The Science and Art of Value in Healthcare: Measures, Voices and Methods

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Background

The concepts of patient value and patient experience are cornerstones of medical care, healthcare delivery and population health. We must have a better understanding of what creates and sustains high value for patients, clinicians, purchasers, and delivery systems. This includes how to measure and assess value in healthcare, and how innovation, efficiency, and care redesign can improve value. A common understanding of value, and alignment of definitions across healthcare stakeholders, are fundamental to optimizing innovation, access, efficiency, payment and finance systems, and research vis-à-vis patient care. Current notions of value have not focused sufficient attention on the voices and perspectives of patients and clinicians. Participatory, arts-based methods, content-analysis, natural language-processing algorithms, narrative and other qualitative methods, expand our perspective on value of care and notions of effective care. Such methods complement quantitative methods that mine from online communities and longitudinal databases, evaluate cost-effectiveness, or use of frontier methods that measure performance.

The overarching goal of this Research Topic is to provide a diverse forum where patients, clinicians, researchers, and representatives of programs and systems can have an interdisciplinary conversation on the notion of “value” in healthcare. We envision the papers prompting discussion and debate as they exchange grounded-definitions, measures, perspectives, conceptual approaches, research findings, case examples, and other real-world examples. We anticipate the issue will inform global efforts to re-conceptualize and improve value in healthcare for general populations, and for specific, under-served populations and groups including veterans, people living with disabilities, people living with chronic health conditions, immigrants and migrants, stigmatized individuals and groups, and people living in rural areas – as well as the diverse clinicians, programs, and systems that serve them. This Research Topic seeks diverse responses to several questions -- Are there better ways to define, understand, measure and evaluate value in medical care and healthcare? What does patient value mean to the organization, delivery and financing of care? How can we apply new notions and data about value to improve programs, policies and practice?

We seek a range of paper types: Original Research, innovative methods, experiments in policy and practice, as well as Systematic Reviews, Brief Research Reports, Case Reports, Community Case Studies, empirical or conceptual papers, and evidence-based opinion. We seek a diversity of authors – including patients, locations (US and global), populations, research methods, and types of care. Themes we would like you to address:
• Value of healthcare from patient, clinician, and community or system perspectives
• Conceptual and empirical papers providing a new lens on healthcare value
• Use of wide range of qualitative and participatory arts-based methods to illuminate patient and clinical perspectives on value for practice, research and education
• Studies using new data analytic techniques that analyze on-line communities and social media
• Use of a wide range of innovative quantitative methods such as frontier analysis that challenge and pose alternatives to well-known, “status quo” hypotheses
• Experiences of “under-served” populations – e.g., individuals living with disabilities or chronic health conditions, migrants, and rural populations - and providers/programs that serve them
• Examples of hospital and system improvement efforts that engage patients and/or clinicians in identifying gaps and solutions, with translation to policy and practice
• Identifying ways that patient-centered care demonstrate value

Keywords: Patient Value, Patient Experience, Patient-Centered, Value Innovation, Value Creation, Health Care Value, Clinical Value, Efficient Care, Effective Care, Access, Equity, On-line Communities, Health Care Performance, Best Practice Frontiers

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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