Going Below The Surface

NPC's Going Below The Surface (GBTS) initiative aimed to better understand the nation’s health spending by promoting discussion firmly based in health policy and systems research. We wanted to provide clarity on how best to optimize health care spending so that patients receive the right care while simultaneously providing the right incentives to sustain next-generation innovation to improve patient well-being and health system efficiencies.

To get at the root of what is driving U.S. health care spending, GBTS brought together stakeholders from all health care sectors to ask tough questions. For example, how could we be spending more effectively on health care? Should health care resources be shared equally or geared toward the few who are most ill? Can we identify the specific areas where we can cut spending, and will that allow us to invest more in next-generation innovation?

While NPC has now sunset GBTS, our interest in nurturing a productive and informed dialogue about the drivers of U.S. health care spending hasn’t waned. The tough questions and challenges around health spending aren’t going away. We’ll continue to dig deeper on health spending research, with the goal of fostering evidence-based conversations.

Thank you to the diverse partner organizations who collaborated with us as part of the GBTS Forum to promote dialogue, develop research and communicate about health spending topics.

Highlights from Going Below the Surface include:

• The launch of the initiative during a conference about health spending that NPC hosted with Health Affairs. At the event, health policy experts shared their thoughts about the importance of dialogue and the tough questions they’d like stakeholders to consider.
• Community Roundtables on Health Care Priorities, which brought together stakeholders in cities across the U.S. to discuss how they can bring positive change in how we spend health care resources.
• Roadmap to Address Low-Value Care, a guide designed to help organizations consider key goals, questions and tactics to effectively implement a plan to focus on services that enable optimal outcomes.
• Research on the Investments and ROI of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) interventions, which considered how to design and evaluate SDOH programs from a cost perspective, better understand which tradeoffs with other health care spending might be most impactful, and what additional data is needed to accomplish these goals.