Credibility Guarantee

The Guarantee itself

The Credibility Guarantee represents a promise to your customers that your validation fairly represents your product’s claims or promises.

The Validation Institute is increasing its highest level of Credibility Guarantee, already an industry-first, from $50,000 to $100,000 for any customer that uses a solution that has been validated for savings, outcomes, or program language. For newly validated vendors, the guarantee starts at $25,000. At each anniversary, assuming no claims against it, it increases by $25,000 to a maximum of $100,000. (A first-year validated vendor may also “buy up” to $100,000, for $5000.)

The Credibility Guarantee further demonstrates Validation Institute’s commitment to elevating healthcare solutions that produce measurable savings or better health outcomes, and provides a bright-line advantage over actuarial firms that are paid to “show savings” but never stand behind their work.

Customers of solution providers are often expected to rely on paid third party validations by, no matter obviously wrong they are, without recourse against the validator who produced it. Consequently, virtually every solution provider of scale has been “validated.” Yet most do not save money. Independent of VI, an entire website is devoted to invalidating spurious claims. As a result, customers increasingly and justifiably disbelieve “findings” by actuaries retained by the solution provider.

By contrast, Validation Institute now offers customers of validated solutions for savings, outcomes, or programs a guarantee of up to $100,000 that the validated solution will, in fact, achieve what the language on a validated claim says it will achieve. Validation Institute has been successfully producing validations for 10 years without challenge or appeal and will continue to do so with a guarantee in place for its customers.

Activating the Guarantee

It is up to you and your customer to activate the guarantee, by putting your exact validation language into a customer contract, with approximately the following language:

If Customer feels that Contractor did not achieve substantially what its validation language says it achieves, customer may submit a claim up to [$X]0,000 to the Validation Institute (VI) for one of two reasons:

1. The Contractor did not achieve substantially what its validation language says would achieve (if the validation is for Outcomes or Savings), or that the Contractual Integrity Validation language was itself invalid, by the standards of the industry
2. The Validation Institute did not validate (including stated limitations) to a standard of integrity higher than the leading benefits firms use for their validations

Triggering the Guarantee

For the first type of claim, VI will review the claim and either pay it, offer a smaller payout, or request a binding, final finding by an arbitrator assigned by the American Arbitration Association, loser to pay costs.

For the second type of claim, there will be five judges, selected as follows:

• Each side gets to appoint one, drawn from The Healthcare Hackers listserv with more 1000 people on it, from all walks of healthcare.
• Two are appointed objectively. That will be whichever health services researchers/health economists are the most influential at the time the reward is claimed. “Most influential” will be measured by a formula: the highest ratio of Twitter(X) followers/Twitter(X) following, with a minimum of 15,000 followers.
• Those four judges will agree on the fifth.

The cost of the judges is $2000, loser to pay costs. They will judge based on the following:

1. Each side submits up to 500 words and five graphs, supported by as many as 5 links;
2. Each party may separately cite 5 previous invalidating mistakes made by either Validation Institute or the major benefits firm(s) to which VI’s integrity and competence is being compared, to prove or disprove that the VI’s validation was of higher quality than that typically done by major benefits firms.

If a claim is paid, but it is determined that the original basis of the validation awarded has been changed without the Institute’s knowledge, the Client must reimburse Validation Institute, and either change the validation language to the satisfaction of VI or remove it. In the latter situations, Customers must be notified that the original guarantee no longer applies.