VA launches value-driven framework for evaluating health care innovations

At VA, we are determined to have Veteran insights and perspectives inform all we do: Don’t make decisions for Veterans without Veterans. For many, like Air Force Veteran Michael Borges, “Technology is moving quickly and it’s hard to keep up.” Fortunately, with VA’s new Value-Driven Framework, Veterans can be assured their priorities and perspectives drive all VA’s innovation decisions.

While the emerging technology landscape can be complex, the Value-Driven Framework seeks to evaluate technologies on an objective scale that emphasizes personalized, user-specific solutions for care delivery.

The Veteran is the primary architect for the solutions used in their care journey.

Value-Driven Framework

To ensure health care innovation offers the greatest value to Veterans and those who care for them, VHA and Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) launched the new Value-Driven Framework.

DiME is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the safe, effective, equitable and ethical use of digital medicine to optimize human health. The organization collaborated with VHA under the belief that digital medicine requires an unprecedented level of interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Value-Driven Framework for Evaluating Healthcare Innovations focuses on four measures of value, including access, effectiveness, efficiency and equity. It follows three fundamental principles: meaningfulness, appropriateness of scale, and time.

Framework expectations

With this new framework, VA will:

• Prioritize what matters to Veterans and continue to support excellence in value-driven Veteran health care.
• Design, develop and deploy a portfolio of mission-driven and sustainable health care innovations.
• Realize the dynamism of innovation value, yielding more significant health outcomes over time from individual and population levels.

To innovate the path to high value care, we must first redefine value beyond just dollars and cents. To ensure that every dollar invested returns value to the Veterans we serve, we need to focus on measuring value across the domains of access, effectiveness, efficiency and equity.

High Value Innovation starts with you

VA invites all interested Veterans, innovators and industry leaders to join us in adopting this new approach for evaluating health care innovations. To successfully bring the promise of today’s health care innovation to fruition, VA encourages that we collectively pursue efforts to embrace this holistic approach to measuring value:

• Demonstrate the balance of value being pursued across an innovation portfolio.
• Support investment decisions based off a holistic evaluation of the value they promise.
• Inform operational rigor needed to track the full range of value returned from the innovation portfolio.

“VHA has an opportunity unlike any other. We feel confident that this new evaluation framework will serve as a powerful reference for any decision maker in health care who is trying to make the right choices about the proliferation and innovation opportunities they face today,” says Jennifer Goldsack, chief executive officer of DiMe. “DiMe is proud to partner with the VHA on this work which has the potential to be successfully adopted by the rest of the health care market and initiate a new way of measuring success.”

VA invites innovators, industry leaders, and decision-makers to deploy this framework and share use cases on individual/team’s innovations here