'Buying Value' herds private market toward value based purchasing

[audio http://healthbb.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/gerry20shea3.mp3]
You'd laugh if someone said they were starting an initiative to get companies to consider value when buying steel or other major inputs to their products or services. Yet health care is somehow different. A typical mid-sized employer routinely spends millions of dollars without knowing what they're buying or whether it's any good.Buying Value is a new collaboration of 18 private purchaser groups including business (IBM, Xerox), labor (AFL-CIO, AFSCME), business coalitions (National Business Group on Health, National Business Coalition on Health), and philanthropy (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). These groups have tried value based purchasing before but it's been a hard sell. They are hopeful that Medicare's coming emphasis on value based purchasing (part of the Affordable Care Act) will make more of an impact this time.In this podcast interview, Gerry Shea of the AFL-CIO explains Buying Value in more depth.