“Value-based care is a health care delivery model where providers are paid based on successful outcomes rather than for individual services,” explains Ted Chan, founder and CEO of CareDash, a doctor review website. “At its very best, value-based care is a patient-centric model that both saves money and improves outcomes.” from https://www.sgu.edu/blog/medical/what-is-value-based-care/
Currently, value based care is all the rage in health care. This simple way to say this is if patients don't obtain desired outcome (i.e. save money, cut cost, improve outcome, improve satisfaction) health systems do not get to keep the money they got paid.
Integrative medicine know this very well. Because of the time-intensive nature of integrative medicine visits, poor insurance reimbursements, and no procedures that result in lucrative billing of insurances, the movement was based on people power which voted with their hard earned $$$.
This means people are extremely sensitive to outcome. Most people do not enjoy wasting their money. However science can or cannot account why people are getting better, the important thing is that people believe in the value of integrative medicine. This means there is SOCIAL VALIDITY to value of integrative medicine.
Last three years, I worked in a value based health system creating integrative medicine for pain services which I estimated about 3 million dollars per year savings to the company. I had 9 people team - that number, according to my estimation, included operational cost - of about 1 million dollars.
My next mission is to build an value-based integrative medicine in San Antonio allowing access to affordable integrative medicine, access to discounted supplements , and access to deeply discounted functional medicine labs.
Yoon Hang Kim MD
San Antonio, TX