Dr Charlie Fazio on the Uncertainty of Transitioning to Value-Based Care

Charlie Fazio, MD, senior vice president and medical director of HealthPartners discusses the uncertainty felt by practices as the industry moves from fee-for-service to value-based care

Transcript (slightly modified)

How do physicians balance the fact that the industry is moving toward value-based care, but they are mostly still practicing in a fee-for-service environment?

There’s a lot of uncertainty as people live in a fee-for-service world and we start to talk about a world where there might be more payments based on population. It’s tough for a practice to figure out "when do I go from A to B?" and so for a while they live with the ambiguity, they try to run both models even though at the same time, I want to treat everybody I see in the course of a day, the same way, according to the same model, without worrying about how I’m being paid for them. You can’t possibly keep track of all that.

So, in a lot of ways I think it’s important for a practice to think through: how do I coordinate the various contracts I have? How do I move more in the direction of population-based care? When will it be safe for me to think through: I want to run this as efficiently as I can, I want to run this based on cost rather than on revenue, and I want to go all-in on the team version.

That’s a tough decision and I think it’s incumbent on all of us. It’s important to all of us and we’ll all benefit from helping practices figure out how to go there.