Value-Based Care Is Hard, but It's Worth Getting Right
Key Highlights
- ➤Oak Street Health reports 40% fewer hospital admissions per thousand versus traditional Medicare
- ➤Signify Health conducts roughly 3.5 million in-home evaluations annually
- ➤MinuteClinic primary care model now available at more than 65% of CVS clinics
- ➤Oak Street shifted from clinic growth toward strengthening performance in existing centers
WOONSOCKET, RI / ACCESS Newswire / September 29, 2026 / Originally published on CVS Health Company Newsroom
Key points * Value-based primary care has stalled in many places not because the model is wrong, but because too many have approached it as a contracting exercise, signing the risk deal and documenting patients' clinical conditions, instead of the harder work of integrating care around the patient. * Scaling it takes connecting the whole system around one patient: the health plan, primary care, in-home engagement, retail clinics and the neighborhood pharmacy, all working toward the same goal. * At CVS Health, we're doing the harder work of integration and medical cost improvement, not just the easier work of contracting and documenting, and being honest about what that takes. For many clinicians, the moments from the exam room that stay with them are rarely the dramatic ones. They're the avoidable ones: the patient who lands in the emergency department over a weekend because no one caught the warning signs on Thursday, the medication that was never reconciled, the specialist visit that never got back to the person managing the whole picture. None of those failures are about the skill of any single clinician. They're about a system that pays for activity instead of outcomes, and that leaves everyone in it working harder than ever while patients still fall through the gaps.
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