While value-based healthcare is a hot topic for many medical groups, for Thom Walsh, PhD, it’s how he’s always done things.
Walsh says he never thought about the work he does as being in response to a health policy change: “In my mind it’s been more about how do we understand how our patients are perceiving the benefit they receive,” says Walsh. “How are they doing measured by what matters most to them, and then how much does it cost us to deliver that? Right now, people might call that value, but it’s really kind of a timeless principle, right?”
Walsh, co-founder of Cardinal Point Healthcare Solutions, a teacher at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Lebanon, N.H., and author of the new book, Navigating to Value in Healthcare, recommends that practices looking to transition to a more value-based system first look at the publicly available data to understand what your practice looks like to outsiders about how well it’s functioning.
“When you do that you’ll find that there are some places where you are doing really well and you might not have even known that,” says Walsh. But you will also identify places where there’s room for improvement.
Once you’ve identified what areas you need to work on, Walsh recommends looking to see where you have the best teams to make those improvements. “And when you find some alignment between a targeted condition where you know there’s a need for improvement and you have people eager and wanting to be involved, then that’s a home run,” explains Walsh.
Learn how to create the systems and processes to help you make the transition from volume- to value-based payment arrangements with Thom Walsh’s new book, Navigating to Value in Healthcare.
