U.S. Trails in Adopting Value-based Healthcare

The United States faces major obstacles in taking advantage of "value-based healthcare"-one of the most promising developments in healthcare, according to a new study by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

BCG assessed the progress of 12 developed-world countries in adopting value-based healthcare, an ­approach to better controlling healthcare costs by improving health outcomes while maintaining or lowering cost. The results of the ­assessment appear in a report titled Progress Toward Value-Based Health Care: Lessons From 12 Countries.

The assessment evaluates national health systems along two dimensions, explains Neil Soderlund, a BCG partner and coauthor of the report. The first is the degree to which key supports of value-based healthcare are in place at the national level-for example, common ­national standards and IT infrastructure, national legal and consent frameworks, the ability to link health outcomes with costs, and high engagement on the part of clinicians and policymakers. The second is the quality of a country's existing disease registries (institutions that track selected health outcomes in a population of patients with the same diagnosis or who have undergone the same medical procedure), both in terms of the richness of the data and the sophistication of the medical community's use of the data.