Value-Based Care Needs a Rebrand. Will 2026 Be the Year It Finally Gets One?

For nearly 2 decades, value-based care has hovered on the edge of its promise. We’ve seen real improvements through programs like the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and meaningful investments in care coordination and population health. Yet the core idea—pay for outcomes, not activity—has been obscured by layers of complexity, administrative burden, and mixed incentives.

Ask a patient or clinician what “value-based care” means and the answer is usually unclear. That’s a problem for a model meant to reshape our health care system.

The result is that value-based care now suffers from a branding problem. The term has come to mean everything and nothing at once. Instead of representing better care, it often evokes a maze of acronyms, quality measures, scoring methodologies, and financial models that feel disconnected from what patients actually experience.

Most importantly, “value-based care” has become shorthand, too often implying cost-cutting rather than meaningful health improvement that supports sustainable health care. This unfortunate framing is more than a semantic issue. It obscures what the movement was designed to accomplish: proactive and preventative care that improves quality of life, outcomes, and cost trend.

In 2026, that must change. And my prediction is that it will.

Redefining What “Value” Should Mean

Value-based care is headed for a necessary rebrand. A rebrand that is not a cosmetic refresh, but a fundamental shift back to its original purpose. Over time, “value” has become confused with administrative precision, risk-score optimization, and actuarial efficiency. The result is a system where organizations have been rewarded more for navigating financial models than for consistently improving patient health.

A true rebrand requires reframing value as a clinical and operational concept rather than a contractual one. Old value-based care rewarded documentation completeness and performance against attribution- and reconciliation-heavy models. New value-based care must reward outcome improvement, proactive engagement, and better long-term disease trajectories. In turn, we’ll create a more sustainable industry.

CMS is accelerating this transformation with a model that ties payment directly to what patients care about most: whether their health actually improves. The ACCESS (Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions) Model is the strongest signal yet that the next era of value-based care will be simpler, more transparent, and centered on real-world outcomes rather than contractual complexity.

In effect, ACCESS draws a bright line between two eras of value-based care:

1. Old VBC rewarded contractual performance and administrative accuracy.
2. New VBC rewards outcome improvement and proactive engagement

If value-based care is going to resonate again with clinicians, with patients, and with operators, it must shed its identity as a financial construct and reclaim its identity as a health-improvement strategy. The rebrand begins with that reorientation.

Limits of the Status Quo

To understand why ACCESS represents such an important inflection point, it’s worth acknowledging where value-based care stands today. The last decade has delivered steady progress, but much of it has been driven by familiar levers that close gaps, reduce avoidable utilization, improve documentation, and manage attributed populations. These efforts were essential, and they produced results, but their marginal returns are shrinking. We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit.

As a result, the differentiators are shifting. Organizations that are pulling ahead are not simply optimizing old models; they are redesigning how care is delivered. They are moving from reactive to proactive care, investing in prevention and navigation, and building systems that can influence a patient’s trajectory over the next five years rather than the next few months. This evolution is as much an operational shift as it is a policy one.

Against this backdrop, ACCESS doesn’t feel like an incremental tweak. It feels like the beginning of a new chapter. One that aligns with the rebrand value-based care has long been needed.

Technology Enables What Was Once Impossible

The reason ACCESS is viable now, when similar ideas faltered a decade ago, is that the infrastructure has finally matured. Interoperable data environments integrate clinical, claims, and social signals. Remote monitoring and digital therapeutics are widely deployed. Virtual and asynchronous care have become common. Increasingly, AI agents, copilots, and companions are interacting with and coaching consumers directly as the healthcare system uses technology and innovation to create capacity previously constrained by the human workforce.

ACCESS assumes these capabilities and expects organizations to use them. Managing chronic disease today requires continuous engagement, real-time measurement, and the ability to course-correct before negative outcomes occur. Technology amplifies all of this—turning operational strength into measurable performance and exposing gaps in organizations that have postponed modernization.

This is where the conversation naturally evolves, because ACCESS doesn’t just depend on technology; it puts a spotlight on whether organizations are truly ready for AI-powered, data-driven care.

A Rebrand Whose Time Has Come

If 2026 becomes the year value-based care is rebranded, it must also be the year we reclaim what the term actually means. Value-based care cannot remain shorthand for administrative lift, complex attribution, or arcane scoring methodologies. It must return to a simple, universal idea: the consistent, measurable improvement of patients’ lives. Proactive, preventive care is how we do it, and leading organizations already talk this way about their optimized strategies.

For value-based care to be credible, it must be understood for what it truly represents: consistent, measurable health improvement—not austerity or cost control. ACCESS helps push the industry back in that direction by grounding payment in outcomes that matter to people. That shift is the rebrand value-based care has needed for years.

If we embrace that shift, 2026 will not be another incremental year. It will be remembered as the moment value-based care finally fulfilled its purpose.

About the Author

Michael Meucci is the president and CEO of Arcadia.