Digital first, value-based care is happening
The Royal Wolverhampton NHS trust has teamed up with the healthcare company Babylon to provide care for approximately 55,000 people living in the trust’s primary network.
The partnership will provide ‘Babylon 360’ to the people of Wolverhampton - a digitally enabled, integrated service which allows Wolverhampton and Babylon to operate using a value-based care model.
The service has been shown to increase patient access to healthcare and outcomes, while also improving the efficiency of the system. It’s an approach that shifts the focus away from ‘sick care’ and on to ‘health care’, providing patients and healthcare professionals with the tools to pursue more preventative methods.
At the same time, NHS Wales – which has been recognised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as a ’Global Innovation Hub’ for value-based healthcare – is building on the experience of the Life Sciences Hub to explore deeper collaborations with Life Sciences companies around new models of care delivery.
Integration is breaking down silos and blurring the lines?
COVID-19 has not only hyper-charged digital trends that were already evolving, it’s also highlighted the inefficiencies and sustainability challenges of many healthcare systems, and will no doubt continue to do so throughout the recovery efforts.
In terms of addressing these sustainability challenges, digitising part of the service delivery is just one piece of the puzzle. Aligning incentives around outcomes and distributing resources more efficiently is another. As Babylon and Wolverhampton have discovered, the two can definitely go hand-in-hand.
A greater challenge may yet be found in how these new models of care redefine the roles of different stakeholders, particularly within traditional silos. A good example of this is the Swedish initiative ‘Hälsorörelsen’ (or ‘Health Movement’) which is a consortium of numerous stakeholders addressing diabetes. The consortium created the foundation for a digital health start-up, Health Integrator, which is now successfully delivering diabetes support to pre-diabetic patients.
A while back we spoke to Fredrik Söder, now CEO of Health Integrator, when he was still driving the Health Movement from within MSD, and he told us: “the technology is out there, that is not the issue, it is creating the model for care and the system for it to work that is the trick”. And that’s where the success of Health Integrator comes from - from integrating different stakeholders around a new value-based care model. To bridge the financial gap for the payer, Health Integrator developed the first Health Impact Bond in Sweden, which also presents new opportunities to share risk and value among stakeholders.
Another good example is Søren E. Skovlund, who has spent the last three years working with stakeholders in Denmark to develop a digital diabetes care support tool, which is now being implemented to deliver coordinated person-centred care.
In the process, Skovlund has applied a new method for systematically involving patients, health professionals and other key stakeholders to achieve a sustainable digital model.
The model brings the patient’s voice to the forefront of all care encounters, and aligns across all sectors towards the same core ‘patient-important’ outcomes. It uses Patient-Reported Outcomes (PRO) which enable the routine measurement of outcomes and the value of therapy for the patient clinically, behaviourally, and psychosocially.
This redefinition of traditional roles in healthcare is an unprecedented opportunity for Life Sciences to not only redefine their own role, but to reinvent the business model to better align with emerging, more sustainable models of care.