What Is High-Value Health Care and Why Is It Important?

As the CEO of St. Luke’s Health, I spend every day immersed in the care of patients, studying best practices and implementing these ideals at our 16 hospitals and physician clinics. Many factors go into our decision-making, but a critical inflection point is whether our physicians and caregivers are providing the highest-value care possible.

The term “high-value care” seems self-explanatory and to a certain extent it is. Many people do not know, however, that high-value care is a term that hospitals use as a gauge for how they are doing and that there are written guidelines about how to achieve high-value care. In 2013, an Institute of Medicine report defined high-value care as “the best care for the patient, with the optimal result for the circumstances, delivered at the right price.”

The St. Luke’s Health network, which includes Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center (the research and teaching hospital for Baylor College of Medicine) and St. Joseph Health, has for years been committed to providing high-value care. In 2020, our organization was named a finalist for the Quest Award for High-Value Healthcare by Premier Inc., a leading healthcare improvement company, for providing outstanding patient care as an academic hospital.

Our patients are the reason we come to work every day. Providing exceptional care to them is a responsibility we welcome and one that we will always honor as we work to ensure the sustainability of St. Luke’s Health, which provides yearly care to more than 75,000 inpatient and 955,000 outpatient Texans, including many of our fellow citizens who are in historically underserved populations.

As we continue to make the transition to value-based care in greater Houston, employers and consumers are looking to providers and insurers for increased accountability. St. Luke’s Health, for its part, is investing in its clinically integrated network of hospitals, clinics and physicians in order to be responsive to employer and patient needs for improved access to essential services, lower costs of care, and improved quality.

St. Luke’s Health comprises 16 hospitals located in Houston, Bryan/College Station, and East Texas, including the renowned Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center (BSLMC). BSLMC is an academic health center providing quaternary care. We are a non-profit health system guided by our values of Compassion, Inclusion, Integrity, Excellence, and Collaboration.