Professional Organizations’ Role in Supporting Physicians to Improve Value in Health Care

Abstract

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) strives to encourage health care value by simultaneously improving quality of care and slowing the rate of increase of health care costs. Some of the law’s provisions, such as the Physician Value-Based Modifier (PVBM), will include financial incentives that directly affect individual clinicians, thus providing an external force for engaging physicians in efforts to improve health care value.1,2 Despite this looming mandate—PVBM will go in effect in 2015 for large physician groups and in 2017 for all physicians—some physicians may lack the tools and motivation necessary to improve the value of their individual care delivery. Notably, the current system does not compel high-value care. Not only is mitigating waste and judiciously ordering tests and referrals disincentivized in the fee-for-service system, doing so is more cognitively taxing and there is a perceived increased risk of legal repercussions.