At the recent AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting in Baltimore, I went to a session on the accomplishments and challenges of community collaboratives. A community collaborative is a pretty cool idea that goes something like this: for a specific community (i.e., city), let’s get all the leaders of the providers and payers in a room (plus a bunch of other stakeholders committed to improving health) and make some decisions collaboratively on how we can fix healthcare in the community. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has provided the money to make these things happen in 20 different communities in the U.S. (see Aligning Forces for Quality, and Value-Based Payment Reform).
Sounds like a great idea, right? Well, an interesting challenge has arisen. More and more, these collaboratives are expected to find ways to reduce the total healthcare spending in that community. But so far, they’ve pretty much failed miserably. Why? Well, think about it. Here are all the leaders of payers and providers in that community sitting in a room together saying, “We need to reduce total spending,” but the savings are going to have to come from someone in that room, and none of them are going to say, “Sure, my organization will take one for the team! I’ll have to cut everyone’s pay, but because it’s for a good cause, they’ll love it.”
Does this mean these kinds of collaboratives are utterly useless in terms of lowering total spending in communities? That was the question I (carefully) asked at the end of the session, and one of the panelists gave a really insightful answer. To paraphrase/translate/elaborate on what he said, his answer went something like this:
Yeah, we’re not going to convince anyone in that room to just give up money like that. But what we can do is come up with standardized ways of reporting prices and quality. And when those are standardized across all payers and providers, patients will be better equipped to choose higher-value payers/providers, which, in the U.S., usually means ‘cheaper’ payers/providers. So this standardization will allow total spending to go down by getting more people receiving services from cheaper competitors. Thus, the higher-priced competitors will be the ones who are losing money when total spending goes down, all because we helped standardize quality and price reporting.
I agree. There are still many barriers to getting patients to choose these “higher-value” providers/payers, but this would help solve one of the biggest ones. And with each barrier we overcome, more patients will be enabled to receive higher-value care, which is what everyone wants, right?
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 