Dr Ashish K. Jha Discusses Patients' Role in Bundled Payments

Gathering patient-reported outcomes and experiences is essential to evaluating the success of bundled payment models, said Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH, the K.T. Li Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What role should the patient voice play in bundled payments to ensure quality care?

At the end of the day, whether the bundles are going to lead to better care, a big part of how we assess that has to come from patients directly. And the patient’s assessment of whether they got better, whether their functional status is good, what their pain control is like, things that only patients can offer us — electronic health record data can’t, claims data can’t – I think is a really important component of declaring something successful or not.

And my take is we’re not doing quite enough on capturing that patient voice and capturing that patient input. So we need not just patient reported measures of experience, which I think are very important, but also patient reported outcome measures, which are fundamental if we’re really going to make sure that bundled payments lead to better care and not just lower spending.