Andrei Gonzales on Value-Based Care Innovations

The transition to value-based care has been helpful in getting providers to examine their own performance and find ways to improve quality, said Andrei Gonzales, director of value-based reimbursement initiatives at McKesson Health Solutions.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Where have you seen some of the most impressive innovation happening in healthcare?

I’d say plans like Horizon BlueCross BlueShield in New Jersey have shown a lot of promise with how their bundled payment model, patient centered medical home. We’ve seen some of their adoption increasing over the last few years, and just recently they’ve started to show some real improvements in terms of outcomes and also control and costs.

Models like the state of Arizona and the bundled payment program they have there have really shown that providers, when they see that their costs or their complications are out of sorts with their peers, and they look at benchmarks, they’ve really made an effort to improve that. And that’s what it really comes down to is that as practitioners, you know, practitioners really want to provide the best possible care to their patients.

But in a fee-for-service world, it’s sometimes difficult to really understand what types of care and outcomes they’re achieving; whereas in some of these value-based models they really look at care as an episode of care, which is how we experience it as patients, and they start to see, okay, I’m really not providing the best care, or I really could make some improvements in cost that would make a real difference to the patients I care about. And that transparency and that information really helps to drive some of the transition.