Position Paper Alcimed – Value-Based Healthcare: how can it improve the quality of care and costs in oncology?

Value-based healthcare highlights the importance of emphasizing health outcomes of treatment relative to its costs. The focus in care in this model is shifting away from quantity of care (i.e. purely providing services to the patients) towards quality of care (i.e. providing high-quality care for patients that optimally increases also their quality of life). In this paper, we discuss different value-based care and reimbursement models, see how the fully patient-centric value-based care models of the future might look alike, explore an example of an excellence center in cancer care that has already fully shifted towards patient-centric value-based care, and provide the key success factors in order to reach highest standards and quality of care and quality of life for patients.

Challenges in limiting costs while keeping quality of cancer care and quality of patients’ life high

In recent years the healthcare sector has been faced with several challenges that impact the overall system and quality of care and life of patients.

• Demographic factors such as a growing and aging populations imply that care demand increases, gets more complex and puts pressure on the healthcare system. These produce high and long-term costs on the one hand and require high-quality care on the other and need to ensure high quality of life for patients.
• The number of novel and innovative treatments, technologies, drugs and digital tools available is increasing. It is expensive to integrate these new technologies and treatments and often difficult to integrate them into existing structures, which bears the risk of inequalities in care if some structures provide the newest technologies, while others don’t.

Cancer care gets more costly and demands higher quality of care and life

Cancer is one example of a disease that will move more and more towards a chronic status. This will naturally impact costs and demands regarding quality in care and quality of life.

Altogether the expenditures in cancer care alone are expected to increase and will reach a new top of 246bn$ in 2030.

The key question is how can we keep the quality of care stable, or improve it, improve on quality of life for patients, while also limiting costs to avoid too much pressure on healthcare systems? Here value-based healthcare, value-based care approaches come into play.

In this position paper, you will explore:

• Various important cost factors that impact quality of cancer care but also put pressure on the healthcare system
• Different concepts of value-based healthcare and some connected reimbursement models
• How those concepts can help confine costs while keeping quality of care and quality of patients’ life high
• Challenges in value-based care that remain to be solved and an outlook into future developments of these models