Brian Klepper
All growing health care organizations struggle for visibility. Within the vast health care universe, thousands of companies strive to be noticed as better and different than others competing in the same spaces. Organizational health care buyers face an overwhelming signal-to-noise challenge, trying to discern whether programs improve quality and cost and, if so, by how much. It’s a market beleaguered by untrustworthy information, and it’s an arrangement that favors vendors’ interests, at purchasers’ expense. Those delivering higher value – consistently better health outcomes and/or reduced costs – may be surprised to find lukewarm reception from the health plans they thought would be eager to learn of new ways to deliver better results. The cold reality is that most health plans make more if health care costs more. Only organizations that are at financial risk for management of quality and cost – e.g., fully insured health plans, managed Medicaid plans, Medicare Advantage plans – are likely to be eager for approaches that can streamline processes and improve outcomes. More promising clients are organizations that can directly benefit from higher value health care. Organizational purchasers – employers and unions – fit this profile. So do firms, like clinic and medical management companies, that sell themselves as full continuum risk managers for purchasers. And health plans that see the potential to undercut the market by offering a richer benefit design for less money than is available through conventional approaches. There are questions that can help purchasers discern whether a vendor is a high performer. For example, can the vendor provide credible enterprise-wide, rather than anecdotal, data showing better health outcomes and/or lower costs than conventional approaches? Can it provide client testimonials (along with contact information, so you can talk independently with its clients) showing that its experience aligns with the vendor’s performance claims? Is it scalable, meaning that it can easily set up operations in new locations that get the same results? Are its impacts enduring (or sticky), meaning that its clinical and financial management processes continue to yield results over time? And is it confident enough in its capabilities that it is willing to put some or all of its fees at risk, against the performance targets it claims it can achieve? Fastidious purchasers can certainly take responsibility for a vendor due diligence process, which has been the norm in health care purchasing for decades. But as most employer and union benefits managers know, that can be a strenuously onerous and inefficient undertaking, especially when multiple vendors are involved. An alternative is for vendors to make it as easy as possible for purchasers to have confidence in their performance claims, by subjecting their processes to credible independent, third party assessments. Validation Institute validation does this by systematically reviewing the analytical elements – the data sources, data and calculations – of a vendor’s performance claims, to see whether they align with promised results. Alignment and the vendor receiving validation can, to a reasonable degree, supplant or bolster the purchaser’s due diligence, giving purchaser confidence that actual outcomes will be close to those that were promised. While the validation process tests the accuracy of performance claims, the evaluation process associated with the Health Value Awards seeks to identify superior performance. It assumes that the vendor has been validated, and then, using independent, third party judges again, asks both objective and subjective questions that give insight into the market viability, importance and elegance of the solution at hand. In a complex and chaotic market, the goal is to provide an evaluation process that is unconflicted and above reproach, that can project credibility so that purchasers can comfortably turn to it for guidance. Organizations like Good Housekeeping and Consumer Reports have achieved this kind of authority over decades, but have primarily focused on evaluating consumer goods and being a resource to individual, not organizational, purchasers. Health care is a more intricate, involved and emotional buy in a sense, but it is also one that comes down to determinations of quality and cost. Health care organizations that believe that they deliver better value and that have the data to support that can, for little cost, obtain credible independent third party assurance that their performance claims are true. Organizational purchasers will and should scrutinize the third party’s processes, but once satisfied, will, for the most part, turn over due diligence. Which makes third party validation and demonstration of superior results the fastest route for a health care vendors to stand out in a sea of competitors. Brian Klepper is a health care analyst and the Executive Vice President of The Validation Institute. Check out The Validation Process and The Health Value Awards.
