If you are ill, and you are about to have a discussion with your doctor, you want to get the best possible benefit from the treatment. For various reasons, the individual patient benefit cannot be illustrated, mostly because it is not recorded or only inadequately recorded in current routine practice. Accordingly, it is difficult to comprehensively assess the services provided and to ensure that the remuneration of the services provided is based on their actual benefits. The Value-based healthcare model (VBHC) wants to change that.
Treatments are carried out and appropriately remunerated if they provide the patient with the greatest possible relevant benefit from their point of view. Using the example of the treatment of breast cancer: in addition to the crucial factor of "survival" for benefit assessment, patients should receive the therapy that meets their needs, beliefs, and preferences with various quality indicators that can be measured.
With the benefit assessment, the patient is placed at the centre of the treatment, this is exactly where VBHC comes in. The "value" is defined as the best possible benefit of treatment for the patient, in relation to the resources that have been used to achieve this result. "Value-based healthcare wants to move away from the principle that every patient is treated equally and towards the approach ‘What brings the greatest possible benefit to this specific patient?’", explains Jessica Thürmer, Market Access Partner at Roche Pharma Schweiz AG.
Roche has been involved with VBHC worldwide for several years. At the heart of the matter are the questions whether and how VBHC can work and what contribution Roche can make to the design of a sustainable and efficient healthcare system.
For this reason, the Roche Pharma (Schweiz) AG, together with the Roche Diagnostics (Schweiz) AG, was looking for partners who share the vision of a patient-oriented healthcare system. Roche launched a pilot project with the University Hospital Basel (USB [Universitätsspital Basel]) in 2019. Together, the USB and Roche want to create an example of use. Since there are no templates for the implementation of VBHC in Switzerland to date, it is also important to understand how implementation can be done in everyday clinical practice. The aim is to prove that the patient benefits can be illustrated with the available data and can be directly linked to the costs. "We are currently evaluating the data", says Thürmer. "The aim is to share the results of our pilot project with the public at the beginning of next year".
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