NONPARTISAN ยท NONPROFIT
Advancing value-based care
Advancing healthcare quality, affordability, outcomes, and equity through research, education, and policy.
WHY VALUE-BASED CARE
The way we pay for healthcare shapes the care people receive.
For decades, the dominant model has paid for the volume of services delivered: more visits, more tests, more procedures, with little connection to whether patients actually got healthier. The result is a system that spends more than any other in the world while leaving wide gaps in quality and access.
Value-based care changes the incentive. It ties payment to outcomes, total cost, and the patient experience, rewarding organizations for keeping people well rather than for treating them more. Done right, it can lower costs, improve quality, and narrow the inequities that the old model so often deepened.
But the transition is hard, technical, and uneven. The Institute exists to make it work better, translating evidence into practice for the clinicians, payers, and policymakers building this system.
KEY FOCUS AREAS
Where we concentrate our work
Value-Based Payment Models
Studying how alternative payment arrangements, from shared savings to capitation and bundled payments, change incentives, spending, and the experience of care.
Population Health & Analytics
Examining the data, risk-stratification, and measurement practices that let organizations manage the health of whole populations rather than one visit at a time.
Health Equity
Ensuring that value-based models close gaps in access and outcomes instead of widening them, with metrics that hold systems accountable to every community.
Medicaid & Public Programs
Analyzing how state Medicaid agencies, Medicare, and other public payers can use value-based design to stretch public dollars further and improve care.
THE ACADEMY
Learn how value-based care works
Free, self-paced courses that build a working understanding of value-based care, from the fundamentals to how payment, delivery, and policy fit together.
Explore the AcademyFree & self-paced
Start anytime and learn at your own pace, from the ground up.
Knowledge checks
Short quizzes at each step help the concepts stick.
Certificate on completion
Earn a certificate to show your working knowledge.
Transforming healthcare through value
Our work is guided by four dimensions of real value.
LATEST RESEARCH
Recent reports & briefs
Behavioral Health: The Blind Spot and the Expired Excuse
Only 17% of hospitals send records to most or all behavioral health providers, the thinnest link in hospital data exchange. For decades the reason was a federal privacy rule. That rule was rewritten, and compliance came due February 16, 2026. The harder problem remains: where accountability has reached behavioral health, studies measured whether spending fell and mostly did not ask whether patients got better.
Read morePrior Authorization: Faster Is Not the Same as Right
A federal rule now requires payers to decide prior authorization requests within 72 hours or seven days, explain denials, and publish their numbers. These are real improvements. But the evidence suggests much of prior authorization delays care it goes on to approve: in one study, 58 of 61 denied imaging requests (95.1%) were approved once reviewed. The rule speeds the process without changing its standard, and it excludes drugs.
Read morePost-Acute Care: The Unclaimed Prize
Accountable care organizations have cut post-acute spending by about 9% (roughly $106 per beneficiary) without harming patients, one of the clearest wins in value-based care. But the savings come from clinicians managing individual attributed patients inside facilities they do not own, and that is exactly where the data does not travel: hospitals get records back from post-acute providers only 8% of the time.
Read more