The American Academy of Value-Based Care

What is the biggest operational challenge that you will face in the upcoming year? Pursuing three objectives at once:

(a) Reaching physicians, practices and health plans at scale
(b) Turning interest into real adoption, and;
(c) Driving real policy change that champions VBC payment models across the nation

What is the core mission of your organization? The increasing prevalence of chronic illnesses, volume of government initiatives, and a rising need for more cohesive care delivery systems are driving demand for a trusted value-based care (VBC) authority – AAVBC was built to fill this gap.

We give clinicians and organizations the clear, evidence-based guidance they need to put value-based care (VBC) into practice – from standards to accreditation and measurement. Our tools and resources are built by a physician-led team with 35+ years of healthcare experience, ensuring everything is clinically grounded, independent, and actionable in a VBC framework.

How do you measure impact and success in your programs? We’re careful not to confuse activity with impact.

In year one, our measures are leading indicators: who is using our guidance, whether they come back, and whether they are using our material during a visit (rather than just reading it afterwards). A download tells us very little. A physician returning to ask for the next condition tells us more, with requests for specific conditions now shaping what we publish next.

We do have one hard external check: our library cleared CME accreditation review with no edits required, which is a third party assessing clinical rigor rather than us asserting it.

Longer term, the real barometer is whether care teams change how they work, and whether the practices we reach show a measurable improvement in outcomes and cost efficiency. That is a multi-year process and we would rather say so than claim credit early.

What are your biggest fundraising or outreach challenges? We are raising while our credibility is still being built.

The other piece is structural — we’re built to prioritize long-term value creation, transparency, and independence, not transactional promotion.

How do you build long-term relationships with donors and supporters? The best working relationships begin with someone using a guide, finding it accurate, and coming back.

We also keep the line between support and influence crystal clear. AAVBC is built as neutral ground in the value-based care ecosystem, so funders do not shape clinical content, and we say so.

What trends are influencing the nonprofit world today? Four we feel directly.

Attention now costs more than money. Reaching a physician is harder than funding the work that reaches them.

Discovery is changing fast. People increasingly get answers from AI systems instead of search results, which means credibility now has to be legible to a machine as well as a human. Clear, well-sourced, structured knowledge gets quoted. Everything else risks going unread, and most non-profits have yet to make the adjustment.

Funding is also now more outcome-oriented than ever. While this is healthy pressure, it falls hardest on young organizations doing foundational work that pays off slowly.

And most importantly, the policy environment is doing some of our work for us. The Inflation Reduction Act, stricter Star Rating algorithms, and CMS models such as LEAD, ACCESS and AHEAD keep pushing payers and providers towards value-based care. That raises demand for a trusted reference point.

Can you share a story that shows your mission in action? One Geriatric Board Certified physician both practicing and in a leadership role keeps our site bookmarked for frequent use – from validating diagnoses, reducing medical utilization and cost and delivering better patient outcomes. This physician felt the resources that we provide fills a gap in her medical knowledge and dramatically improved her value-based care delivery on her patients and guided her in her oversight of other physicians.

What keeps you motivated in this work? What never stops bothering me is the distance between what medicine already knows and what you can actually do with it in a fifteen-minute visit. That gap is where patients get lost. Closing it does not take new science – it takes somebody doing the unglamorous work of making existing evidence usable at the point of care, and not many people want that job.

What keeps me in it is that the feedback is immediate. When a physician tells me a guide saved them time, or changed how they handled someone that morning, there is a straight line between the thing we made and what happened in a clinical setting.

There’s also the gratifying opportunity to provide the next generation of physicians with a road map for early success. Value-based care concepts are rarely taught in medical school or residency. Our evidence-based guidelines and educational platform help bridge this gap.

There aren’t many jobs where you can see that line so clearly, and leave something behind that outlasts you.