The details of a payment system methodology are clearly described in this article. I was not surprised to confirm that the proposals we made two decades ago were in the same direction: two-part payment, fix and variable. Unfortunately nowadays we have a retrofuture system that nobody knows exactly how incentives really work. Of course, this is the first best for a discretionary behaviour by a resource allocator. This is a clear step in the wrong direction that started a decade ago. Without proper incentives, efficiency suffers, and to be clear this means less efficient healthcare for the patients. Unfortunately again, nobody cares about it.
The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Inspired by the societal debate on whatThe time to fix the current mess has arrived.
stakeholders in health care should ideally strive for, as well as by existing definitions of value, we first described and further specified the concept of value, facilitating the specification of requirements in the design of VBP. We conclude that, in this respect, value is ideally conceptualised as a multifaceted concept, comprising not only high quality of care at the lowest possible costs but also efficient cooperation, innovation and health promotion. Second, starting from these value dimensions, we derived various design features of a theoretically preferred VBP model. We conclude that in order to stimulate value in a broad sense, the payment should consist of two main components that must be carefully designed. The first component is a risk-adjusted global base payment with risk-sharing elements paid to a multidisciplinary provider group for the provision of (virtually) the full continuum of care to a certain population. The second
component is a relatively low-powered variable payment that explicitly rewards aspects of value that can be adequately measured.
Jordi Sàbat
