Emerging notions of 'Valued-Based Health Care' are raising the bar and extending forecasting horizons for new drug therapies

Not long ago, a New England Journal of Medicine article, "What is Value in Health Care?" by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, offered up an analysis of healthcare value and its measurement in health outcomes research. Porter, along with and his colleague and co-author Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg, describe three types (tiers) of health outcomes:

• Health status achieved or retained -- survival, degree of health/recovery
• Process of recovery -- time to recovery/normal living, short-term liabilities of treatment
• Sustainability of health -- time to/nature of recurrences, longer-term liabilities of therapy

This "Outcome Measures Hierarchy" is being used by a growing number of large multi-hospital providers, small group practices, health plans, and employers in the U.S. and abroad as they work toward implementing value-based principles to guide therapy choices and outcome assessments.