Hôpital de La Tour is one of the few hospitals today pioneering value-based healthcare (VBHC), an approach that focuses on patient outcomes and sustainable healthcare costs. Rodolphe Eurin, CEO of Hôpital de La Tour, explains why VBHC’s success depends more than anything on a shift in mindsets.
What’s the one thing you’d like people to understand about VBHC?
People rarely think of hospitals as entities that sell products, yet the comparison is useful in the context of VBHC. I often ask the teams at Hôpital de La Tour, ‘What are we selling as a hospital?’ The answer is quality of life. Regardless of why a patient comes into the hospital, our aim is always to improve their quality of life.
Take any successful company that sells a product or service. How do they make sure they remain competitive? They measure their product. Since a hospital’s product is quality of life, this is what we need to measure to offer better care. We do this by asking customers – the patients – for feedback to drive continuous improvement. This feedback gives medical professionals actionable data so they can address gaps and improve patient care.
It’s very difficult to improve what you don’t measure. Understanding this is key, as it’s the basis on which the whole VBHC system is built.
What needs to be put in place in a hospital for a VBHC approach to work?
As the system is based on getting feedback from patients, you need infrastructure and tools to do this efficiently. At Hôpital de La Tour, we have a team that has conversations with doctors to work this out. For instance, what do we want to measure? What questions should we ask patients? We also need a coordinator to call patients and make sure they’re engaging with the questionnaires. And an IT backbone – including digital tools and apps – to make the system work efficiently.
Yet when we get caught up in how to put in place a system, it’s easy to forget the why, and we mustn’t lose sight of this.VBHC is not an IT project. It’s a fundamentally different way of defining the mission of a hospital. If we keep in our minds that we are selling quality of life, we see that the measuring, feedback and IT systems are simply tools to help us achieve this aim. This is extremely important because if medical professionals don’t understand this, they won’t be motivated to keep moving towards VBHC.
In this sense, VBHC is as much about changing mindsets as it is about putting in place robust tools that will make the system work. And it makes sense: if you understand why you’re doing something, you’ll be motivated to push the approach forward.