“Value-based care in action: the necessary and growing disruption of the status quo” is the title of the article published on the 22nd of May in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) where Filipe Costa, director of the Luz Saúde program ' Valor em Saúde' , is interviewed by one of the chief editors of the medical journal, Thomas H. Lee. In the article, written in an interview format based on a conversation between the director of Luz Saúde and the NEJM specialist on the Catalyst podcast, Filipe Costa describes in detail the 'Valor em Saúde' program that he is developing at the Luz Saúde Group, explaining the steps that are necessary to implement this new way of organizing care and the teams of health professionals involved in treating patients. Linked to several scientific projects in this area, the director of Luz Saúde states that, given the current crisis experienced in all health systems, the change to health based on value in action is «the necessary disruption» in health organizations and in their health systems . At Luz Saúde, he explains in an interview with Thomas H. Lee, “We have more than 10 years of researching and putting it in practice, with more than 40 IPUs (integrated practice units), 40 pathologies, that we are running at the moment”. “It was struggling in the beginning, because you are changing one of the hardest things, which is changing the cultural organization of a company”, he says, in the same interview. However, he adds, “since moment zero we internalized, in our mission and vision, the concept of value-based health care; our mission was change and our vision being a leader of health care providers with high specialization in complex medical care”. “We wanted to be recognized as a reference of excellence, the true integration of patient care, teaching, and research, and to achieve the best outcomes that matter to patients, to the most efficient and effective diagnosis and treatment, with a most absolute respect for the patient, and to build a value chain in our organization that can attract, develop, and retain exceptional people”, he explains. “We were able to capture the attention of all the leaders, clinical leaders, management leaders, and all the environments that you have on your integrated structure that could deliver this on a mission to achieve the most value for the patient.” Reducing the variability of clinical behaviors, through well-designed protocols and clinical pathways, and maintaining this variability over time “allowed us to generate better results in the value chain” and, in the end, “offer our patients the best results with the correct costs", says the director of Luz Saúde, also stressing that "all the ecosystems need to be aligned with the models to create value along the system that we are creating": sustainability in this "patient-centered culture". Read the article and listen to the Catalyst podcast with Filipe Costa .
