The Bio Report

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been working to move Medicare from fee-for-service to value-based payments. It’s seeking to get 90 percent of payments to being value-based by 2018. The problem, according to a recent Viewpoint in JAMA, is that when addressing life-ending chronic conditions faced by older patients, traditional professional standards that drive today’s metrics don’t effectively address patient desires. We spoke to Joanne Lynn, director of the Altarum Institute’s Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness and lead author of the JAMA Viewpoint, about what value-based care means for patients near the end of their lives, the need to recognize the great variance in patient desires, and how healthcare systems will need to change to account for this.