How value-based care can transform health care for older adults

In a commentary published in Becker’s Hospital Review, Maria Ansari, MD, FACC, and Ramin Davidoff, MD, co-CEOs of The Permanente Federation, explain why value-based care provides a blueprint for ensuring our health care system can deliver high-quality care to the growing population of older adults.

“Older patients … with multiple health conditions underscore the challenge of delivering compassionate, scalable, and affordable care to the aging U.S. population,” said Drs. Ansari and Davidoff. “Caring for these individuals requires a fundamental shift in how we practice medicine.”

Because adults over 65 will represent 23% of the U.S. population by 2050, and with Medicare and Medicaid under threat from funding cuts and payroll tax shortfalls, the two leaders shared why the sustainability of the U.S. health care system will rely on this critical transformation.

“Value-based care, which has proven its value to patients for nearly 80 years, offers a lifeline that could save the American health system,” wrote Drs. Ansari and Davidoff.

Related value-based care story: Physician leaders discuss how Permanente Medicine delivers value-based care

To support a future system where health care dollars are used more efficiently and effectively, the Permanente physician leaders highlighted 3 strategies for health care organizations to realize the benefits of an integrated, value-based model like Kaiser Permanente’s care delivery:

• Emphasize high-quality and coordinated care through primary care teams that deliver preventive medicine, like regular check-ups and screenings, and also collaborate directly with specialty care physicians in a timely way to improve outcomes and patient experiences.
• Increase better outcomes and manage resources through health care innovations that reduce the need for emergency medicine and in-hospital surgery recovery, allowing better treatment for conditions faced by older adults and supporting more more advanced care-at-home delivery.
• Deeply engage with patients, their families, and communities by treating the whole patient, focusing on healthy habits and better chronic condition management, and addressing social determinants of health through integrated services.

These timely insights provide an opportunity to not only advance value-based care for the aging population, but to also build a roadmap to a more sustainable, equitable, and effective health care system.

“The question is no longer ‘if’ we should offer innovations like these but ‘when’ will the system evolve to meet older adults’ needs at scale,” wrote Drs. Ansari and Davidoff.

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