Value in Healthcare: Accelerating the Pace of Health System Transformation

For the past three years, a critical source of new thinking and research on how to improve healthcare value has been the World Economic Forum’s Value in Healthcare project. The project was launched in July 2016 by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The goals of the project were: to develop a comprehensive understanding of the key components of value-based health systems; to draw general lessons about the effective implementation of value-based healthcare by codifying best practices at leading healthcare institutions around the world; to identify the potential obstacles preventing health systems from delivering better outcomes, etc.

The authors believe that building the necessary levels of trust and the institutional mechanisms for effective cooperation in the global healthcare sector will require both top-down and bottom-up initiatives. The former include developing a shared vision, accelerating the pace of change, and realizing full potential of system improvement, while the latter involve testing this vision in the real world and scaling up.

In this report, which is the third and final in the series, the authors focus on three initiatives for accelerating the value-based transformation of global health systems. The initiatives are:

• a «user’s guide» to health system transformation, based on the authors’ review of leading transformation efforts around the world and their own experience in launching the Atlanta and Ontario initiatives;
• a «roadmap» for global health-informatics standardization, which sets out a comprehensive agenda for accelerating the development of global health-informatics standards, including a proposed «digital health bill of rights» that puts patient empowerment at the centre of informatics standardization efforts;
• a new public-private coalition for value in healthcare, known as the Global Coalition for Value in Healthcare and initially hosted by the World Economic Forum, which will serve as a global platform to share learnings, develop effective best practices, and guide the development of value-based health systems worldwide.

The authors state that in the three years of the Value in Healthcare project, they have witnessed the emergence of an important trend: activity in value-based healthcare is moving beyond the level of single healthcare organizations. Increasingly, it encompasses broad-based multistakeholder collaborations designed to have a material impact on entire health systems — at the local, regional, national and even international level. These multistakeholder collaborations have the potential to drive value for patients and for health systems, but they also require an effective context to guarantee success.