Season 1: Episode 2- Sink or Swim: Value-Based Care is Coming

Hello everyone and welcome to episode two of The Behavior Breakdown. I’m your host, Lynette Elizabeth, and for those who are just tuning in, which I am assuming is most of you since we just launched this project, I am a Behavior Analyst, working in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA as it is most often referred to. I created this podcast because throughout my decade of experience in behavioral health, I have been consistently presented with questions from parents and professionals about how to navigate the labyrinth of clinical and financial details of ABA. My goal is to provide enlightening and factual episodes, interviews with professionals with a wide range of viewpoints, and round table dialogues where we hit the hard topics facing our families and industry. 

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Today’s episode talks about the shift from the fee-for-service model we are all accustomed to, into the value-based care model. What is value-based-care? I’m glad you asked, because this episode will cover what the it is, where it came from, and what this means for clinicians and families seeking behavioral healthcare. Buckle up, because I sure didn’t know most of this was going on heading into the research this week, and I’m going to bet most of you didn’t either. 

So you may have heard the term Value Based Care or VBC becoming more popular in the last few years, but very few of us BCBA’s actually know what Value Based Care really is, where it came from, or what it means for our future. Well let’s break it down and pull back a few layers on this onion to figure out how much of an impact this may have for us. Based on a journal article written in 2019, published byBMC Health Service Research, they say “In 2006 the concept of Value-Based compensation in Health Care (VBHC) was introduced by Porter, a professor of Business Strategy at Harvard Business School. During the previous years, health care in the US, and other Western countries had been heavily criticized for its high costs and suboptimal quality and safety. Porter introduced a twofold strategy to tackle this. First, health care should be reorganized into ‘value-based’ care pathways around patient groups. These pathways should no longer be merely focused on increasing production, while shifting costs to other providers, but they should strive for the highest value for patients, i.e. the best possible outcomes, for acceptable costs. Second, these pathways should compete for the favor of patients and health care purchasers. Patients should – in turn – behave more as critical health care consumers, while purchasers ‘buy’ the best possible health care for the lowest possible cost. During the last decade, VBHC has been embraced by almost all stakeholders in most of the Western health care system. Although it is widely believed that VBHC contributes to more efficient clinical pathways, a focus on relevant outcomes, cost awareness, and transparency, evidence of its effectiveness is still scarcely available. While it seems like VBHC has been around for almost 20 years, why do we, as consumers and clinicians, have such limited information about what it actually means to us? While ABA is new in...