Innovations in healthcare have contributed significantly to improvements in health. Today, for example, two out of three people diagnosed with cancer will survive at least five years, and someone diagnosed with HIV has just about the same life expectancy as someone without the disease.
All this progress makes access to good healthcare more important than ever, but the increasing cost of healthcare raises concern. Our growing challenge is: How can we ensure that patients get great care and achieve the best possible outcomes, at a cost we can manage, while continuing to drive medical progress that is essential to vanquishing devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer?
Collaborating for change
The good news is that partners across the American healthcare system—doctors, hospitals, health plans, patient and consumer leaders, employers, government, academic experts and more—are working together to address that challenge. They have come together under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the “Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network” (LAN). The LAN is focused on accelerating our health care system’s transition to alternative payment models that reward value—the difference a treatment makes for patients—rather than volume.
At Johnson & Johnson, we’re proud to be the first healthcare manufacturer to join the LAN. As the world’s most broadly-based healthcare company—spanning pharmaceuticals, medical devices and consumer health—we have a unique vantage point on the challenges and gaps in our current system.
We know that the U.S. healthcare system is fragmented and complex. Excess administration and low-value care costs the United States as much as $765 billion annually. Moving to a system focused on paying for value will mean we invest in treatments and procedures that actually improve the health of individuals and our broader society. That’s a win for the patient and for all other stakeholders in the sprawling U.S. health system.
Our commitments
As a LAN partner, we’re making a number of commitments to expand our involvement in value-based care, beginning right at home with our own employees. We are committed to increasing the percentage of employees receiving care through value-based, coordinated care models from 10% in 2015 to 50% by 2020. We will also engage employees more actively in their health via personal digital health tools, connecting 100,000 employees worldwide by 2020. We see these commitments as critical steps toward achieving our goal of having the world’s healthiest employee population.
And we will partner with other stakeholders in the healthcare system to advance value-based care throughout the United States. We will provide solutions that improve coordination of patient care; assess our new products for their impacts on quality measures that are relevant to new payment models; and partner with healthcare providers and patient advocates on the clinical pathway to measure development processes.
We recognize that reining in healthcare costs while improving health for all Americans isn’t simple. It will take active engagement from every part of our healthcare system. But the prize is worth the effort. A more value-based healthcare system can enable us to improve health, increase quality and limit costs while at the same time fostering the extraordinary medical innovation that is our hope for a healthy, vibrant future for our children, grandchildren and society as a whole. We’re excited to be part of that change.
