An article in JAMA asserts that “valued-based payments require valuing what matters to patients.”

The authors conclude:

“As Medicare moves to implement value-based payment initiatives tied only to current quality measures, the values of large populations of disabled and frail persons, whose care is the most costly and most concentrated in Medicare, are at high risk for being seriously neglected. These people will receive the medications and treatments that would be mostly correct if they were healthier, but their actual priorities will be neither noticed nor met. If the United States intends to pay on the basis of value, it is essential to ask patients what they value, and then deliver on those priorities.