06/16/2026
“We’ve started the transition.”
In many organizations, that means a value-based component has been added to physician compensation.
From the leadership side, that can feel like progress.
From the physician side, it can feel like being measured by a model that arrived before the supporting infrastructure did.
That is where the transition gets exposed.
Not because the strategy is wrong. Because the formula changed faster than the operating model around it.
A physician may now be accountable for value-based performance while still working inside old throughput assumptions, uneven care-team support, incomplete panel visibility, lagging attribution logic, and reporting that shows the score after the month is already gone.
At that point, the incentive stops functioning like direction.
It starts functioning like exposure.
That is the part organizations tend to underestimate.
The move to value is not just a compensation redesign. It changes who is accountable for what, what data needs to be visible, what support has to sit around the physician, and how improvement is supposed to happen in practice.
If those pieces are still immature, the organization has not really operationalized value.
It has introduced it into the formula first.
The formula may move first.
That does not mean value has been operationalized.
