Partners Value Based Healthcare Delivery Course Delivers

Robert Bonacci, MD

Resident in Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine

Brigham and Women's Hospital 

PGY-4

01/31/2020

Robert A. Bonacci, MD, MPH

I had the opportunity this winter to attend the Value Based Healthcare Delivery course offered by Harvard Business School and Partners Healthcare. Led by and based on the foundational ideas of professor Michael Porter and others, the course brings together residents and fellows across Partners’ many training programs to discuss a fundamental restructuring of how healthcare is organized and provisioned across the U.S.  Through case studies of various organizations, professor led interactive case discussions, video interviews with key case protagonists, and a few conceptual lectures, the course tries to re-orient our understanding of how to organize healthcare around value.

Studying real world examples from companies such as the Cleveland Clinic, Texas Children’s Hospital, the U.S. Navy, and the Martini Klinik in Germany, we were able to dive deeper into how each of these institutions grappled with the value proposition of creating better outcomes that matter to patients while considering the costs to achieve those outcomes. I was struck by how simple and logical the value proposition seemed on its face, increase value for patients. But further reflecting on my own time working in medicine, I could quickly summon myriad examples of how our American healthcare system is rarely oriented around value for our patients.

Getting to talk through some of these challenges with colleagues across various disciplines provided an important opportunity to hear a diversity of thoughts and ideas about how we can reorganize healthcare toward a more sustainable future, in our own clinics and hospitals to the national level policies that incentivize or disincentivize such reorganization. As I continue my residency and beyond, I feel this course has provided me a framework to better understand how we can reorganize, redesign, and re-incentivize care across the country to center it around the patient experience and create increasing value for our patients.