The Era of Value-Based Care
Posted June 21, 2023
McKnight’s Home Care
By: Liza Berger
Is value-based care the only home care topic worth talking about? It would seem so, judging by the program at the Home Care Innovation + Investment Conference this week.
Consider the titles of a few sessions at this very worthwhile three-day conference in Chicago:
- “The intersection of value-based payment and home care”
- “Hospice and value-based care: A burgeoning relationship”
- “Home care M&A strategies that align with value-based care”
Notice a theme? And that doesn’t even include the sessions whose titles include the words “managed care” and “Medicare Advantage.” (I count three more.)
Clearly, value-based care is the biggest subject in home care these days, at least among those companies reading the tea leaves to assess how the government is leaning and to project future revenue sources.
As Ting Gu, principal of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, commented at a conference session on deal-making and, you guessed it, value-based care, “MA is taking over the world.”
With MA already surpassing 50% of Medicare participants’ lives, it is hard to disagree with this assessment. It makes sense that a conference focused on innovation and investment in home care sees value-based care as the future. Concepts like hospital-at-home, primary care house calls and the explosion of companies geared to helping seniors live better at home with services like transportation and meal delivery, all are working with MA, which is based on a value-based system.
Increasingly, it seems clear the MA is driving both innovation and experimentation. Medicare, while perhaps more solid financially, seems tethered to a health system of the past and grounded in that now-outdated concept known as fee-for-service.
No doubt there are big problems with MA — with plans hiding behind prior authorizations to avoid paying for certain procedures, using misleading marketing tactics and paying home health firms at inadequate rates — it still is the big attraction right now in healthcare. You can’t ignore it.
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