Scaling Value-Based Care across the United States: Progress from Risant Health

Despite many advances in care, the U.S. health system continues to underperform in several important respects. Health outcomes are highly variable and often fall short of what is seen in other developed nations, yet we pay more for these subpar results. Health care affordability continues to be an ever-worsening challenge for government, employers, and individuals as both taxpayers and patients. In addition, the experience for patients, families, and clinicians is suboptimal. Care is often difficult to access; the system is fragmented and complex to navigate, which leads to poor experiences, inconsistent outcomes, and a lack of engagement by key stakeholders. In 2023, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals formed Risant Health as an alternative to this challenging reality. Risant Health will help scale Kaiser Permanente's (KP) value-based care (VBC) best practices to the pluralistic environments outside of KP's core integrated care and coverage model and markets. Pluralistic refers to multipayer, multiprovider, multipayment models. Here, the authors provide an update on Risant Health's efforts working with its mission-aligned, nonprofit health systems, starting with the acquisition of Geisinger Health in April 2024 and Cone Health in December 2024. Both are organizations that had made meaningful strides in their respective value journeys even prior to joining Risant Health. Central to this ambition is the aim to bolster and expand VBC capabilities to generate better outcomes in more communities nationwide through the introduction of a value-based platform (VBP) to accelerate the transformation of health care delivery across organizations that are part of Risant Health. The VBP incorporates clinical knowledge, technological tools, workflows, and operational models from across KP and Risant Health organizations. Early development has been led through collaboration with the KP Medical Foundation and the Colorado Permanente Medical Group, the Washington Permanente Medical Group physicians, and KP care teams. Although progress has already been made, Risant Health is still in the early stages of this journey. The authors discuss the need to accelerate adoption of VBC, share initial positive indicators of the VBP's impact, and outline efforts to scale a model that results in better outcomes with a better experience at a lower cost.