13 December 2018 - Value in health care is measured in terms of the patient outcomes achieved per dollars spent. As such, when policymakers measure the output of health care systems it's not the volume of services delivered that matters, but rather the outcomes. 

In short, more care is not necessarily better care. In light of this emphasis, there's been an uptick in value- or outcomes-based contracts that are supposed to reflect “pay for performance,” that is, reimburse for the value added by achieving a certain level of improvement in a patient's condition. Here, pharmaceutical firms share in the risk of their drugs' success or failure. Hence the expression "risk-sharing arrangements."

On the whole, the U.S. health care system has been gradually heading towards the use of value-based payment models. Roughly 30% of health care payments in 2016 in hospital and outpatient clinic settings were paid through a non fee-for-service payment model, such as shared savings and pass-through programs, risk-sharing arrangements, bundled payments, or population-based reimbursement.

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