A heightened focus on value is driving efforts across health care to improve outcomes and reduce costs. For pharmaceutical companies, this focus translates into a shift away from traditional payment models to more outcomes-based, risk sharing agreements. In many ways, these agreements present the opportunity to better align interests across health care’s stakeholders. However, they also introduce significant challenges, such as defining measurable and standardized outcomes, developing and implementing effective programs to measure those outcomes, and determining new ways to improve outcomes to better succeed under these programs.
Initiatives that focus on value, such as outcomes-based contracts, are likely to become more common as value-based care advances. To succeed in these arrangements, stakeholders must learn to leverage big data sources and new analytic tools to understand their patient populations, identify areas of risk, and find strategies to mitigate those risks.