Health Care Costs Are Rising Everywhere. What if the Solution Starts With Measuring What Matters to Patients?
HealthSpark, Episode 30: David Bernstein, orthopedic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Affiliate Scholar at the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative, explores how routinely tracking patient-reported outcomes and rewarding care teams for improving them could help health systems control costs while making people healthier.
Why isn't more spending making people healthier?
Health care costs are rising around the world, but improvements in population health are not keeping pace. Even though countries differ in how they organize, govern, and finance care, many face the same challenge: turning higher spending into better health outcomes, patient experiences, and quality of life. The question is not how much a system spends, but how well it turns those resources into value for patients.
What does "value" mean in health care?
A health system's success is often judged by how much it spends or how many services it provides. Neither metric tells us whether patients are healthier or receiving better care. A more meaningful measure of value asks whether care improves the outcomes patients care about most, such as their symptoms, physical function, and quality of life. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) capture these outcomes from the patient's perspective. Used in everyday practice, they can inform clinical decisions and show whether a system is effective, efficient, and responsive to the people it serves.
What drives a health system to change?
Health systems are shaped less by individual clinical decisions than by the structures around them: what is measured, rewarded, and expected. When patient-reported outcomes are tracked routinely, they become visible and actionable. When governments and payers link reimbursement to those outcomes instead of the volume of services delivered, care teams have an incentive to improve them. As patients increasingly expect their priorities to shape the care they receive, the momentum for change can come from both policy and the patients themselves.
Key question to take forward:
As you watch the video and consider your own setting, you might reflect on:
What does it mean to deliver value in health care, and how is it measured where you work?
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