True Competition Zeros in on Value

Healthy competition leads to endless improvements.

• Product quality and customer service improve.
• Innovation propels advances in the state and types of care.
• Quality adjusted prices fall, the market expands and more customer needs are fulfilled.
• The options expand as health care organizations work to distinguish their products or services from others.
• Excellent companies prosper while firms with low quality, poor service, or high costs decline or go out of business unless they make fundamental changes to the way they operate.

This is how value-based competition works in virtually every field: retailing, airlines, financial services, aerospace and computer services.  However,  it is very different from what we see today in health care.  There are a number of reasons for this.  First of all, many practitioners consider the whole idea of competition to be suspect.  Physicians are taught that competition is wasteful, that it promotes self-interested behavior and that it undermines patient care.  Many equate ‘competition’ with price-cutting.  Another huge barrier to value-based competition in the United States’ health care delivery system is skewed regulatory and private-sector incentives.  This has led to a misalignment between the true nature of competition and anything of value for the patient.  The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, Health Care Reform – whatever you want to call it – has attempted to bridge social objectives with the economic infeasibility of our current public and private underwriting/reimbursement mix. 

Just to make sure everyone is completely befuddled at this point, let’s redefine the Democratic and Republican parties in the midst of the health care reform debate, as the party leaders do their best to reconcile socioeconomic objectives with what makes sense from an ideological standpoint (i.e., both where we were and where are going ideologically).  Is it any wonder that anything this ambitious could drop the value-based ball?

When value improves, capable health care organizations and consumers benefit.  The health care organizations that find unique ways to deliver superior value are winners, and are rewarded with more business.   But customers also win as quality increases and prices fall.  The more health care organizations that find ways to provide high value for patients and other key stakeholders, the more winners there are.  The only losers are organizations that fail to deliver good value.  

Health care competition must become value-based in order to achieve sustained improvements in quality and efficiency.  The experience in numerous other industries tells us that this transformation is possible. It also tells us that there can be astounding advancements when the right kind of competition is in play.

tPF is working with several large health care organizations that want to leverage value-based competition.  Our clients’ thinking?  We can compete with anybody and that’s exactly what we intend to do by elevating this whole value-based competitive debate.  This way, if the right metrics are applied, the weak, underperforming ‘competitors’ will either have to clean up their act or go away.  That means more patients for our clients, and the patients they do pick up will be receiving better care.

This is a win-win deal; the deal all health care organizations should be striving for.  Let the political, social and economic winds blow the way they will.  Hunker down and get serious about ways to demonstrate value.  You’ll knock out the competition, get more patients and do a better job with all the patients you care for.   Now you are in the driver’s seat instead of a regulatory victim.