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The USA is experiencing rapid change in the healthcare industry and environment in both the public and private sectors. Significant upheaval in the private insurance market has occurred since the adoption of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 [1] which yielded changes in the type and amount of insurance coverage offered as well as in the proportion of Americans receiving coverage. Coupled with the cultural and economic shifts in the overall healthcare landscape, an increased focus has been placed on the “value” of care, both as a concept and as a means to determine the appropriate level of payment or reimbursement for providers and facilities. Public payers, most notably the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), have begun to move away from the more traditional “feefor- service” (FFS) payment model in favor of what is frequently referred to as a “value-based” system. Again, the ACA has played a critical role in this transition by specifically allowing for this type of payment design; it was further promoted by the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015, which went a step further. Specifically, language withinMACRA mandated the creation of an incentive program for providerswhere their level of reimbursementwould depend, in part, on their performance on a variety of quality measures.1 Additionally, the CMS Innovation Center was established to test models that may help to improve care by aligning payment policies with proven practices for quality care delivery. As of this writing, the CMS Innovation Center displays more than 90 payment and care delivery models on their site in various stages of development or evaluation. [2]One of thesemodels is the Value-based Insurance Design, or VBID, [3] which is an attempt to explore different approaches to delivering and paying for health care for those covered under Medicare’s risk-based program, Medicare Advantage. The VBID model allows Medicare Advantage organizations to design benefit packages based on beneficiary characteristics, including some related to income. Additionally, these organizations must also develop programs to help beneficiaries plan for future care. Starting in 2021, the VBID will also explore hospice benefits for Medicare Advantage patients as a way to increase access and facilitate care coordination. This is particularly relevant given the significant increase in the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, from a low of approximately 13% in the early 2000s to a high of 34% (22 million individuals) in 2019 [4]. Given the stated pursuit of aligning payment policies with preferred care practices and the fact that more than one-third of all Medicare beneficiaries are currently enrolled in a risk-based model, clearly the role value plays will continue to gain significance in how health care is delivered and paid for, as will efforts to maximize the financial return of care programs and quality improvement. Risk-based models, which can often be considered to be value-based, are expanding in the private sector too. Numerous examples exist of private insurers moving to value-based payment mechanisms made possible, in part, because of the explosion in available data on enrollees. A report produced in 2018 by a task force of 41 providers and payers, including the likes of Aetna, Blue CrossBlue Shield, theCleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, and the American Academy of Family Physicians, indicated that 47% of their members’ business was in value-based arrangements by the end of 2017, up from 30% in 2015 and on track to reach 75% by 2020 [5, 6]. In a 2018 survey of 120 payers, nearly $2 out of every $3 paid by those who responded were based on value, which corresponded to significant improvements in measures of quality and reductions in “unnecessary medical costs” [7]. Major payers, including UnitedHealthcare [8] and Cigna [9], have launched value-based initiatives, promoting them as a way to achieve better care at lower costs. All these signs point to a continued push away from FFS and toward value-based models. They signal a need for increasingly sophisticated methods for quantifying and evaluating value. At the same time of this shift, there is greater awareness of the value tied to the patient experience of care, quality of life, and efficiency in the systems and processes of care delivery. The explosion in the volume and availability of health data allows for more granular information on individual patients as well as the calculation of aggregate metrics to evaluate processes and outcomes. Patients, on the other hand, are demanding more of their care experience and encounters, including the recent push for “price transparency” from providers and facilities. Whether they realize it, they are really pursuing a better understanding of the “value” of the care they are receiving. That is, they want to know not only “What is the cost?” but “How does that cost compare to the quality of the care I received?” which can then be used to determine whether that cost is reasonable or fair.