CEO Rupert recently wrote an article featured in the Future Healthcare Journal, “Paying for what matters most: the future of outcomes-based payments in healthcare.” With debates on how to implement outcomes-based approaches increasing, Rupert addresses many of the surrounding questions, problems with the status quo, and how we can get outcomes-based payments off the ground.
It is already clear that outcomes tend to be more stable over time than quality process measures. Nobody with diabetes wants a stroke now, or in ten years time. But new population metrics are required for us to create healthy and financially sustainable health systems. As Rupert puts it, “Unless improvements in life expectancy are more than matched by improvements in people’s ‘healthspans’, then lifetime costs of care will only continue to escalate unsustainably. However, it is extremely hard to improve what is not measured. In this context, the need to develop and agree on a definitive, population-level measure of ‘healthspan’ has never been more pressing.”
Measures that reflect the proportion of a person’s life span which is spent predominantly healthy would make excellent markers of the success of primary prevention, and are essential to the achieving sustainability of health and care systems. Read more of what Rupert has to say on it here.