Introducing value-based healthcare perspectives into hospital performance assessment: A scoping review

Value-based healthcare (VBHC) puts patient outcomes at the center of the healthcare process while optimizing the use of hospital resources across multiple stakeholders. This scoping review was conducted to summarize how VBHC had been represented in theory and in practice, how it had been applied to assess hospital performance, and how well it had been ultimately implemented.

For this review, we followed the PRISMA-ScR protocol and searched five major online databases for articles published between January 2006 and July 2022. We included original articles that used the concept of VBHC to conduct performance assessments of healthcare organizations. We extracted and analyzed key concepts and information on the dimensions of VBHC, specific strategies and methods for using VBHC in performance assessment, and the effectiveness of the assessment.

We identified 48 eligible studies from 7866 articles. Nineteen nonempirical studies focused on the development of a VBHC performance assessment indicator system, and 29 empirical studies reported on the ways and points of introducing VBHC into performance assessment and its effectiveness. Ultimately, we summarized the key dimensions, processes, and effects of performance assessment after introducing VBHC.

Current healthcare performance assessment has begun to focus on implementing VBHC as an integrated strategy, and future work should further clarify the reliability of metrics and their association with evaluation outcomes and consider the effective integration of clinical outcomes and patient-reported outcomes.