Why does the United States spend so much of its annual GDP on healthcare, relative to other industrialized countries, yet continue to see poor returns on its investment? Why aren’t patient outcomes improving more quickly as we shift toward value-based care?

It may be because there is no rigorous, mandatory and standardized reporting structure for outcomes, nor a single regulatory agency — akin to the pharmaceutical industry’s relationship to the Food and Drug Administration — for safe care delivery, argue Harvard Medical and University of Pennsylvania researchers.

“A large reason why investments in health care [sic] underperform is because we invest so much in services that are clearly low-value,” Jena, et al., proffered, “and likely many more where the returns are gray. Investing limited health care dollars into low-value services crowds out our ability to spend on high-value services.”

“If we want to see better outcomes,” the authors asserted, “we need to start to think like investors.”

Read their entire op-ed here, in the Harvard Business Review.