Vital Directions: A Checklist for Policy Makers

✔ Pay for value – deliver better health and better results for all

• Tie payments and incentives to value and outcomes
• Help clinicians develop the core competencies they need to succeed
• Advance care and payment models that integrate medical and non-medical services

✔ Empower people – democratize action for health

• Link care with personal context
• Ensure health care information is available, understandable, and useful for all
• Promote effective telehealth tools and clinician links to patients and families
• Guarantee patients access, ownership, and protection of their health data

✔ Activate communities – collaborate locally to mobilize resources for health

• Invest in local leadership and capacity to drive community health collaboration and initiatives
• Strengthen community-based assessment and strategies targeting high-need individuals
• Build strong state-based capacity to guide, assist, and coordinate local health efforts

✔ Connect care – implement seamless digital interfaces for the best care

• Ensure clinical data accessibility and use through infrastructure and regulatory changes
• Enforce principles and standards for end-to-end (system/clinician/individual) interoperability
• Implement data and IT strategies that promote a continuously learning health system

✔ Measure what matters most – use consistent core metrics

• Focus reliably and consistently on the factors most important to better health and care
• Create the national capacity to identify, standardize, implement, and revise core measures
• Invest in the science of performance measurement

✔ Modernize skills – train 21st-century health care and science workforces

• Reform health workforce training to emphasize teams, innovation, and continuous improvement
• Create new education and training pathways to maintain a robust science workforce

✔ Accelerate real-world evidence – integrate clinical care data for progress

• Draw on real-world clinical data to accelerate knowledge and improve care, outcomes, and innovation
• Foster a culture of data sharing by strengthening incentives and standards
• Partner with patients and families to invest them in evidence generation and data sharing

✔ Advance science – forge innovation-ready research and partnerships

• Promote practices and policies for scientific innovation and collaboration
• Support an adaptive and patient-engaged regulatory framework
• Foster cross-disciplinary and public-private partnerships for continuous learning

For the complete Vital Directions collection and related resources, visit NAM.edu/VitalDirections.

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