Better Care at Less Cost by Liberating Value

Few would dispute the emerging reality that the cost of care per patient must drop for our healthcare system to be sustainable. However, many have expressed, frequently quite rightly too, that the incessant cost-reduction process is putting at risk hard-earned gains in clinical outcomes, as well as introducing significant safety concerns. Simple cost-cutting is not the answer because it fails to adequately consider the quality side of the equation and yet the costs must drop. Intelligent reform seeks to re-design care pathways with the dual aim of reducing the cost of care whilst improving the quality of outcome and experience. This combined approach is the realm of value-based healthcare and it has the potential to radically reform the financial footprint of most services.

Liberating Value from the System – System Thinking in the Healthcare Sector
Dr Steve Allder, Assistant Medical Director, Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust

There’s a massive difference between delivering value in clinical medicine versus just churning more work. Ironically, focus has tended towards the process of organising work cost-efficiently without sufficient regard to the outcome of that work or the health value gained. Freeing the delivery of value requires a whole new level of thinking and without it, cost improvement will likely be futile, dangerous and unsustainable at a time when we desperately need to re-think our whole approach to delivery.

• Just what does ‘value’ really mean in healthcare and how is your future linked to it?
• How non-value-based belt-tightening weakens services and makes them vulnerable
• Reducing the bed base by 50% - realistic & possible?
• Healthcare as a living, breathing, interconnected system
• A system conspiring against – what are the forces at odds with both change and value?
• How do leaders need to think and what must they do to liberate value?

Managing Value Daily  - Optimising Quality & Efficiency whilst Reducing Cost
Roger Killen, Managing Director, The Learning Clinic & co-founder and former Managing Director of Dr Foster Ltd & Designer of VitalPAC

It’s one thing subscribing to the principle that care pathways and processes should be based on purposeful steps and interventions, each of which necessary and value-adding to the clinical results achieved but a whole new ball game delivering care in this manner day-in-day-out. However, if outcomes are to be optimised at the lowest possible cost of care, with minimal system bureaucracy, then we have to adapt our approach towards and utilisation of information in clinical decision making.

• What is value-based daily care?
• How much of a difference can it really make?
• Utilising the right information to optimise care
• Value-based clinical decision making
• Optimising resource deployment & efficiency

Pathways to Liberation – Overcoming the Chief Executive's Trap
Mr Andrew Vincent, Chief Executive, Medicology Ltd & Head of Clinical Business Excellence
 

Many Trusts and services recognise that what they are doing currently does not address the real challenges they face but most struggle to know how to go about the sort of changes that really need to happen. Growing numbers recognise the need to ‘let go’ to clinical leaders but how do you achieve this without allowing your immediate results, financial or clinical, to go off the rails? This is not ‘Hobson’s Choice’ it’s the Chief Executive’s Trap and it must be overcome.

• Holding on tight – it creates the OPPOSITE effect by increasing costs and reducing good behaviour
• If tight control is wrong, why isn’t everyone letting go?
• The importance and sources of trust – the necessary baseline for exiting the trap
• Will the right level of trust sufficient to ‘let go’ ever simply emerge?
• Just what do you need to do to free yourself from the Chief Executive’s Trap?

Marrying Quality & Safety with Cost Reduction & Competitiveness – Making sure it isn’t all for nothing in our most sacred principles & values
Dr Sara Watkin, Clinical Service Lead & Consultant Neonatologist, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

As we move towards a wholly different mindset in the commissioning and delivery of health, many feel that the core driving principles and values, such as quality, safety and professionalism take second place to cost reduction and competitiveness. If we cannot find the path to combine the two, the new system, vital in coping with a magnificently messy problem, will be stridently resisted from every professional corner. However, why can’t we make quality and safety bedfellows to cost reduction and competitiveness? Final perspectives on the forces that bind us all.
 

• What are the sacred values & principles that must be addressed?
• Examples of quality and safety failure driven by a financial focus
• The leadership challenge of delivering both sets of needs
• Back to the business model – building a way of working that delivers both
• Next steps – a journey of discovery and collaboration

Questions & Debate from the Floor

Summit Close & Final Words