Maximizing Value for patients in Healthcare together

Healthcare has developed in an incredible and fascinating way over the past decades. Through (clinical) research and development of new treatment methods, patients’ quality of life improved. Chances to survive increased dramatically.

At the same time however, healthcare systems around the world are struggling with rising costs and uneven quality despite the hard work of very well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Ageing populations, increase of chronic diseases make it increasingly difficult to keep healthcare affordable to societies and individuals.

Thanks to technical innovations and with the aim to deliver care more cost-effective, care will transfer from the hospital towards the patient’s home. Resulting in more outsourcing of services. This means that hospitals need to develop more long term relationships with their suppliers, mostly with technical healthcare providers. The role of a hospital therefore moves from being a one stop shop at one location to being a director of care and medical technology.

Before healthcare organizations can embrace the principles of VBHC, buyers need to make a shift towards a value based approach. This requires moving from a transactional to a value chain stage based on the procurement maturity model (Rozemeijer and Van Weele, 1992) before being able to apply VBHC principles. This stage is based on the recognition that most important for success is delivering value to the patients. Which is the objective of VBHC and therefore a value based purchasing strategy can be evaporated in the total VBHC strategy. Making this transformation is not a single step but an overarching strategy.

We discovered ways to better select partners that will thrive the quest for more patient value at acceptable cost levels. The assessed topics are:

• Organize & Measure
• Move to bundled payments for care cycles
• Build an enabling information technology platform
• Integrate care delivery across facilities/geographies
• Contract and Risk Management

But, while focussing on partners, we also found out that creating patient value is a demanding assignment for a procurement department. We put the gained insights together to reach our objective: develop and deliver a prototype VBHC assessment tool that is useful to sourcing for supplier capabilities and contributing to patient value.