Value-based medicine, a compass to guide healthcare decisions in the COVID-19 aftermath

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemics has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives among the elderly, the patients with chronic conditions and among underserved communities and people in social distress. In addition, the measures that succeeded in containing the epidemic created a profound economic crisis, which real dimension is still unclear. It is clear, however, that most healthcare systems were unprepared. Years of cost containments had eroded the ability of the healthcare sector to cope with the surge in cases. This editorial contends that rebuilding the healthcare systems will require forward thinking, a data-driven approach and avoidance of reactive decision making. The editorial proposes the Value Based Medicine approach as a way to avoid the errors of the past and to align decision making in healthcare with patient health and quality of life (Value). This is an approach that is gaining traction in several systems. It needs a built-in capability to collect and analyse outcome and costing data. Today the necessary informatic and computational capabilities are widely available.