Nathan Tierney’s powerful storytelling is rarely seen in today’s health care business environment. We must redesign the health care delivery system—a team sport in service of patients, hold it accountable with measurement to improve outcomes, and quantify the resource costs over the full cycle of care. Value-based health care is a framework through which these goals are achieved, and Tierney provides a detailed playbook to get your organization there. Outlined in incredible detail and clarity, he presents core concepts and dives into the key metrics needed to build, maintain, and scale a successful value-based health care organization. Nathan shares a realistic vision of what any CEO should expect when developing their own Value Management Office. Nothing is more important to me than improving the lives of those I love. My personal mission is to create systemic change with an impact on the global stage. This playbook needs to be on the desk of every executive, clinician, and patient today.

-Mahek Shah, MD, Senior Researcher and Senior Project Leader, Harvard Business School

Our current healthcare system’s broken. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) predicts health care costs could increase from 6% to 14% of GDP by 2060. The cause of this increase is due to (1) a global aging population, (2) growing affluence, (3) rise in chronic diseases, and (4) better-informed patients; all of which raises the demand for healthcare.

In 2006, Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg authored the book ‘Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results.’ In it, they present their analysis of the root causes plaguing the health care industry and make the case for why providers, suppliers, consumers, and employers should move towards a patient-centric approach that optimizes value for patients. According to Porter, value for patients should be the overarching principle for our broken system. Since 2006, Professor Porter, accompanied by his esteemed Harvard colleague, Profesor Robert Kaplan, have worked tirelessly to promote this new approach and pilot it with leading healthcare delivery organizations like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, and U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. Given the current state of global healthcare, there is urgency to achieve widespread adoption of this new approach. The intent of this book is to equip all healthcare delivery organizations with a guide for putting the value-based concept into practice.

This book defines the practice of value-based health care as Value Management. The book explores Profesor Porter’s Value Equation (Value = Outcomes/ Cost), which is central to Value Management, and provides a step-by-step process for how to calculate the components of this equation. On the outcomes side, the book presents the Value Realization Framework, which translates organizational mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures and contextualizes the measures for healthcare delivery. The Value Realization Framework is based on Professor Kaplan’s ground-breaking Balanced Scorecard approach, but specific to healthcare organizations. On the costs side, the book details the Harvard endorsed time-driven activity based costing (TDABC) methodology, which has proven to be a modern catalyst for defining HDO costs. Finally, this book covers the need and a plan to establish a Value Management Office to lead the delivery transformation and govern operations.

This book is designed in a format where any organization can read it and acquire the fundamentals and methodologies of Value Management. It is intended for healthcare delivery organizations in need of learning the specifics of achieving the implementation of value-based healthcare.