Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration

CMHS Consumer Affairs E-News
January 12, 2007, Vol. 07-11

HHS Promotes Value-Driven Health Care

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has developed a website and additional material on value-driven health care that maximizes consumer choice and involvement as a means to encourage health care transparency in order to improve our nation's healthcare systems.

The website - http://www.hhs.gov/transparency/ - notes the following:

Value-Driven Health Care

Consumers deserve to know the quality and cost of their health care. Health care transparency provides consumers with the information necessary, and the incentive, to choose health care providers based on value.

Providing reliable cost and quality information empowers consumer choice. Consumer choice creates incentives at all levels, and motivates the entire system to provide better care for less money. Improvements will come as providers can see how their practice compares to others.

"Every American should have access to a full range of information about the quality and cost of their health care options."
— HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt

Health care transparency is built on four cornerstones: Building a value-driven health care system requires four interconnected cornerstones. With the growing use of electronic health records, all four are within our grasp.

• Connecting the System: Every medical provider has some system for health records. Increasingly, those systems are electronic. Standards need to be identified so all health information systems can quickly and securely communicate and exchange data.
• Measure and Publish Quality: Every case, every procedure, has an outcome. Some are better than others. To measure quality, we must work with doctors and hospitals to define benchmarks for what constitutes quality care.
• Measure and Publish Price: Price information is useless unless cost is calculated for identical services. Agreement is needed on what procedures and services are covered in each "episode of care."
• Create Positive Incentives: All parties - providers, patients, insurance plans, and payers - should participate in arrangements that reward both those who offer and those who purchase high-quality, competitively-price health care.

Please see the recently released brochure Better Care, Lower Cost: prescription for value-driven health care at: http://www.hhs.gov/transparency/brochure.pdf.

************************************************
To subscribe or unsubscribe to this list, please visit the Consumer Survivor page of the Center for Mental Health Services Web site at: http://samhsa.gov/consumersurvivor/

The Center for Mental Health Services is a component of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, United States Department of Health and Human Services.