It’s Time to Help Clinicians Do What They Were Meant to Do

I recently stumbled upon an online forum that posed a question many have pondered: What would you do if you had the resources you needed to retire today? I opened the comments, expecting to read about movie marathons and never-ending beach vacations.

But that’s not what I found. Instead, I found hope.

Nearly every comment envisioned a life in service of others. One commenter shared plans to open a free hospital for kids. One imagined gardening with folks at the local nursing home. Another dreamed of building kid-sized musical instruments and donating them to underfunded elementary schools.

What a beautiful world this would be! If people suddenly had the resources they needed, they wouldn’t retire in the conventional sense, they’d do what they felt they were meant to do.

I began to wonder: What would clinicians do if they had the resources to retire today?

Some would, of course, retire. But medicine runs on the dedication and selfless service of its providers. It’s not difficult to envision a world where doctors, nurses, and support staff would continue caring for others, even if they didn’t need to —?after all, it’s what many of them say they were meant to do.

I’m not here to push for utopia. Rather, I’m here to work hard to build a healthcare ecosystem where clinicians are incentivized to follow their calling, unencumbered by the failures of our current system.

That’s impossible in a fee-for-service world. In fact, features (not bugs) of this system, like burnout, are driving 20% of doctors toward conventional retirement in the next two years.

The endless churn of the fee-for-service model isn’t working for clinicians, and robust data suggests it doesn’t work well for patients, either. It entangles providers in webs of misaligned incentives and administrative tasks, and prevents them from building meaningful relationships, helping people achieve health, and using their education and expertise to accomplish social good.

So, how can we give clinicians an opportunity to do that —?to do what they were meant to do?

Value-based care emerged as a solution to this problem decades ago, but it has yet to deliver on its promise.

Why? It’s not just lagging implementation. Under value-based care’s current framework, clinicians still don’t have the resources they need to do their jobs. We simply can’t expect them to understand whether they’re making progress toward value-based care if we don’t supply them with the tools needed to track and incentivize that progress.

Doing value-based care the right way starts with supporting clinicians with provider enablement platforms that surface meaningful, actionable insights. Platforms that provide clear metrics connecting payment with performance. Platforms that give them real-time feedback, so they can double down when they achieve better patient outcomes or augment their approach when things go awry.

Healthcare has failed to do that. But we shouldn’t be confused about the reason why: It’s not value-based care that’s falling short, it’s the short-sighted way in which we’ve implemented it.

It’s time to push onward and upward toward this vision. It’s time to help clinicians do what they were meant to do.

#valuebasedcare #paymentreform #healthequity #technology #innovation #healthcareleadership