What is value in healthcare?

Professor Michael Porter has written passionately about the need to reconsider what constitutes value in healthcare for many years. His latest article in the New England Journal of Medicine summarises his views http://bit.ly/gl4XIm and highlights the health informatics issues associated with not focusing on value.

What is surprising is that his perspective should still be seen as radical and challenging in an open market such as the US. In other areas of life the idea that "value should always be defined around the customer" would hardly deserve mention, yet in healthcare it is radical and challenging.


The idea works well in the UK. But there is one thing to add. That in the UK system some of the value of health expenditure is manifest at the population level, and there is still (just) some value in the notion of social solidarity which the NHS represents - some of the value I gain from NHS expenditure is knowing that people I don't know may gain access to healthcare.  

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