Is There Value in VBP?

Gary Tiller

CEO
Ninnescah Valley Health System Inc.
Kingman (Kan.) Community Hospital

Don't call it value-based purchasing. Call it "We are going to throw you under the bus and take your money." Do I have any faith in these things? Not much. It's a ruse. First of all let's separate quality from cost. There are a thousand different interventions, séances, Kumbaya moments in quality that HHS is pushing and they are plunking down money and some of these things they have studied for years and they have not proven to be of any benefit.

The push for quality is not going to save money and it's not going to improve quality either. But they tie money to all these things.

The two things that have a chance to actually save money are the medical home concept and the evidence-based medicine, and we will never see much of those. For one thing, on the medical home, the family practice docs don't want to lose the camaraderie with the specialists, and the specialists don't want to see any of that happen. They want to see the patient get into that vortex where the specialists keep handing them off. While you may impact the rate of increase with this sort of stuff, you are not going to ever have a decrease.