High-value health care

Overview of the report

Most health care systems around the globe need new strategies to improve outcomes and hold the line on costs. Today’s leaders are looking for innovative, high-value solutions to critical challenges such as addressing social determinants of health; better aligning economic incentives with desired outcomes; putting patients at the center of care; improving chronic care management; and achieving better patient adherence to prescribed treatment regimens.

To spotlight successful strategies for producing high-value health care, the US Deloitte Center for Health Solutions talked to industry leaders and examined evidence from health system innovators around the world. Health care organizations globally—providers, payers, and life sciences companies—could benefit by adapting and adopting the successful models these groundbreaking organizations have pioneered to meet local needs and circumstances. This article’s case studies illustrate how successful initiatives tend to take a multi-pronged approach and leverage new technologies, insights, and business models to connect the right patient to the right solution at the right time. Innovative technology-based solutions—software, devices, web-enabled tools—can support new health care models. But to produce real change in health outcomes and bend the cost curve, health care models themselves also must be innovative.

The quest to deliver high-value health care

Strong leadership and industry stakeholder support are essential to making innovative, high-value health care work. With technology-aided solutions like the polypill or apps like BlueStar, prospective payers and physicians would benefit from education to help them understand how such solutions could help particular patient subgroups, as well as optimal ways to integrate them into a high-value health care delivery model.

Despite the potential challenges and requirements of replicating and implementing localized versions of the models illustrated, doing so could be an important step forward in the quest to deliver high-value health care. Models that take a multi-pronged, technology-enabled approach may be most likely to yield success, since today’s health challenges are complex and interrelated:

• Health Leads and Connecting to Care show that addressing social, non-medical needs can help improve patient health and reduce costs.
• Gesundes Kinzigtal and the Pacific Business Group on Health demonstrate that providers can lower costs when they share in the financial savings, or when financial incentives are aligned with doing the right thing at the right time.
• Kaiser Permanente’s HealthConnect and Ribera Salud show that when health care consumer choice is expanded—encompassing preferences such as whether they want to interact with providers in person or virtually or whether they prefer one clinic over another—health outcomes may improve and costs may fall.
• Vermont’s Blueprint for Health and Mexico’s CASALUD demonstrate that rethinking primary care and prevention strategies to better meet the needs of patients with chronic conditions may reduce costs and improve health outcomes.
• Technology-enabled solutions like a polypill or an app designed to help manage a chronic condition have the potential to improve treatment adherence, particularly if implemented as part of a high-value health care delivery model.

As they design care models for the future, health care providers and health plans in the United States and other developed countries can learn and benefit from the experiences of those who have already forged new paths towards the common goal of delivering higher-value health care.