King's Health Partners defines high value care as:

the equitable, sustainable, and transparent use of available resources to achieve better outcomes and experiences for every person in the population

This definition was developed to define high value care for the NHS and promotes the importance of considering resource use (not limited to expenditure) and its equitable allocation across the whole pathway of care at a population level.

The NHS definition builds on the 2004 Porter and Teisberg definition where Value is defined as the health outcomes (that matter to patients) achieved per dollar spend.

How is KHP working to deliver high value care for our populations?

To improve outcomes and increase the value that is derived from available resources across varied population groups we are focussing on three priority areas.

Digital Health and Data Science

Step 1: to deliver high value care first we need to continue to grow our health data science capabilities so we can exploit big data to identify unwarranted variation in access, response to treatment and outcomes and to allow us to use data to drive treatment decisions and continuously improve services. We need to continue to grow our data assets to enable populaiton health management and we need to develop intelligent tools that allow real-time evaluation of pathways of care and identification of interventions that deliver the highest value to enable the efficient allocation of finite resources.

Population Health

Step 2: to deliver high value care we need to take a systems approach and consider the impact of interventions and innovations on population health outcomes, using our data and digital capabilities, to identify underserved populations and prioritise equity. We need to work cohesively across partners to further integrate and improve the value of whole pathways of care in order to improve population health and equity.

Personalised Health

Step 3: to deliver high value care we need to focus on outcomes that matter to populations and patients, and those close to them, through personalising the care received. We will do this by harnessing our translational expertise to treat disease more effectively, responding to the needs of individuals. We will also promote the effective monitoring and use of patient reported outcome measures as fundamental to ensuring shared treatment decisions respond to individual need.

Mind and Body

Mental and physical health conditions are often connected which is why integrating mental and physical healthcare has the potential to vastly improve peoples experience of healthcare, their outcomes and the efficiency of care pathways. Taking a mind and body approach is therefore integral to both improving sustainability of our NHS services and ensuring that individuals, communities, and populations needs are holistically met. King's Health Partners recognises the importance of treating the whole person and is committed to integrating mental and physical health care across everything we do.

Our strategic priorities are further explained in our Impact Report 2022-23. Across all our activities we are committed to measuring outcomes and resource use across a full pathway of care, to ensure that decisions to spread and scale are led by strong evidence of value. We will continue to learn from local and international exemplars, and work collaboratively with these partners to strengthen the evidence base for high value care approaches to healthcare delivery.

Our work on high value care:

The King's Health Partners Digital Health Hub aims to accelerate the development of digital health and data science technologies, including through our leadership of the AI centre for value based healthcare.

Our Vital 5 programme forms part of and aims to tackle five modifiable risk factors through high value interventions that address these major drivers of poor population health and inequity.

Our IMPARTs programme has helped deliver personalised, high value mind and body care to people with chronic conditions by screening for common mental health conditions in physical health outpatient appointments using validated patient reported outcome measures (PROMs).

Through KHP Education, in partnership with Erasmus MC, we host High Value Care courses and seminars which support clinical and non-clinical health care leaders from across our system to understand and implement high value care principles in practice. You can watch our introduction to health economics webinar here

To support our partner trusts to continually improve services based on excellent clinical outcomes that matter most to patients, we are supporting the standardisation of clinical effectiveness monitoring and are supporting shared governance on how and when outcome measures are embedded in the Electronic Patient Record System used across both our acute Trusts.

History of high value care at KHP

Our commitment to high value care was first communicated through our 2014-19 strategy ‘Improving health and wellbeing – locally and globally’. Our programme focussed on improving the recording and sharing of outcomes and developing big data solutions and informatics capabilities. We published a series of outcomes books to help patients, service users, carers, referring clinicians and commissioners to make better-informed decisions, and to continuously improve quality of care. The books reported key outcomes for treatments provided by our Clinical Academic Groups.

Our most recent five-year plan for 2020-25 'Delivering better health for all through high impact innovation' embedded high value care through our thematic focus on transforming system-wide approaches to Quality Improvement and outcomes.

We are now working to accelerate progress in three priority areas within this current strategy: digital health and health data science, populaiton health, and personalised health, whilst integrating mind and body across everything we do. These interdependent priorities are connected through a high value care framework.

Our partners

Through our membership of the European University Hospital Alliance we work alongside Europe's leading hospitals to take part in High Value Care education opportunities including:

Further reading 

“Defining Value-based Healthcare in the NHS”, Hurst L, Mahtani K, Pluddemann A, Lewis S, Harvey K, Briggs A, Boylan A-M, Bajwa R, Haire K, Entwistle A, Handa A, and Heneghan C. CEBM, University of Oxford (April 2019). 

Porter ME, Teisberg EO. Redefining competition in health care. Harv Bus Rev. 2004 Jun;82(6):64-76, 136. PMID: 15202288. (And later in What Is Value in Health Care? Porter M, NEJM Dec 2010; 363;26).

Michael E. Porter, Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg, Redefining Health Care (2006). For summary see Porter and Lee, “The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care”, Harvard Business Review (2013).

How can you define value in healthcare? (2019)​.

 https://www.3vh.org/challenges-solutions/

Expert Advisory Panel, “Defining value in value based healthcare”, European Commission (2019). 

Katarina Sternudd blog post, “Conceptual confusion among researchers of value-based health care”, Karolinska Institutet (27 May 2015). Findings based on analysis of 199 articles citing Porter’s trend-starting article on Vale Based Healthcare.

Implementing high value care

What are the value of value based healthcare? (2018)​

The Roadmap for Implementing Value-Based Healthcare in European University Hospitals—Consensus Report and Recommendations (2021)

John Kay, Obliquity (2010).

Alderwick et al, “Better Value in the NHS”, The King’s Fund (2015).

Leemore Dafny & Thomas Lee, “Health Care Needs Real Competition”, Harvard Business Review (2016). 

“Person-Centred Value-Based Health Care: A report analysing the approaches to bringing together Value-Based Health Care, Person-Centred Health Care and Population Equity”, Sprink 2021.

Scottish government definition.

ICHOM - Value Based Healthcare, Improving Patient Outcomes.

Mind and Body.

Economic evaluation

Introduction to health economics and economic evaluation - RDS London (nihr.ac.uk).

An Overview of Value, Perspective, and Decision Context—A Health Economics Approach: An ISPOR Special Task Force Report 2.

Defining Elements of Value in Health Care—A Health Economics Approach: An ISPOR Special Task Force Report 3.

Contact the team

To learn more about the Value Based Healthcare team or explore how we can work together please email khp-programmesupport@kcl.ac.uk