Canada’s Value-Based Healthcare Champion
April 22, 2024
Eva Villalba won’t rest easy until value infuses every aspect of health care
On the face of it, “patient-centred care” may seem like a truism: who else should medical treatment centre, if not the patient? But dig a little deeper and more complex questions emerge. What’s the most effective way to measure and define what really matters to patients? And how can we get a clearer picture of the pros and cons of a given treatment within the real-world constraints of our healthcare system?
Value-based healthcare (VBHC) addresses these questions by seeking to improve patient outcomes throughout the care path, while considering the most efficient and cost-effective ways to do so. Driving the VBHC movement across Canada is Eva Villalba, Executive Director of the Coalition Priorité Cancer au Québec (Québec Cancer Coalition).
Eva’s passion for value in healthcare shone early, when she worked as director of strategic partnerships, development and philanthropy at the Palliative Home Care Society, a role that “gave me a lot of government relations experience and showed me that politics can be used for good.” In 2021, she became the first Canadian to receive a Master’s degree in VBHC, from the Value Institute for Health & Care of the University of Texas at Austin.
In her current position at the Coalition, Eva advocates for cancer patients and for integrating patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and value considerations into clinical trials and everyday healthcare. “Historically, VBHC was applied to interventions like stents and knee replacements,” she notes. “There’s a great opportunity to use it in cancer because it’s more complex and can be scaled up to whole systems applications. It takes up such a large proportion of health and financial resources and at some point affects almost half of Canadians.” Thanks to Eva’s vision, the Coalition is laying the groundwork for a VBHC framework to improving health outcomes for people with cancer, starting with lung and colorectal.
“There’s a great opportunity to use VBHC in cancer, because it’s more complex and can be scaled up to whole systems applications.”
Known as a “dot connector” to her colleagues – “I love to bring people together to network” – Villalba also serves as the Canadian ambassador for VBHC Center Europe and as co-Chair of the Resilient Healthcare Coalition, inaugurated in 2021 to strengthen the healthcare system so it can better absorb future shocks. Being flawlessly bilingual hasn’t hurt.
COMPETING FOR VALUE
To mobilize healthcare sector leaders who share her value-oriented mindset, Eva brought together leaders and innovators from Canada, the Netherlands, the US, and Brazil to Montreal for the first-ever VBHC Summit of the Americas in April 2024. Along with educational sessions, group discussions, and networking opportunities, the Summit included the first edition of the VBHC Dragons’ Grant of the Americas competition, created to support ideas and programs that measure PROMs and costs across the care pathway and improve value. Participants pitched their concepts to a jury of VBHC experts, with the top initiatives moving forward to the International Prize Competition presented by VBHC Center Europe later in the spring.
So what’s next for VBHC and for Eva? “We would like to see reimbursement for drugs tied to the value of a treatment – such as with outcomes-based agreements – and not just the cost,” she says, adding that “systematic measurement of PROMs will help us establish a drug’s value from the patient’s perspective.” With successful precedents in the UK, Australia and Europe, such value-driven agreements “will ensure the sustainability of our healthcare system.”
It’s a high bar to meet, but Villalba has confidence that Canada can get there. “There are different levels of government starting to see the light,” she says. “We just need it to become more contagious.” And if anyone can spread the message, it’s Villalba. “I want to see Canada be a leader, and not a lagger, in the race for patient access to innovative treatments, technologies, and interventions,” she says. “Value-based healthcare will keep us on the right path.”