Covid As an Accelerant: On Value-based Care (Yes), On Telemedicine (Partly), on AI (Not So Much) (Managed Healthcare Executive)

By Peter Wehrwein and Briana Contreras | Sept 5, 2020

Improved medical management of acute respiratory disease and a shift toward value-based care will be two of the last effects of COVID-19 pandemic, according to Brent James, M.D., M.Stat.

“We are seeing the financial model shift,” James said in a video interview this past week with Managed Healthcare Executive®. “And if anything, Covid has accelerated the shift to provider-at-risk, pay for value, population health — all names for the same thing.”

James has been a leader in taking a systems approach to healthcare quality and patient safety t and became well known for his work in that area at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City. He is currently a clinical research professor at Stanford and has a number of other affiliations.

James was less sanguine about COVID-19 accelerating the use of artificial intelligence. “Relative to Covid changing the rate of change — accelerating it — I am a little bit skeptical that it will,” he said, while noting the overall future of AI and machine learning and keen interest that his Stanford colleagues have about those technologies…