Alignd wins Best Journal Paper at prestigious BHF Titanium Awards

Alignd shone at the recent BHF Conference Titanium Awards night with the cofounders winning Best Journal Paper Award entitled The devil’s in the detail: A value-based contracting case study.

The case study focused on the personal experience of Alignd’s cofounders in developing a value-based contracting solution for the South African market.

“The award signifies growing industry recognition of our work and the need for an alternative approach to funding palliative care, particularly as it applies to metastatic cancer patients,” says Alignd cofounder Shivani Ranchod.

Development of value-based contracting holds a multitude of philosophical, intellectual, pragmatic,
relational and technical challenges. In Alignd’s case study on value-based contracting for palliative care, three key lessons learnt in relation to these challenges are outlined: that the process matters as much as the end-point; to constantly ask “What Would Porter Do?”; and the importance of maintaining “Beginner’s Mind”: the willingness to learn and re-create.

There are multiple challenges for end-of-life care in the South African private sector: limited time-based terminal benefits in the Prescribed Minimum Benefits (PMBs), under-developed supply of palliative benefits, low impetus for value-based approaches and regulatory impediments to payment innovation.

The process of designing a value-based contract required overcoming the trust deficit between funders and providers, which in turn required neutrality. The process and the end solution both required transparency, positive intent and a commitment to excellence.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are
few. It requires an openness, an enthusiasm and an absence of pre-conceptions that are difficult to achieved in a cynical industry.”

(Suzuki, 2010)

The solution that was developed required multiple dimensions in order to satisfy the requirements of
the Porter and Lee (2013) framework: a bundled professional fee for a multi-disciplinary team,
outcomes-based payment incentivising value and continuous improvement, a tiered-fee across care
settings, an innovative remote-access solution and an enabling information technology platform.

“Through the lived experience of moving from a theoretical concept to a fully-fledged offering, we have frequently encountered, and continue to encounter, the devil in the detail,” Ranchod says.

Interested in reading more on Alignd’s proposed value-based contracting model? Download our white
paper now.