INTERVIEW: Jennifer Clawson, Associate Director, The Boston Consulting Group, Madrid, Spain

Value based healthcare helps in cost reductions. ETHealthworld talks to Jennifer Clawson, Associate Director, The Boston Consulting Group, to know more about this concept that promises better value for care, besides lowering the costs in the competitive healthcare scenario.

1. What is the concept of value based healthcare?


Value based healthcare is a simple concept about improving the patient outcomes while at the same time maintaining or even lowering the overall cost to deliver those outcomes. Historically many healthcare systems are under strict financial prices.

The cost of healthcare in many countries is rising faster than GDP. The focus on outcomes fairly allows organisations, healthcare systems, and governments regions to figure out what actually drives the improvement. We also get to know the things that are not contributing so that it can be removed.

By doing this we can lower the cost by taking out either the direct costs or indirect costs by making the procedures more efficient.




2. What are the places where these concepts are in vogue?

Value based healthcare is strongest in some of the countries which have been looking at outcomes for the longest period of time. Countries which had have a long history of setting up disease registries. These countries have gone the furthest in implementing and using value based healthcare. Other countries that are very far along the journey include the UK, Netherlands, and United States to some degree.

They can start to measure the outcomes and by comparing where the best outcomes have been achieved and why. Through this they can raise all of the outcomes for the patients and provide even better value for care.


3. How can value based healthcare improve the Indian healthcare scenario?

The measuring and transparency of outcomes can be done in any organisation. When we start to work with provider organisations, we can see benefits within 4 to 6 months in terms of improved efficiencies and raising the overall outcomes.

Within the first year we can see impact on the cost as well. One of the intangible benefits is that once you start to get the clinical staff engaged and looking at the outcomes, it changes the outcomes instead of facing another process of reengineering program or cost reduction
programme etc.

This gets back to the reason why many people went into medicine in the first place. It gives them data to operate with. This can improve their own outcomes, helps them identify and learn from the best practices and innovate in faster way.


4. How is the Boston Consulting Group contributing to value based healthcare?

BCG has been focussing on investing in value based healthcare for over 5 years now. We work with clients across all the sectors of healthcare, provider organisations, payers organisations as well as government, to figure out how they can compete in a healthcare world that is going to be much more focussed on outcome transparency.

We have helped to create and launch an out or profit organisation called ICHOM (the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurements). We co-founded ICHOM to focus on the standardization and we continue to do research on who is winning at this game, what actually makes it different and how can they really compete to win in this new environment by focussing on outcome improvements.


5. How do you implement value healthcare in any particular hospital?

We have globally worked with a number of provider organisations on their implementation on value based healthcare. We identify a couple of pilot medical conditions. Depending on the size of the organisation we would start with 3 to 5 conditions and with each of those conditions then we would have a medical champion. Once the conditions have been identified for the pilots, then we start up a small cross functional working team of 3-4 people. In this we bring in the doctors, nurses and some of the therapy staff etc along with patients and patient representatives to figures out the outcomes that truly matter or this patient group….