Why Healthcare Data Won’t Magically Create Value-Based Care
Irv Lichtenwald, President & CEO of Medsphere Systems Corporation
The conversation about transitioning the American healthcare system from fee for service (FFS) to value-based care (aka, pay for performance) has been going on for more than 15 years. Still, it felt like time travel to come across a Health Affairs book review from 2006 by the late Princeton Professor Uwe Reinhardt that could have been written last month.
In evaluating what he describes as the “utopian vision” laid out in Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg’s
Redefining Health Care (a title, by the way, that can be recycled without penalty just as soon as the previous use has fallen out of the public memory), Reinhardt identifies a fatal flaw: Explaining what American healthcare
Irv Lichtenwald, President & CEO of Medsphere Systems Corporation
We’re now in a new year and new presidential administration. At least three companies are producing effective COVID-19 vaccines, which are being administered to healthcare workers, teachers, and the elderly. By summer, hopefully a large majority of the population in most countries will be vaccinated. From where the world now stands, we can see an end to prolonged isolation, trauma, fear, grief, and economic torpor.
But out of the woods, we are not.
The virus mutates, perhaps more rapidly than expected. Maybe the existing vaccines will handle all variants. One can hope.