Chartering Value Exchanges

A “Value Exchange” is a multi-stakeholder collaborative that has taken clear action in its community to convene community purchasers, health plans, providers, and consumers to advance the four cornerstones of Value-Driven Health Care. 

HHS invited interested Community Leaders to apply to become Chartered Value Exchanges. Secretary Leavitt designated the first Chartered Value Exchanged in February 2008. In September 2008, HHS announced 11 additional CVEs creating a network of 25 local collaborations of health care providers, employers, insurers, and consumers working jointly to improve care and make pricing and quality data widely available.

Local collaboratives play a vital role in improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of health care.  The first step in building the collaboratives has been to recognize multi-stakeholder entities as community leaders and encourage them to become Chartered Value Exchanges.  These would:

• Embody all the characteristics of the Community Leaders
• Have well defined and balanced stakeholder representation including community purchasers, health plans, providers, and consumers.
• Keep stakeholders engaged in ongoing collaboration and serve as hubs for sharing information.
• Use standard performance information to engage providers in improvement, help consumer decision-making through public reporting, and promote effective payment policies and consumer incentives.
• Share promising practices and lessons learned and continually refine efforts.

Participation as a Chartered Value Exchange offers several benefits. Members can join their peers in a nationwide Learning Network sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Often called communities of practice, this Learning Network provides peer-to-peer learning experiences through facilitated meetings, both face to face and on the Web. The network also features tools, access to experts, and an ongoing private Web-based knowledge management system.

The Learning Network allows members to:

• Share their experiences.
• Identify promising practices.
• Point out gaps where innovation is needed.
• Raise issues for national consensus-building organizations.
• Provide an on-the-ground perspective to participate in setting national priorities for improvement.

Additionally, Chartered Value Exchanges will have access to summary Medicare provider performance results, which can be combined with similarly calculated private-sector results to produce and publish all-payer performance results.

Requirements

To become a Chartered Value Exchange, at a minimum, you must be:

• Designated by HHS as a Community Leader for Value-Driven Health Care.
• A collaborative comprised of community purchasers, health plans, providers, and consumers.

AHRQ has more tools for Chartered Value Exchanges.