ISC: High Value Care: In Policy and Practice

School of Medicine

The cost of healthcare is an issue that affects everyone on both a population as well as individual level. Additionally, despite spending far more money in the United States on healthcare, our health outcomes are often no better and, in many cases, worse that other industrialized countries. This has led to an increased interest in high value care and its role in our healthcare system. This course aims to increase understanding and application of value metrics in health care, with a special emphasis on integrating value into clinical decision-making. Students will study value-based care through both a general medical lens as well as from the ethics, administrative, and health policy perspectives. At the end of this course, students will have a deeper understanding of how value is quantified in medicine and will have honed the crucial skill of incorporating value information and pretest probabilities into their diagnostic workups. Students will also be better prepared to act as high-value care change makers as they enter residency, having studied value-based care hospital practices as well as through interactions with utilization management and complex care teams.