Value-based care services plant roots in the evolving healthcare landscape

Value-based care has evolved into a healthcare landscape of its own, with a wide range of organizations contributing to systematic changes that improve the quality of care and outcomes while better controlling costs. Providers specializing in value-based care have become attractive to investors and patients because of the distinctive quality of care they can provide and the investable opportunity they present, with a diversity of risk levels and business models. Building on a decade of increasing value-based payment adoption–combined with enhanced value-based capabilities across payers, providers, employers, and other stakeholders–continued traction in the value-based care market could lead to patients and investor confidence as it emerges as a distinct healthcare landscape.

So why has value-based care become so popular amongst investors, private practices, and patients?

Private capital inflows to value-based care companies increased more than fourfold from 2019 to 2021, while new hospital construction—a proxy for investment in legacy-care delivery models—held flat. During the pandemic, patients started asking themselves if they received the medical care they individually needed for treatment and if medical systems moved to a one size fits all care plan.Senior patients on Medicaid and Medicare suffer most from this revolving-door medical practice and spend more time recovering from their ailments when not attended to for their specific needs.

What are the potential impacts of value-based care and the key takeaways from the emerging market for patients?

The demand for value-based health care is catalyzed by the increase in chronic diseases post-pandemic. The rising rate of fatalities contributes to market expansion as well. In 2018, nearly 250,000 fatalities occurred in the US. Statistics indicate medical mistakes were the 3rd largest cause of mortality in the country, following heart ailments and cancer. Incremental hikes in service prices and rising healthcare expenditures drive the need for value-based healthcare. Additionally, the increasing requirement for patient-centric and decentralized treatment enhances the potential for implementing a value-based healthcare system.

What makes value-based care more appealing and potentially more effective in the centralized healthcare system we are accustomed to in America?

The path to value creation is likely to rest on analytics, standardized clinical practices and operational workflows, and a package of member and physician services designed to reduce medical costs by avoiding unnecessary (or unnecessarily high-cost) practices. Value-based care providers and mature markets may be entering a transition in which the low-hanging fruit in operational and clinical performance improvement has largely been picked, as evidenced by the publicly reported performance of provider groups. Value-based care models have grown more intermittently among specialists than they have among primary care providers in recent years. Across specialties, there has been a fundamental shift from a predominantly utilization-management approach to specialty spend to one that aims to use analytics, care coordination, provider integration, and patient engagement to address avoidable spending more holistically.

For example, as the founder of a value-based care company, I developed a proprietary treatment approach that strategically combines hormone optimization with peptide therapy. These two methods work together to systematically dismantle underlying imbalances. This treatment has generated a remarkable effectiveness/rapidity ratio, with neither one being particularly compromised. While this central therapy heightens the quality of life, value-based care focuses on a patient's need for cellular optimization, nutrition support, and supplemental protocols that guide each unique patient through their wellness journey. Value-based care adoption makes its highest headwinds in primary care, and other specialties are seeing meaningful and growing traction as well.

Larry Siegel is the founder and lifeblood of Yunique Medical. With a robust background in multiple wellness modalities, Larry founded Yunique in 2016 in order to offer sustainable treatment that addresses the underlying causes of his clients’ unique symptoms–which in turn produces outcomes they can feel in their quality of life.