ValU

For Professionals

At UCLA Health, we believe that real improvement in healthcare value is achievable and encourage you to join us. In addition to looking for engaged partners within our own system, we seek to provide leadership in the field and are always happy to share ideas.  

Our goal is continuous improvement, with measurable results. Learn more:

Design Flow

Finding Partners for the Value Mission

To achieve better patient care, our ValU team works on a disease state basis, partnering with interdisciplinary groups of UCLA clinical providers, administrators and other staff. We:

  • Work closely with project sponsors to identify and bring together the appropriate stakeholders who provide direct patient care
  • Facilitate the group’s progress towards developing, executing and sustaining its own solutions for redesigning care pathways

Learn more about redesigning care.

How Value Benefits Clinicians

While our team provides the framework and the opportunity, value care redesign is a dedicated team effort. It cannot succeed without the dedicated support and participation of physicians, nurses and other clinicians — those who actually provide patient care.

Doctor-Patient

Our clinicians take great pride in redesigning care so that it benefits patients as much as possible. Many are excited by the chance to address long-running challenges. By emphasizing value, clinicians receive the opportunity to:   

  • Optimize daily workflows and take disease-based programs to the next level in excellence
  • Work at the top of their licenses
  • Communicate with colleagues outside their discipline to discuss current processes and ways to improve them
  • Receive technical support and resources not previously available
  • Directly identify challenges, causes and solutions
  • Feel more empowered and productive, with greater job satisfaction and less frustration

Why Value Matters to Healthcare Professionals

The primary reason we work to improve care outcomes and the care experience is to serve our patients. But doing so can also reduce costs, which benefits both our health system and those we care for.

We must operate within this larger context, described in Change Agent, an interview with UCLA Health Chief Medical and Quality Officer Dr. Robert A. Cherry, and in a Harvard Business Review article by two experts titled The Strategy that will Fix Health Care.

Some concerns include:

  • Lower reimbursements: Pressed to rein in costs, payors continue to push for lower reimbursements and a move from fee-for-service to performance-based payments. Public insurance, which pays much less than private plans, now covers more patients — the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid, while the aging population increases Medicare rolls. State and federal budgets remain tight, and cuts in federally funded research budgets mean less support for academic medical centers.
  • Investment needs: Academic medical centers like ours must continuously invest in technological advancements, new treatments and leading research. Given the changing environment, we need to provide optimal care while remaining as efficient and lean as possible. We need to carefully manage limited resources, and to provide improved care at a reduced cost. This will allow us to reinvest savings.
  • Call to adapt: Reputation is no longer enough. To remain competitive and sustainable, medical centers must prove that they offer value. We must offer care that is attractive to consumers, employers and insurers, based on measurable outcomes, patient satisfaction and cost. Centers that adapt can sustain and even grow their market share. Those that do not will prove untenable.