What is value-based healthcare (VBHC), and why should it matter to you

If you've ever wondered why two clinics can charge the same for a treatment and still deliver very different results, the answer usually lies in how each health system measures success. In Switzerland, the Vadian VBHC Innovation Award recognizes projects each year that bet on a different model: value-based healthcare, or VBHC.

What value-based healthcare is

The traditional health model tends to measure success by volume: how many consultations, how many procedures, how many studies were performed. The problem is that number says nothing about whether the patient actually got better.

Value-based healthcare changes the question. Instead of "how much was done?", it asks "how well did the patient do, relative to what it cost to get there?" A treatment that resolves the problem in fewer sessions, with fewer complications and a better quality of life for the patient, is worth more than one that generates more billing but worse outcomes.

Why this award exists and what it recognizes

The Vadian VBHC Innovation Award is presented by HOCH Health Ostschweiz, together with the University of St. Gallen and the VBHC Suisse Association, during an annual symposium dedicated to this model. The award — named after Vadian, the historic humanist figure of St. Gallen — recognizes the best project, program, or startup that demonstrates measurably better clinical outcomes, with a connection to the Swiss health system.

Although the award is Switzerland-specific, the model it celebrates is a conversation already present in health systems around the world, including Latin America: what does real quality in health actually look like, beyond how many visits were logged in a month?

What this means for you

If you're a doctor, value-based healthcare gives you an argument for something you probably already sense: the quality of your work shouldn't be measured only by how many patients you saw in a day, but by how many of them actually got better. For that approach to be possible, something very concrete is needed: complete, connected, reliable clinical data — not records scattered across systems that don't talk to each other.

If you're a patient, this model should matter to you because it shifts incentives in your favor: a clinic measured by your outcomes, not by how many times you came back, has every reason to want your treatment to work the first time, not to need a repeat visit.

That's ultimately one of the problems we work on at Davix: without a system that connects medical history, imaging, and lab results in one place, it's practically impossible to clearly measure which treatments are delivering better outcomes for patients.

This post is part of a series on health innovation awards for 2026-2027. We also cover the Fierce Healthcare Innovation Awards, the iF Design Award 2027, the MedTech World Awards Europe, and the Global Business Tech Awards 2027.

Want to see a platform built to connect clinical data and measure outcomes, not just visit volume? Schedule a demo with Davix.