To achieve its goals, the HVHC is using an approach designed to quickly generate and share new knowledge. Rather than conduct parallel processes and compare results, we collect and analyze pooled data on a range of common and costly health care conditions from our geographically diverse healthcare delivery organizations and disparate patient populations. This method allows for rapid evaluation and identification of high value health care processes, testing the effectiveness of implementing innovative processes on healthcare value, piloting of new payment models, and dissemination of identified best practices.
Although the HVHC approach is different from those used in traditional research programs, we believe it has distinct advantages. First, our approach will allow us to determine what is cost-effective and efficient in practice. Translating findings and anticipated effects of interventions defined by our method should be more direct and timely than translating traditional research findings. Second, our findings will not suffer from concerns over generalizability; they will be derived from a common data pool that contains the large and diverse population served by members of the collaborative. Third, we believe that the impact of our findings on practice model improvement and the development of new care models will be much more rapid. While traditional research methods may take a generation to integrate into practice, ours will be concurrent.