The CMS target year for value-based care is 2030, with a goal for 100% of Traditional Medicare beneficiaries and the majority of Medicaid beneficiaries to be in an accountable care relationship, focusing on quality outcomes and cost efficiency over service volume. 2025 reports and surveys showed a clear turning point for value-based care as model programs to actual scalable strategies.With only 4 years to go, can we keep up the positive projection in 2026?
We asked our experts that very question. Here is what they had to say. And check out all our prediction posts looking to 2026.
David Bates, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder, Linus Health
LinkedIn: David Bates
Digital transformation will accelerate progress toward value-based care by making prevention more practical and measurable. For example, early detection of cognitive change can reduce avoidable hospitalizations and lower long-term costs. The evidence is compelling: each year of delayed diagnosis adds about $18,500 in lifetime expenses per patient, while universal screening could save $275 billion over five years. Digital tools that help teams identify risk earlier, guide timely intervention, and support more efficient care pathways will create measurable value for payers, providers, patients and families, while improving population health.
Taylor Beery, Chief Innovation & Administrative Officer and Co-Founder, Imagine Pediatrics
LinkedIn: Taylor Beery
Pediatric value-based care will gain momentum in 2026 as integrated models that combine medical, behavioral, and social care continue to demonstrate measurable impact. Data-driven approaches will increasingly help care teams anticipate needs and prevent crises, and when we expand access to that care through virtual and in-home models, we create more safe days at home for children with special health care needs. As more states align incentives around these outcomes, pediatric value-based care will become the benchmark for how success in pediatric care is defined.
Carol Berry, CEO, Health Care Administrators Association (HCAA)
LinkedIn: Carol Berry
Reaching CMS’ 2030 value-based care goals will require stronger digital infrastructure, and TPAs will be central to that progress. In 2026, we’ll see interoperability and real-time data exchange become non-negotiable for self-funded plans. TPAs need timely insights into risk, care gaps, and performance to help employers invest in what truly improves outcomes. Digital tools will ease the administrative load tied to attribution, quality measures, and reporting, which often slows adoption. As data becomes more actionable and accessible, TPAs can guide employers toward value-based arrangements that are financially sustainable and clinically meaningful.
Sean Cassidy, CEO and Co-Founder, Lucem Health
LinkedIn: Sean Cassidy
AI will help accelerate the path to value-based care in 2026 through program-first platforms that support the full journey from identification to pathway completion. When teams can surface patients who may benefit from intervention and coordinate each step within familiar workflows, they can reduce avoidable costs and advance individuals into care sooner. This structure can help organizations achieve stronger outcomes and support the core clinical and financial goals of value-based care.
Patrick Cline, CEO, Lightbeam Health Solutions
LinkedIn: Patrick Cline
Accelerating digital transformation in healthcare requires more than adopting new tools—it demands stronger data interoperability, predictive analytics, Agentic AI, and seamless workflow integration for clinicians and patients alike. When these elements work together and combine with operational execution, we’ll meaningfully reduce total cost of care while improving quality. We’ll also accelerate the realization of CMS’ goal of transitioning most beneficiaries to value-based care arrangements by 2030.
Mark Coetzer, VP of Business Development, IMAT Solutions
LinkedIn: Mark Coetzer
In 2026, value-based care will reach a digital tipping point as interoperability shifts from a competitive advantage to a requirement for survival. Driven by NCQA’s retirement of the HEDIS Hybrid Method, healthcare organizations will no longer be able to rely on manual chart review and must instead adopt FHIR based data exchange and automated access to clinical data.
This change marks the end of fragmented data strategies, as meeting new ECDS standards requires connected, centralized platforms that can aggregate and normalize data at scale. Organizations that modernize now will be positioned to deliver real time quality reporting and move closer to the CMS 2030 vision of fully digital, accountable care.
Kyle Cooksey, CEO, Deacon Health
TEAM Becomes the Defining Force in Surgical Care after the “Upside Only” Grace Period Ends
2026 is the year hospitals will start to feel the real weight of CMS’s TEAM. The initial upside-only period buys some breathing room, but the shift toward downside risk at the end of 2026 fundamentally changes incentives. Success in 2027 and beyond will hinge on laying the foundation in 2026 via smart partnerships to maximize the true opportunity that TEAM offers. Hospitals that treat TEAM as a documentation project will struggle. Hospitals that treat TEAM as a partnership strategy will be able to improve margins and patient outcomes.
Amee Devani, CEO and Co-Founder, WellBeam
LinkedIn: Amee Devani
Value based care relies on solutions that support longitudinal patient care and visibility of clinical care management. For this to be true, interoperability is a requisite, not optional, step function. That is, clinical data must move as patients transition between sites of care along the care continuum.
WellBeam is breaking down these EMR data silos; becoming the necessary connective network and infrastructure across EMRs to move this clinical data real-time. In doing so, WellBeam is unlocking a range of clinical use cases across the bridge from acute to post-acute care, that relied on manual, fax based workflows, to drive better patient outcomes and reduced total cost of care. WellBeam’s use-cases are directly benefiting CMS TEAM health systems and their post-acute partner networks.
Todd Doze, CEO, Janus Health
LinkedIn: Todd Doze
CMS’s goals for value-based care by 2030 are aggressive, but digital transformation is accelerating us toward them. The next four years will be defined by AI that closes care gaps automatically, predicts risk earlier, and connects clinical and financial data to drive better outcomes at lower cost. Health systems that embrace intelligent, interoperable infrastructure will be the ones that make value-based care sustainable at scale.
John Elliott, Vice President, Head of Sales & Growth, MDClone
LinkedIn: John Elliott
The path to value-based care by 2030 will be shaped by how quickly organizations adopt digital solutions that transform data into insight. Synthetic data, advanced analytics, and interoperable platforms will allow health systems to test strategies safely, accelerate learning, and deliver better outcomes faster.
Dana Finnegan, Senior Director of Market Strategy, MDaudit
LinkedIn: Dana Finnegan
To reduce exposure and protect financial stability, revenue cycle leaders are shifting toward more assertive revenue integrity strategies built around hybrid audit models that emphasize prospective, or pre bill, reviews. Applying insights from historical data to current workflows gives organizations greater foresight, enabling them to anticipate payer actions, prevent errors, and minimize financial disruption. This approach balances compliance and revenue risk, which are core to achieving best-in-class revenue integrity. This shift is reinforced by CMS’s Transforming Episode Accountability Model (TEAM), a significant step toward expanding VBC across more than 700 participating hospitals. TEAM ties financial incentives directly to patient outcomes and care coordination across six targeted surgical procedures. Success requires converting episode-level data into actionable insights and managing care from pre-operation through recovery. To meet these demands, RCM leaders must strengthen analytics capabilities by closing data gaps, modernizing infrastructure, and creating unified views of cost and quality across previously siloed systems. Many organizations will need advanced analytics platforms incorporating AI and machine learning to identify high-risk patients, recommend early interventions, and model episode costs and outcomes. Robust data interoperability will ensure clinical, claims, and cost data are standardized and shareable.
Ultimately, advancing VBC success requires preparing clinical, financial, and operational teams to interpret and act on data-driven insights. Understanding TEAM metrics and investing early in cross-disciplinary education will help embed data-driven thinking across the organization.
Tracy Gayeski, Psy.D., MBA, Chief Health Officer, Catalight
LinkedIn: Tracy Gayeski
Transforming your organization digitally will accelerate value-based care by giving clinicians more time to focus on patients and less time on paperwork. AI and telehealth enable clinicians to prioritize quality over quantity, allowing them to stay engaged during appointments. These tools also provide real-time insight into what truly supports well-being, so success is measured by meaningful progress, not the amount of time spent with individuals. In 2026, organizations will integrate digital tools with empathy and intention and advance value-based care by delivering support that is more personal and connected to the needs of each individual and family.
Jan Grimm, CEO, Savista
LinkedIn: Jan Grimm
Value-Based Care Will Create New Revenue Opportunities
The transition to value-based care represents a transformative shift that is reshaping how healthcare organizations generate revenue. Leaders can excel by mastering outcome tracking, risk management, and the alignment of clinical and financial objectives. Success requires collaborative innovation and the strategic reimagining of traditional revenue models. Organizations that embrace this evolution will discover remarkable growth opportunities.
Abhi Gupta, CEO and Co-Founder, Fold Health
LinkedIn: Abhi Gupta
Value-based care will enter an execution era where the advantage shifts from who has the best analytics to who can operationalize the analytics at scale. close gaps at scale through automation embedded in daily operations. The most successful groups will have automation embedded in daily operations, translating risk signals into automated, auditable actions— outcomes will improve by design, not by brute force.
Sachin K. Gupta, Founder and Global CEO, IKS Health
LinkedIn: Sachin Gupta
Value-based care vs. fee-for-service
A few years ago it felt like fee-for-service medicine was waning, and that the holy grail would be value-based care with global capitation. Today people are more pragmatic and have recognized that fee-for-service and value-based care are going to coexist for the foreseeable future.
Within value-based care, one of the unexpected benefits of CMS-HCC V28 is that it places a cap on how much organizations can rely on risk-score optimization to drive premiums. While it may feel like a financial hurdle today, it will ultimately force the industry to invest in true total cost of care management infrastructure, the kind that improves patient outcomes while reducing overall cost of care.
I believe this shift will allow value-based care to finally come into its own, with physicians truly operating as the quarterbacks of care delivery, especially for patients with chronic disease. And while there is considerable skepticism about the future of value-based care, this moment of adversity is likely to spark the innovation needed for the model to reach its full potential. At the same time, fee-for-service medicine isn’t going away; these two models will continue to coexist for the foreseeable future.
Gary Hamilton, CEO, InteliChart
LinkedIn: Gary Hamilton
Digital transformation will be the accelerator that turns CMS’s 2030 vision for value-based care into reality sooner. In 2026, intelligent patient engagement platforms powered by AI will help providers connect data, outreach, and follow-up in ways that anticipate patient needs rather than react to them. By uniting clinical, operational, and financial insights, these tools make it easier for organizations to close gaps in care, improve outcomes, and deliver value-based care that’s both compassionate and sustainable.
Luke Hansen, MD, MHS, Chief Medical Officer, Arcadia
LinkedIn: Luke Hansen
Value-based care is at a moment of reckoning as we enter 2026. Many stakeholders use the term “value-based care,” but focus almost exclusively to describe value payments bolted on to the longstanding fee-for-service (FFS) chassis of healthcare payment. CMS has historically been more willing to introduce new payment models connected to legacy FFS payment than to fund more fundamental alternate care delivery approaches, hence alternative payment models rather than alternative care models. The result is a landscape where providers are expected to drive transformation using incentives that have often been insufficient to spark meaningful change.
However, the paradigm maybe be changing as indicated in the recently announced Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions (ACCESS) Model. What makes the ACCESS Model different from prior initiatives in outcome-based payment is that CMS will measure performance using markers of health including blood pressure, HbA1c, lipids, weight, and validated Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs). While these metrics have been included in quality modifiers to payment, this model advertises a future where optimizing these outcomes is the point of payment rather than a secondary consideration.
The ACCESS model also explicitly recognizes that technology-enabled care is key to scalable disease management. Improved interoperability and true data transparency can give providers the financial and clinical performance insight they need to confidently engage in higher levels of accountability. In healthcare, uncertainty is the enemy of innovation and progress and connected data systems are essential to removing that uncertainty. Digital tools must help shift VBC from a different way of paying for care to a fundamentally different way of achieving it.
Patty Hayward, General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Talkdesk
LinkedIn: Patty Hayward
In 2026, patient experiences aligned to value-based care will finally move from theory to execution, and the front door will be the difference-maker. AI-enabled contact centers will drive panel activation, reduce readmissions, and support continuity in ways traditional models can’t, because they meet patients where they are. Proactive outreach, tailored nudges, and automated follow-through will become core performance levers. When access, navigation, and engagement improve, value-based results do too, clinically and financially.
Steve Holt, Vice President of Government Affairs, PointClickCare
LinkedIn: Steve Holt
Throughout 2026, digital transformation will play a central role in accelerating progress toward CMS goals for value-based care. Hospitals, ACOs, and post-acute partners will rely on real-time data, predictive analytics, and tight care coordination to manage high-risk episodes and complex transitions that often drive avoidable utilization. Progress will hinge on stronger interoperability across settings and technology that supports complete, accurate documentation, giving teams the visibility required to meet quality benchmarks and deliver consistent outcomes throughout the care continuum.
Dr. Shannon Housh, EdD, MBA, MHA, LCC, Director of Consulting Services, CenTrak and Leapfrog Certified Coach
LinkedIn: Dr. Shannon Housh, EdD, MBA, MHA, LCC
As CMS pushes toward its ambitious 2030 goal for widespread value-based care adoption, the next four years will be defined by rapid digital transformation that makes value-based delivery operationally achievable. Advances in interoperability, driven by TEFCA and the accelerating maturity of FHIR standards, combined with real-time data visibility from IoT and RTLS platforms will finally remove long-standing friction in care coordination, clinical decision-making, and hospital operations. Predictive analytics are enabling earlier identification of rising-risk patients and more proactive chronic disease management, while digital quality measures are shifting measurement from retrospective reporting to real-time performance management.
At the same time, AI-driven automation, such as ambient documentation, streamlined prior authorization, and digital quality abstraction, will significantly reduce administrative burden and return valuable time to clinicians. Digitally enabled hybrid care models, including virtual care, remote patient monitoring, and hospital-at-home, will expand access and reduce avoidable utilization, aligning cost with outcomes. Together, these advancements are creating a more connected, efficient, and proactive healthcare ecosystem, precisely the foundation needed for health systems to thrive under value-based care contracts by 2026 and beyond.
Taylor Justice, Co-Founder and CEO, Unite Us
LinkedIn: Taylor Justice
Value-based care is fundamentally centered on improving outcomes. However, while much attention is paid to clinical workflows and reimbursement models, our digital strategy must also evolve beyond standard clinical and financial interoperability. There has to be a change in the model where we look at interoperability clinically, financially and in the community.
Non-medical drivers of health, including housing, food security, employment and transportation, are not merely peripheral factors. We know that they are the fundamental drivers of health outcomes. A value-based system that fails to integrate these data points with clinical history from the outset is inevitably flawed.
Success will depend on leveraging newer digital capabilities like closed-loop referral systems that track patient needs from identification through to resolution and predictive analytics enabled through AI that allow states, cities and health care entities to spot patterns between non-medical factors and health risks which will enable more proactive intervention.
Ram Krishnan, CEO, Valant
LinkedIn: Ram Krishnan
Value-based care isn’t going anywhere on any nationally mandated basis. The fight to get paid for quality will happen on the street, with each practice fighting for its own negotiation to get paid for performance. That means, if you have the tools, the measurement, and the reports, there will be more precedent to get paid, but this will only benefit practices that grab the bull by the horns, use modern technology, data & reporting, and embrace an outcomes approach.
Payers will pay, tools will help you get paid, but no one’s coming to hand it to you.
Angel Mena, MD, Chief Medical Officer, symplr
LinkedIn: Angel J. Mena, MD
In 2026, AI will continue to be adopted to solve real clinical workflow challenges. We will see clearer connections between operational improvement, workflow redesign, and patient outcomes. Soon, AI-driven insights may help us visualize morbidity and mortality trends in real time, all while enabling clinicians to spend more meaningful time with their patients. But with this opportunity comes responsibility: a call for discipline in AI validation. We must be vigilant in validating AI interventions. Poor data leads to poor insights, and in healthcare, poor insights can lead to real harm. Rigor, transparency, and continuous monitoring must anchor every implementation. The goal is not to adopt AI quickly; it is to adopt it responsibly.
Shaji Nair, Founder/CEO, FriskaAi
LinkedIn: Shaji Nair
Lifestyle data becomes a clinical asset and a value-based care driver
Lifestyle data—including nutrition, activity, sleep, and glucose trends—will be recognized as clinically meaningful and increasingly used to shape quality measures, early interventions, and reimbursement models. We expect payers to incorporate continuous lifestyle signals into quality and payment frameworks because of their potential to close care gaps far more quickly than episodic clinic visits.
As a result, validated data will become the gold standard, with health systems prioritizing vendors that deliver clean, clinically reliable lifestyle information rather than unverified consumer feeds. Ultimately, pharma and life sciences organizations will also embrace metabolic signals and begin using lifestyle and CGM-based endpoints in trials and real-world evidence programs to improve recruitment, strengthen outcomes, and explore new digital biomarkers.
Simeon Niles, Director, McDermott+
LinkedIn: Simeon Niles
Over the next four years, I believe that we’ll see a sharp acceleration in the use of digital health technologies delivered directly to Medicare patients as a core feature of value-based care. The CMS Innovation Center’s recently announced Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions (ACCESS) model, paired with the FDA’s Technology-Enabled Meaningful Patient Outcomes (TEMPO) for Digital Health Devices pilot, point to a future where digital therapeutics and AI-enabled decision support are routinely embedded in chronic disease prevention and management. These technologies will be delivered through novel arrangements between technology manufacturers and provider organizations but are aligned through outcome-based arrangements.
In ACCESS, technology alone will not be sufficient. These tools will need to be integrated into comprehensive clinical programs that include care teams, medication management, and active clinical oversight to achieve targeted outcomes. ACCESS is a 10-year model, but whether this future materializes within that timeframe will depend on national policy choices around AI and data governance. Done right, digital health technologies could accelerate CMS’s 2030 value-based care goals.
Hari Prasad, CEO, Yosi Health
LinkedIn: Hari Prasad
We greatly appreciate and welcome CMS setting ambitious goals for value-based care (VBC). VBC will only scale if healthcare organizations can close the gap between what data they have and what data they can actually use. In 2026, the biggest accelerators will be automation and interoperability at the front end of care; capturing clean, discrete data before the visit, verifying insurance and benefits in real time, and reducing avoidable gaps like missed appointments or incomplete documentation. These seemingly “administrative” steps are actually foundational to VBC; they drive accurate risk adjustment, reduce leakage, and ensure patients show up for the right care at the right time. Digital front-door platforms, like Yosi’s, can automate these steps, while integrating seamlessly with EMRs, which will be key in helping organizations hit CMS’ 2030 VBC adoption goals.
Kristie Ressler, DO, Chief Medical Officer, Avalon Healthcare Solutions
LinkedIn: Kristie R.
With just four years left to achieve CMS’s 2030 goals for value-based care, 2026 will mark a pivotal transition from theory to transformation. The convergence of digital tools, diagnostic data, and intelligent analytics is helping us close persistent gaps between testing and treatment, making care more precise, efficient, and equitable. At Avalon, we’re seeing how lab stewardship, provider education, and smarter policy alignment can translate insights into action, ensuring that every test and every decision contributes to better outcomes. The coming year is about building the infrastructure and accountability that will turn data into true value for patients and health systems alike.
Clay Ritchey, CEO, Verato
LinkedIn: Clay Ritchey
The CMS TEAM model signals real progress toward its 2030 vision for value-based care by making coordination and accountability mandatory. But organizations will only keep pace with these requirements if they have a trusted identity framework that links every record to the right individual. Without that foundation, the promise of value-based care slips further from reach. With it, healthcare can finally achieve the continuity, transparency, and shared accountability the value-based model is designed to deliver.
Patrick Sheehan, Vice President of Value-Based Care, Withings Health Solutions
LinkedIn: Patrick Sheehan
The biggest barrier to value-based care is specialist participation, and the complexity it creates for risk-bearing organizations trying to manage specialty care costs. Digital transformation can change that by enabling connected, at-home care that’s both precise in monitoring risk across specialty populations and efficient in triaging to specialists for high-value treatment decisions. We are seeing our partners make it easier for specialists to remotely manage chronic care within team-based models through connected care, and reducing the clinical and operational burden of value-based care participation. I think that’s the path to specialty cost containment, and therefore giving risk-bearing organizations the tools and confidence to scale value-based care across all Medicare beneficiaries.
Reva Sheehan, Senior Vice President of Health Solutions, DUOS
LinkedIn: Reva Sheehan
In order to track towards transitioning to value-based care by 2030, healthcare organizations need several interconnected digital transformations. Goals can’t outpace the actual ability to be adopted, implemented, and perform at satisfactory levels. The industry needs to keep an eye on disparities that may emerge – specifically between organizations with fewer funds or resources who may lag behind their wealthier counterparts. Over the next four years, organizations must consider the following to transition to value-based care by 2030:
- Advanced Analytics & Risk Stratification: Value-based care is dependent on identifying high-risk patients before they experience costly complications. An effective predictive analytics platform is needed to ingest and organize clinical encounters, claims, socioeconomic datasets in turn to identify specific patient populations. These tools, when effective, help drive care coordination, care management, member engagement, and appropriate utilization by segmenting members into personalized and individualized groupings.
- Interoperability: It’s about to see some improvements with the Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule (some changes take effect January 1, 2026). A strong foundation for value-based care success requires robust health information exchange capabilities. Organizations need systems that can aggregate data across multiple care settings like hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmacies, and even social services. Implementing FHIR APIs and other interoperability standards enables data flow. Successful organizations will adopt changes and requirements even before they are required for each line of business or impacted provider groups.
- Patient Engagement: This can no longer be seen as a nice to have. Healthcare continues to lag behind other industries and commerce. A multichannel approach that can be tailored to language, culture, clinical, and social needs will be a bare minimum requirement. Messaging must be meaningful, impactful, informative in order to yield a positive result.
- Provider Engagement & Involvement: Streamlining requirements, reports, return on investment and automating workflows will lead to easier and swifter adoption by provider groups and teams. Organizations should be open to exploring how AI and technological advances can lessen administrative lift and promote better individualized care.
Jonathan Shoemaker, CEO, ABOUT Healthcare
LinkedIn: Jonathan Shoemaker
With CMS pushing toward full value-based care by 2030, the next four years will depend on how well health systems manage the costliest part of the continuum: acute care. Reducing avoidable days and acting on barriers to discharge in real time will be essential for improving both outcomes and financial performance. The systems that thrive in VBC will be the ones that use digital tools to shorten length of stay, guide patients to the right next site of care, and ensure every acute day truly adds value.
David B. Snow, Jr., Chairman & CEO, Cedar Gate Technologies, an IQVIA business
LinkedIn: David Snow
Value-based care concepts have been around in healthcare for many years, but the system remains stubbornly resistant to moving entirely away from fee-for-service. This is likely partially attributable to the comfort of staying in an operating model that systems have been in for decades, but also partially the result of VBC models being almost entirely voluntary up to this point.
In 2026 we will see the first mandatory model from CMS, but it will not be the last. CMS, regardless of which political party is in power, will launch more mandatory models over the coming three to five years that require hospital systems, clinics, and providers to prove their ability to reduce costs while adhering to high quality standards. Additionally, commercial payers will follow suit by launching their own mandatory programs for provider and hospital system partners, and employers will expand their participation in bundled payments and other VBC-related programs in an effort to get more predictable costs and demonstrated improvement in care quality and outcomes. This government-private insurance-employer parity will shift the trajectory, eliminating the ability to stay in the comfort of fee-for-service and force movement to the VBC models that will get us closer to our goals of lower costs and better outcomes in U.S. healthcare.
Sundar Subramanian, CEO, Zyter/TruCare
LinkedIn: Sundar Subramanian
2026 Marks the Beginning of the End of Healthcare Point Solutions
After years of fragmentation, 2026 will be the year healthcare leaders begin consolidating dozens of point solutions into unified agentic platforms, systems that orchestrate entire workflows rather than automate isolated tasks. Instead of buying tools, health systems and plans will buy outcomes. Agentic platforms will oversee complex processes end to end, closing gaps in care, coordinating benefits, completing prior auth packets, reconciling claims, and guiding clinicians through multi-step pathways.
The era of point solutions is ending. The era of outcome platforms begins.
Jim Szyperski, CEO, Acuity Behavioral Health
LinkedIn: Jim Szyperski
Healthcare is moving deeper into the value-based era. Metrics drive decisions, outcomes define quality, and performance data shapes reimbursement. Yet amid this transformation, inpatient psychiatry and behavioral healthcare remain the most notable outlier, excluded for a variety of reasons including stigmatization, subjectivity, and a high degree of variation in clinical operations from site to site.
In today’s environment, data quality is very poor and highly variable, ergo costly. There has never been a standard model to measure patient acuity across the industry. This is simply fundamental to value based care and the reason behind everything we have developed at Acuity Behavioral Health.
Leading health systems are beginning to implement technology solutions to standardize and measure patient acuity, helping them improve patient outcomes, reduce staff burnout, and integrate behavioral health into broader care delivery strategies. Behavioral health deserves the same level of recognition and support as any other medical specialty, because mental health is, unequivocally, healthcare. But to gain parity, behavioral healthcare needs to act like healthcare and adopt standards, models, and best practices that evolve from data-driven approaches like the rest of healthcare has done for years. We cannot manage what we cannot measure, and will be unable to monetize what we cannot manage.
Jordan Taradash, CEO, PeopleOne Health
LinkedIn: Jordan Taradash
Value-based care will move from vision to survival strategy. With healthcare costs at a breaking point, the current fee-for-service system has become unsustainable for employers. In 2026, value-based care will become less of a “nice-to-have” and more of a critical approach for managing costs and improving outcomes.
Bob Watson, CEO, Health Gorilla
LinkedIn: Robert (“Bob”) W.
In 2026, value-based care will increasingly hinge on the ability to systemically spot high-risk, high-cost patients earlier and intervene before issues escalate. This ability will be driven by tighter quality measures and broader access to real-time clinic data. The momentum will allow providers to rely on always-available, timely, and context-rich data to pinpoint emerging risk signals and ensure clinicians can direct their attention to the patients who stand to gain the greatest benefit.