How the Evolution of Payment Models Has Led to Improving American Healthcare

As we learned in Value Based Care Makes for Better Caregivers, while the old-style “fee-for-service” payment model promoted quantity of services, federal officials have planned numerous compensation programs to reward healthcare providers for the excellence of care they provide to patients. In the past, Providers or Professional Caregivers have not trusted CMS or the health insurance companies. Today, more and more Providers are partnering with payers and CMS in order to improve the health of their patients.

VBC helps advance, not just the triple aim of healthcare, but it has also expanded to include the quadruple aim of healthcare today. ‘Triple Aim’ includes improved patient experience, improving population health, and cost-effectiveness in healthcare. The ‘Quadruple Aim’ adds improved work-life balance of Providers and their staffs as well. Like everyone else, professional caregivers get burned out and they need the improved, more efficient workflow of value-based care.

With modern philosophies like VBC making their way into our healthcare industry, systemic inefficiencies are becoming a thing of the past so that American caregivers can focus on maintaining a higher standard of ‘wellness’ for our patients. Providers weren’t paid for wellness visits for many years in the past. Now, they are through Value-based care.

We need our hospitals to care for sick patients that require 24 hour care and monitoring to help them begin to heal. We need to keep people more healthy with VBC and improved wellness teachings. This is the ethical thing to do for our patients. Patient satisfaction is extremely important because, as my Dad taught me many years ago, if the patient doesn’t like you, they won’t get better. People don’t trust Providers and Hospitals that they don’t like. Many Medical Errors are due to poor communication with patients. When we improve patient satisfaction with improved communication, we win at many levels.

Story Time: A Personal Example

When I was practicing Cardiology and Internal Medicine, many new patients came to my practice due to the heart-to-heart trust my patients and I had developed. Their friends and family members wanted to come to my practice and they trusted the care I outlined for them due to this relationship. In fact, if a therapy was not successful, they would let me know early so that I could change their treatment earlier rather than later. Without this trust, they would probably have just continued on the failing treatment for a more prolonged period of time or just stopped the therapy and changed Providers.


The overviews of the value-based care model that I write about are merely a brief summation of the Mission and Values of this program. VBC has already begun to stimulate the healthcare system to reward Providers with bonuses and higher fees for improving their patients’ health outcomes while helping them more effectively and efficiently care for their patients. Focusing on wellness will help the healthcare system prophylax against increasing chronic diseases in the US. This will lead to the healthier population we all strive for. As an added bonus, a more cost-effective system will continue to allow the system to become more affordable for more and more patients. This is the most exciting piece of all.

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