Opportunity after crisis: enhancing value in the COVID-19 rebound.

As we reset post pandemic, providers and payers are in an excellent position to prioritize a reallocation of health care expenditures driven primarily by individual and population health gains.

Opportunity After Crisis: Enhancing Value in the COVID-19 Rebound

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 led to a significant reduction of both high-value and low-value care. This once-in-a-century disruption that nearly shut down all elective medical care provided an unprecedented opportunity to restructure and align provider- and consumer-facing incentives with the value of care delivered, reallocating more resources to high-value, underutilized services and decreasing utilization of low-value care. Shahzad and colleagues report that this silver lining of the pandemic may have been partially achieved. As we reset post pandemic, providers and payers are in an excellent position to develop, implement, and evaluate policies that serve public interests first and foremost. In addition to the aforementioned accountability programs for providers, plans should also experiment with more widespread rollout of value-based insurance design (VBID), as has been emphasized in guidelines from CMS.