Scott Wallace

Around the world, value-based care delivery is gaining momentum – and vital support. Improving value – health outcomes that matter to patients for the cost of delivering those outcomes – is now widely recognized as a critical objective of health care reform. And most health care leaders view it as an urgent priority. But how do organizations redefine care to dramatically improve value for patients? In nearly a decade implementing value-based care worldwide, Scott Wallace has observed that when leaders set the compass by establishing value for patients as the unequivocal goal, they create a powerful cultural shift, inspiring care teams and renewing the professional calling of those in health and healing.

But what happens next? Inevitably, inspirational objectives lead to the question of “How?” Wallace discusses four steps that organizations seeking to redefine care delivery must work through. Taking these “steps within your stride” transforms an organization in the direction of higher value services for patients, no heroic leaps required.

Health care is about service and experience. Although most service design starts by identifying customers’ unmet needs, health care delivery innovations often rely on clinicians’ views, overlooking patients’ needs and goals. That difference explains why many care delivery innovations produce disappointing results. To get better results, care delivery organizations need to understand the experiences of patients as they live their lives, says Scott Wallace. His Experience Group methodology provides a solution to the challenges of knowing what matters to patients and of gaining insights about unmet needs, gaps in care and obstacles that prevent people from achieving better health.

Wallace discusses the Experience Group method and how it provides deeper insight than surveys or focus groups, both of which are constrained by the presumptions of their creators and are often subject to courtesy biases. Most patient advisory panels are too heterogeneous, leaving patients to discuss only issues they have in common, which are often not specific to health (e.g., parking, waiting and food service).  He also describes in detail the challenges organizations face designing new, more effective health care services and reveals some of the insights identified with the Experience Group methodology.

When evaluating a patient’s health care experience, many surveys simply ask about processes such as, “how was the check-in experience?” Most questionnaires don’t ask about the actual outcome of care. According to Scott Wallace, managing director of the Value Institute for Health and Care, “This is health care’s greatest self-inflicted wound.” In this revealing presentation, Wallace explains that questions such as, “Was the hospital food any good?” are much less important than asking patients vital questions like “Did you get better?” By showing audiences the importance of creating objective measures of outcomes, Wallace empowers health care providers to focus on improving overall patient outcomes, creating greater value by requiring less care in the long run.

The move to value-based reimbursement models will affect supply chain companies as much as it does care providers. Most pharmaceutical and device companies are seeking ways to help their care delivery partners achieve higher value with their products. The future of supply companies, Scott Wallace says, hinges on their ability to demonstrate the value of new therapies and devices in the hands of partners.

Supply chain companies often have deeper, more sophisticated resources for outcome and cost measurement; use those resources to help partners demonstrate value through better health outcomes and lower overall costs. Wallace discusses how pharmaceutical and device companies can select better partners, help build learning care delivery systems and demonstrate value.