Value Driven Healthcare

1. Powered, operated, or controlled
2. Piled up or carried along by a current
3. Motivated by or having a compulsive quality or need

I had the pleasure of presenting at the first ever Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) Healthcare Summit yesterday. There were about 60 people in attendance who shared an interest in understanding the potential role and impact of incorporating open source concepts into their care setting, their product development cycle, and their healthcare delivery model.

My keynote presentation focused on value-driven healthcare and how the convergence of open source and healthcare information technology are enabling the creation of a new concept of healthcare called “Health 2.0”. I have previously put forth my definition of Health 2.0 and the attributes and examples of Health 2.0 Companies. The purpose of my presentation was to convince the audience how a focus on “value” driven healthcare is the key politico-reform catalyst that will help redefine and reshape the currently sick healthcare industry into a vibrant and healthy care delivery system

I began presentation with the obligatory slides about how jacked up our healthcare system is, and how previous reforms have either missed the mark or fallen short. I then made the case that we can reform our system by focusing on delivering healthcare value. We next discussed the definition and role of values in society, and how values are powerful drivers of behavior. Identifying and understanding values then, as the root source of any ideology, can be very helpful in not only predicting but guiding behavior. We reviewed the guiding values of healthcare, and then compared those to the guiding values of open source. Overlaying these two sets of values, from two distinct industries, shows a strikingly high degree of correlation, similarity, and symmetry.

From this foundation, we discussed how we can apply the concept of value-based competition to healthcare (the mixing of the term values and value is an intentional word play). Building from the concepts described in Michael Porter’s excellent book, Redefining Healthcare, we described how the principles of value-based competition can lead to a virtuous cycle of innovation. These specific principles are essential to understand, as they form the backdrop of the various reform efforts currently underway at the national, state, and local levels. These reform efforts rely heavily on value, transparency, and the principles of openness to drive the innovation required to reform our healthcare system. “Value-based competition at the medical condition level over the full cycle of care” will be the reform agent to get us to a Health 2.0 world.

The canonical representation of Value Driven Healthcare.
Conceived by Scott Shreeve MD, illustrated by Hemeon Design, and Copyright © 2007 by Crossover Consulting.
Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike 2.5 License.

The above image highlights the virtuous cycle of innovation enabled by the principles of value-based competition. The graphic attempts to paradoxically capture the complexity of these concepts while succinctly and simply distilling the message. By understanding the drivers of value-based competition, we set the stage for further definition, description, and discussion of the inevitable Health 2.0 revolution.