Value-Based HealthCare Delivery Course
Partners residents participated in a joint Partners-Harvard Business School course on Value-Based HealthCare Delivery in January 2017
Value-Based HealthCare Delivery (VBHD) postulates that patient health outcomes will improve if health care is organized around the needs of the patient and if both the outcomes and the cost of the care are carefully measured. The concept has been championed by Michael E. Porter, PhD, founder and Director of Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy & Competitiveness and co-author with Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg of Redefining Health Care, in 2006. The valued-based approach to health care has gained momentum, been widely researched and discussed in medical journals, and increasingly adopted.
In January 2017, nearly 90 Partners residents and clinical fellows from over 45 specialties and subspecialties attended a VBHD course sponsored jointly by the Partners HealthCare Center for Expertise in Health Policy and Management and Harvard Business School. Dr. Debra Weinstein, Partners VP for Graduate Medical Education, welcomed the group and noted that this course, configured specifically for GME trainees, has filled to capacity each of the 5 years it has been offered. She thanked Professor Porter and his team and introduced Dr. David Torchiana, Partners President and CEO, who opened the course by describing a value-based project in cardiac surgery that provided an early bridge between his own clinical engagement and healthcare leadership activities. Professor Porter’s lecture introducing the concepts of value-based health care delivery then set the stage for the remainder of the 2½ days.
The VBHD course uses the Harvard Business School case-study method, and 7 cases were sent to participants to study prior to the course. Discussions and content lectures were led by a broad-based faculty including star teachers from Harvard Business School, the Kennedy School, the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM), and Partners’ own Liz Mort, Neil Wagle, and Gregg Meyer. A special feature of the course was the inclusion of discussants who were protagonists from the cases being studied – including a recent graduate of the Partners Emergency Medicine residency program, Dr. Griffen Myers, CEO of Oak Street Health.
Dr. Gregg Meyer, Partners Chief Clinical Officer, closed the course with a discussion about value-based health care at Partners. He also announced that the annual Partners “Presidents Prize” for best selected project proposal based on principles from the VBHD course will continue. Dr. Meyer reflected that “these trainees are in an enviable position – having the opportunity to have a superbly crafted experience at Harvard Business School focusing on issues that will become increasingly important to their life in healthcare.” Formal evaluations are being collected from the participants, but initial reactions were glowing. As one attendee said, “It was a game changer.”