Risk Management: 
Preparing for Value-Driven Healthcare
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How is all this going to work? A newly formed consortium of U.S. businesses announced in early February the release of a guide designed to help employers purchase health care that supports the Department of Health and Human Services’ plan to establish value-driven healthcare in the U.S.  The Partnership for Value Driven Health Care provides strategies that employers and other healthcare purchasers can use to meet each of the Bush Administration’s four cornerstones of value-driven health care.  This guide, “The Purchaser Guide to Value-driven Health Care” is available at:    http://www.leapfroggroup.org/news/leapfrog_news/Purchaser_Guide   The Partnership was formed in 2006 and includes the American Benefits Council, Bridges to Excellence, Corporate Health Care Coalition, the ERISA Industry Committee, HR Policy Association, the Leapfrog Group, National Association of Manufacturers, National Association of Wholesaler Distributors, National Business Coalition on Health, National Business Group on Health, National Federation of Independent Businesses, National Retail Federation, Society for human Resource Management, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.         For the initiative to work, care outcome and pricing information must be gathered and transmitted via health care information technology systems.  “To do business with the federal government (and increasingly major private sector health plans) in the future, everything will have to be electronic,” Michael O. Leavitt, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, told members of the Medical Society of New Jersey, during a stop off in Lawrenceville late last year.  This initiative roll out will be driven by the federal government and the major employer and payer groups having committed to purchasing health care based on the four value driven health care principles outlined above.  Since it will be driven by those who ultimately pay for health care, those who deliver it, to be paid, will have little, if any, choice about giving payers, purchasers, and, most importantly, patients, what they require to fulfill these principles.    Preparing hospitals and physicians to survive and thrive in this brave new world will provide the ultimate challenge not only to health IT companies, but also those, like Princeton Insurance, which have a vested interest in its hospital and physician policyholders’ providing the highest quality and safest care to patients.