Value-Based Health Care: Lessons from 12 Countries,” looked at the national health systems and evaluated them along two dimensions.  The degree to which important supports of value-based healthcare are in place at the national level was the first; specifically, common national standards and legal and consent frameworks, IT insfrastructure, the ability to link health outcomes with costs, and a high level of engagement on the part of healthcare providers and policymakers.  The second dimension considered each country’s existing disease registries with regard to the richness of the data and the sophistication of the medical community’s use of it.  These registries track selected health outcomes for patients who have the same diagnosis or have undergone the same medical procedure(s).

Sweden, Singapore, Canada, and the United Kingdom came out on top in the report, while the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany, and Hungary were at the bottom.  The American healthcare system has the highest per capita costs of the twelve countries studied, and while it does have some successful national disease registries, including the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Patient Registry and the American College of Cardiology’s CathPCI Registry, there is no national mechanism to compel providers to report patient outcomes to these registries, nor are there reporting or clinical outcomes metrics standards in use on a national level.  As reimbursement is shifting to an outcome-oriented basis from a volume one, the U.S. healthcare industry must move to close this gap with the rest of the industrialized world.

The use of an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system such as Lytec MD, Allscripts MyWay, or McKesson Practice Choice is critical to managing and reporting on data which can be added to these kinds of patient registries.  A healthcare technology consultant at Microwize Technology can help you with installing and implementing an EHR.