A new book on value-based healthcare offers worthwhile lessons on measuring outcomes that matter to patients, engaging frontline teams, and making difficult trade-offs.
Implementing Value-Based Healthcare: An insider’s guide to improving patient outcomes and creating sustainable systems by Sally Lewis is a good book on an important topic.
It is also timely, because current NHS efforts to improve productivity are too rarely focused on increasing value across the whole system. Too often, they seem to target costs in narrow silos without any consideration of consequential costs elsewhere or side effects on the quality of care (which matter for productivity).
Another reason the book is worth reading is that Professor Lewis works in the Welsh NHS and, therefore, many of her ideas are different to those dominating English policy.
Prof Lewis notes that despite “spending more and more, outcomes for those receiving care are not improving at a similar rate.” This is a helpful correction to the habit of the English system of ignoring outcomes and focusing too much on activity and cost.
Date: 24 November