Value-Based Healthcare in Cardiology: How to Integrate a more Comprehensive View into Medical Decision-Making?

Value-based healthcare is a patient-centered concept that provides a broad view of all parties involved in the care process. This model is designed to achieve the best possible patient outcomes while maintaining cost sustainability. In its classic description, value-based care is the relationship between outcomes that matter to the patient and the costs required to achieve them. Later, other variables were considered in this equation, such as appropriateness and user experience, to make this model more replicable. With a view that aligns the interests of patients, physicians, and payers, value-based healthcare has great potential to improve medical practice sustainably. After more than a decade of discussions and publications, putting this concept into practice is still challenging and dynamic. Value-based healthcare has gained importance and should become a transformative model for health ecosystems. Medical compensation aligned with these principles appears to be a promising path toward such transformation. Nevertheless, the application of this concept depends on a more straightforward definition of the health value parameters in different clinical scenarios. Cardiology is a specialty that usually has a solid evidence base for medical decision-making and this generates great potential for the application of health value elements. In this article, the authors outline a review of the main concepts of value-based healthcare and its potential applications in cardiology.