Salt Lake City, Utah-based Intermountain Health was an early adopter of value-based care principles, deploying strategies to boost quality and lower costs. The health system pioneered owning a health plan and driving down pharmaceutical costs with CivicaRx.
Intermountain has the reputation of leading in value-based care. But now, health system leaders are ditching the term for a new concept: proactive care.
"We made the change for a couple of reasons," said Greg Poulsen, senior vice president and chief policy officer at Intermountain, on an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast." "One is we think it defines more precisely what we're about. We're trying to, whenever possible, get upstream to make sure people are as healthy as they can be and not just be there to rescue them when things go badly, but to avoid those bad things in the first place."
Intermountain's leadership also found the term "value" was sometimes misinterpreted as "cheap," according to research done by the team.
"While we're certainly looking for the lowest possible costs and we think that's essential in the U.S. health system, we certainly don't ever want to be in a situation where we're not providing the very best care that's available irrespective of cost," said Mr. Poulsen. "But in many cases, what we found is there are approaches that yield lower costs that actually provide better outcomes, that put people in a better health situation. That's our goal and we think the term 'proactive care' better encompasses that."