Unlocking Value-Based Care's Upside

Value-based purchasing has begun to take hold, with federal incentives for lower-cost care and best performance and disincentives for unnecessary care. Many of the VBP metrics will be a tall order for healthcare systems, especially HCAHPS.

Yet healthcare executives also see great upside in VBP. In the HealthLeaders 2013 Industry Survey, VBP rated as the number-two opportunity for organizations, garnering 64% of the vote from the 823 respondents.

Geisinger is ready to help its counterparts realize the opportunity. Last week, Geisinger announced the launch of xG Health Solutions, a spinoff company that will offer the Geisinger approach to value-based care for a price.

xG aims to help clients achieve better care at lower cost. In announcing xG, Geisinger President and CEO Glenn D. Steele Jr., MD, PhD, said, "It is generally accepted in the healthcare industry that somewhere between 30 to 40% of the care that is provided is not only unnecessary, but may actually cause harm to patients."

Danville, PA-based Geisinger, an integrated delivery system that bills itself as the nation's largest rural health provider, is widely recognized for its quality of care, low cost, and innovations such as early EMR adoption. This identity is behind the creation of xG, says its new CEO, Earl P. Steinberg, MD, MPP, Geisinger's executive vice president of innovation and dissemination. "[Steele] is tired of hearing many people say that Geisinger is a one-off, that has a dozen unique circumstances that enable it to provide the caliber care that it provides and that, while it's interesting how it does it, it's irrelevant because it's not generalizable. He doesn't believe that. And so I was hired 18 months ago to figure out how to take what Geisinger has innovated and learned to export that to other healthcare delivery systems."