Toward an anthropology of health care value: Including the voice of lifeworld in healthcare policies

The implementation of value-based healthcare (VBHC) model promises to bring efficiency and sustainability to the national health systems. The model redraws the whole logic of the systems’ operability and proposes that budgets positively discriminate those institutions that most produce value for patients. For this purpose, the authors of the model understand 'value' as the relationship between the quality of care received by the patient and the money spent by him to benefit from healthcare services.
In this article, I critically analyse the process of value standardization throughout the VBHC model implementations starting from the argument that the model is focused on conceptualization of 'value' that is more easily accepted by formal stakeholders than by patients. I further argue that such conceptualization reflects an epistemological cleavage which may be solved through an anthropological approach on value.
The article ends proposing to carry out an ethnography on stakeholders’ critical capacities to map and eventually remap the boundaries that separate the diverse perceptions about what does it mean 'value for patients'.