The number of companies participating in President Bush's plan for value-driven healthcare has skyrocketed from 175 in January to more than 775.
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt announced Wednesday at a roundtable meeting of industry leaders that 775 employers - representing coverage for some 21 million employees and their families - have committed to supporting the Bush plan since its inception last November. Of those participating, 97 companies are among the top 200 U.S. companies, and 25 states and state employee health plans have also pledged support, Leavitt said.
These companies and states join all federal programs, including Medicare, Veterans Affairs, the Defense Department and Indian Health Services, already committed to the value-driven healthcare approach under executive order signed by President Bush last August.
Supporters of the plan promise to provide what the president calls the "four cornerstones" of value-driven healthcare, including the use of healthcare IT, measuring and publishing quality and price information and creating positive incentives for high quality, efficient care.
Federal contractors working with federal healthcare plans will be required to embrace value-driven healthcare in their 2008 contracting cycle and web-based report cards on quality are expected to be available to plan enrollees within the next 12 months, Leavitt said.
Compared with other industries, little quality and cost information has been available to health consumers until recently, Leavitt said. He urged the leadership of physicians and other health professionals to achieve reliable information about healthcare quality and costs.
"Medical associations and others have begun the work of developing quality standards and cost measurement, but we have many years of work ahead of us to achieve the wide-ranging and meaningful quality standards we need," Leavitt said.
In conjunction with Leavitt's announcement, a private-public partnership released the first-ever guides available to Medicaid and state employee healthcare purchasers for making value-based purchases.
According to The Leapfrog Group and the Partnership for Value-driven Health Care, developers of the guides, they were developed in direct response to the president's call for value-driven healthcare.
Suzanne Delbanco, CEO of The Leapfrog Group said healthcare purchasers should work together to leverage a healthcare market more conducive to improvement. The guides should help to foster collaboration among purchasers, driving value into healthcare dollars, according to Delbanco.
Jack Lord, senior vice president and chief innovation officer for Humana Inc., who also spoke at the HHS roundtable, urged national healthcare leaders to speed up the adoption of technology to increase consumerism.
"Americans are ready to embrace technology in a new arena," Lord said. "Technology has become such a useful tool in every part of our lives with the exception of healthcare, and our industry must join the rest of the world in striving for greater efficiency, higher quality and lower costs through the better utilization of technology."
Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans, said health plans have demonstrated that they have a unique role to play in achieving value-driven healthcare.