Collaboration Paves the Way for Value-Based Care

Two years ago, Helsinki University Hospital, the University of Helsinki, and Johnson & Johnson entered into an agreement for large-scale international collaboration to develop value-based healthcare. The first projects within the collaboration have now been completed, and the results have been eye-opening – most notably in terms of the positive prospects the value-based approach brings to Finnish healthcare. 

It is generally acknowledged that health systems, including the Finnish one, need to evolve to ensure sustainability. Because of scientific and technological progress, we find ourselves questioning established knowledge, methods, and systems. As scientific advancements continue to progress, they bring personalized solutions. At the same time, decision-making and the overall structure of healthcare services are also becoming more intricate.

Concrete projects to take value-based healthcare thinking into practice

While healthcare organizations worldwide are embracing the concept of value-based healthcare, there are still few examples of how to implement this transformation holistically in the daily operations of hospitals and healthcare systems.  In collaboration with the University of Helsinki and Johnson & Johnson, HUS adopted a very practical and capability development-focused approach. 

“The first initiative was to build a training concept based on our identified need to enhance healthcare professionals' understanding of value-based healthcare. The aim was to create a foundation for incorporating value considerations into practical clinical patient care,” said Sami Pakarinen, Chief Medical Officer of Clinical Auditing at Helsinki University Hospital. 

“The training involved utilizing the existing online course, 'Rethinking Health', together with a workshop-based training program, where a group of HUS healthcare professionals worked on how to implement value-based thinking in practice, as part of everyday decision-making, and how its impact can be measured. We have utilized the results in building disease-specific dashboards visualizing the costs and outcomes of care,” he continues. 

To make this training as concrete as possible, it was built around the challenges of caring for one specialty area, multiple myeloma. In another initiative, partners tapped into one of the most pressing challenges of current times, depression, to gain a comprehensive understanding of its societal costs and outcomes. 

“Depression has a very big impact on society. This is something we have empirically acknowledged for a long time, but through research we have now been able to quantify the total costs across sectors and identify development actions. Data are otherwise very extensive, but currently patient-reported outcomes are not being collected. This insight gives us clear next steps in our research: implementation of the collection of patient-reported outcomes in depression to support data-driven decision making to best allocate services for patients,” said Paulus Torkki, Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki.

With the first initiatives completed, the collaboration between Helsinki University Hospital, the University of Helsinki, and J&J continues with projects to measure patient-relevant outcomes in bladder and prostate cancer, as well as continuing research to improve healthcare services in depression.

Professor Risto Renkonen, Director of Innovation at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki added: “These initiatives serve as important evidence that the value-based approach not only enhances the effectiveness of our healthcare operations but also addresses broader societal challenges. We are actively working to expand the insights gained from these pilot projects across other disease areas, with the ultimate goal of enhancing research to improve diagnostics and treatment pathways for every patient at Helsinki University Hospital. The lessons from this collaboration inspire hope that we can overcome the challenges in Finnish healthcare and, one day, serve as a role model for other health systems on their transformation journeys.”