Research into value-based care has been gaining momentum in its ability to demonstrate the benefits of palliative care delivery.
Research has been an important part of transformational development in health care, providing evidence around the systematic policy changes needed to improve access, according to Bridget Doherty, director of access and policy research at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine.
More research around the trajectories of seriously ill patients is needed to give policymakers a wider lens around their unmet needs and priorities, Doherty said at the Center for Innovation & Value Research’s Method Summit in Washington D.C.
“Patients are the end users of almost any policy, and therefore the research we’re doing is looking at what the policies are doing to patients, patient access, which ultimately is their outcomes,” Doherty said during the summit. “That patient voice in the policy space, especially in policy research, is not being listened to. We are learning about patient preferences and the patient journey from the policy perspective. These policies are having a dramatic impact on their ability to access care, and therefore their outcomes.”
A growing body of value-based care research has allowed for greater insight into patient preferences, Doherty said. Data play a key role in supporting legislative evolutions aimed at improving goal-concordant care delivery, including in the palliative care space. Examining patients’ expressed goals in concert with the efficacy of the care they actually receive can provide a “blueprint” for new policy ideas that boost quality, Doherty indicated.
Policymakers have historically had limited visibility into the broad range of services that impact health outcomes, according to Asia Williams, program officer of the National Academy of Medicine’s leadership consortium. The program focuses on advancing trust and engagement among diverse populations of patients and their families.
Person-centered research has aided in providing valuable data across a multitude of spiritual, emotional and psychosocial aspects of patient and family experiences, Williams indicated. These have been areas of less focus compared to studies examining the physical and medical components of disease trajectories, she added.
With a growing body of value-based payment data surfacing in recent years, policymakers may be gaining more insight into more than just the financial impacts of current reimbursement models, Williams said.
The data trends have helped to demonstrate how palliative care can be a cost-effective avenue to providing pain and symptom management for seriously ill patients. As value-based reimbursement expands, palliative care will become increasingly important when it comes to improving outcomes and reducing costs. Patients who receive these services often have lower hospitalization rates and health care costs, studies have found. Palliative care patients also receive more personalized goal-concordant care delivery.
“Everyone’s talking about meaningful outcomes [and] the importance of value within the term ‘patient-centered value research,’,” Williams said at the summit. “Inherently aiming for value means that you’re trying to ensure that you’re aligning with patient preferences at their core. Sometimes I think we tend to focus on outcomes that are more narrow in definition or more aligned with traditional definitions of health, like the absence of physical disease, when in reality there’s so much more to the context in which the patient exists. When you are looking at value, you’re really trying to look at the patient as the true expert in defining what health means for them.”
