If you’re a healthcare leader, you’ve probably heard the pitch: value-based care is the future. CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) wants all Medicare beneficiaries in value-based arrangements by 2030. Provider participation increased 25% from 2023 to 2024, and the market is projected to explode from its current size to potentially $1 trillion in enterprise value.
But here’s what most industry articles won’t tell you: only one in four medical group leaders anticipated increasing their value-based contracts in 2024, and 27% were uncertain about future shifts. The gap between the industry’s confident rhetoric and what’s actually happening inside healthcare organizations is significant—and it has implications for your teams’ strategies, whether you’re driving patient engagement or shaping marketing campaigns.
So what’s really going on with value-based care? Is it actually more profitable than fee-for-service? And what does this transition mean for organizations trying to figure out whether to allocate resources to a payment model that still accounts for less than half of their revenue?
What Value-Based Care Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Under value-based care, providers are compensated based on patient outcomes rather than the volume of services delivered. Instead of billing for every test, procedure, and appointment, organizations receive payments tied to quality metrics, patient outcomes, and cost efficiency. This is a huge departure from the traditional fee-for-service model, where revenue correlates directly with volume. If physicians see more patients, perform more procedures, and order more tests, then they make more money.
The theory behind the shift is that fee-for-service creates perverse incentives. Twenty percent of medical care (including 22% of prescribed drugs, 25% of testing, and 11% of surgeries) is deemed unnecessary by doctors themselves. When providers profit from doing more regardless of whether that “more” actually improves patient health, the system incentivizes waste.
Value-based care attempts to reverse this by aligning financial incentives with patient outcomes. Reduce hospital readmissions, manage chronic conditions effectively, prevent complications—these become revenue opportunities rather than missed billing chances.
But here’s where it gets complicated. “Value-based care” isn’t a single model. It’s a spectrum of arrangements ranging from minimal risk to full capitation. The financial risk, operational requirements, and profitability vary dramatically depending on which model an organization implements. These variations create ripple effects that touch marketing, growth, and patient experience teams—from how services are communicated to patients, to how networks are built, to how satisfaction is measured and promoted.
The Profitability Question Nobody Can Definitively Answer
Ask any healthcare CFO whether value-based care is more profitable than fee-for-service, and you’ll get a remarkably consistent response: “It depends.”
The trend is clear that value-based care can be equally profitable and is better for patients, but it’s an exceptionally complicated process. That “exceptionally complicated” part is where organizations either succeed or struggle.
In 2022, Humana Medicare Advantage’s value-based care arrangements achieved 23.2% savings in medical costs compared to Original Medicare. That sounds impressive until you realize those savings go to the payer, not necessarily the provider. Organizations participating in these arrangements might see some of those savings through shared savings agreements, or they might simply be managing more efficiently while the payer captures most of the financial benefit.
Savings within value-based care are estimated to range from 3% in models with limited quality metrics to as high as 20% in high-touch primary care groups. That range reflects the reality that profitability depends entirely on your organization’s ability to actually manage population health effectively, your patient mix, your risk adjustment capabilities, and which specific model you’re operating under. For marketing and growth teams, this affects what you can realistically promote or build your network around. For patient experience teams, it shapes how patient engagement and satisfaction impact both outcomes and revenue.
Some organizations thrive under value-based care. They build sophisticated data analytics capabilities, hire care coordinators and case managers, implement population health management systems, and successfully reduce unnecessary utilization while maintaining quality. For these organizations, value-based care can be significantly more profitable than fee-for-service.
Others struggle. They take on financial risk without the infrastructure to manage it effectively. They can’t accurately predict which patients will require expensive care. Their care coordination efforts don’t reduce utilization enough to offset the fixed payment structure. Value-based care is making inroads at a majority of healthcare organizations, but it’s often still competing with traditional fee-for-service models, which remain, for the moment, more profitable.
The Infrastructure Problem
Here’s what most discussions about value-based care underplay: the operational requirements are substantial and expensive.
Under fee-for-service, the revenue cycle is relatively straightforward: see patients, document services, submit claims, and receive payment. The infrastructure needed is appointment scheduling, electronic health records for documentation, and billing systems.
Value-based care requires all of that plus patient care navigators to coordinate care across multiple providers, case managers to monitor patients between visits and try to ensure medication adherence and appointment compliance, data analytics platforms to identify high-risk patients and predict future costs, population health management systems to track quality metrics across your entire patient panel, and often stop-loss insurance to protect against catastrophic cases that exceed expected costs.
Only 18% of medical groups reported integrating advanced analytics or AI tools to support their value-based care work as of August 2024. That means most organizations attempting value-based care are doing so without the technological infrastructure that makes it actually manageable at scale.
The upfront investment is significant. Organizations have to hire new staff, implement new systems, train existing providers on a fundamentally different approach to care delivery, and maintain dual infrastructure while they still have substantial fee-for-service revenue. All of this happens before you see any return from improved outcomes or reduced costs.
For smaller practices or rural health systems, these infrastructure requirements can be prohibitive. The biggest criticism of value-based care is that rural and smaller hospital systems will naturally have worse outcomes due to a lack of resources necessary to meet national patient outcome benchmarks. If they can’t meet performance standards, they receive less reimbursement, making it even harder to invest in the infrastructure that might improve their performance.
The Risk Adjustment Game
With value-based care, profitability depends heavily on an organization’s ability to accurately document patient complexity and risk.
In value-based models, organizations receive higher payments for patients with more complex conditions and higher expected costs. A 75-year-old with diabetes, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease generates significantly higher per-member-per-month payments than a healthy 40-year-old.
This creates a new skill set requirement: risk adjustment optimization. Organizations need to ensure they’re comprehensively documenting every diagnosis, capturing every comorbidity, and coding to the highest level of specificity allowed. If a doctor misdiagnoses or codes incompletely, the organization is left managing patients whose actual costs exceed the payments it’s receiving for them.
Since 2010, Congress has mandated systematic reductions in Medicare Advantage risk scores, resulting in lower per-patient payments even when health conditions remain constant. This means the payment floor keeps dropping, requiring organizations to become increasingly efficient just to maintain profitability at current levels. For growth and marketing teams, this impacts messaging, network planning, and positioning. The financial realities of VBC affect which services can be promoted and which patient populations are feasible to target.
What’s Actually Happening in 2025
Despite all the industry momentum toward value-based care, the on-the-ground reality is more tentative than the headlines suggest.
Less than half of practice leaders have a positive outlook on value-based care in 2025. When asked about future participation, only 25% expected increases in their value-based contracts, while 41% expected participation to remain the same.
Part of this hesitation stems from recent policy changes that have made value-based care less financially attractive. CMS significantly cut the incentive bonus for providers participating in alternative payment models, meaning organizations that invested heavily in value-based care infrastructure, expecting ongoing bonus payments, now face the prospect of operating those programs without that additional revenue support.
The market is moving toward value-based care, but it’s moving slowly and unevenly. 54% of eligible Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans last year, and Medicare Advantage is heavily value-based. But commercial insurance adoption varies significantly by region, and many specialists struggle to find value-based models that work for their patient populations.
What This Means for Your Strategy
Value-based care isn’t inherently more or less profitable than fee-for-service. It’s a different operating model with different economics, risks, and infrastructure requirements.
Organizations that succeed in value-based care usually share certain characteristics. Many have invested in data analytics and population health management capabilities. They have hired staff specifically focused on care coordination and patient engagement. They have built systems to identify high-risk patients before they become high-cost patients. They’ve developed relationships with specialists and other providers to ensure coordinated care across the continuum.
They’ve also accepted that value-based care requires a different mindset. Under fee-for-service, a no-show appointment is lost revenue. But under value-based care, it might be an opportunity to reduce unnecessary visits and improve efficiency. Under fee-for-service, a patient who needs extensive testing is a revenue opportunity. Under value-based care, it’s a cost that needs to be managed appropriately.
Organizations that struggle with value-based care are often trying to operate it alongside fee-for-service without fully committing to either. They implement minimal care coordination because they’re not ready to invest heavily. They participate in low-risk value-based arrangements that don’t require significant operational changes but also don’t offer meaningful financial upside. And they track quality metrics because they’re required to, but don’t use that data to reshape how they deliver care.
For some organizations, full commitment to value-based care is the right strategic move. For others, selective participation in lower-risk models while maintaining fee-for-service as the primary revenue source makes more sense. And for still others, the honest answer might be that value-based care doesn’t align with their capabilities or market realities, and they’re better off optimizing their fee-for-service operations.
Looking Ahead
The industry momentum toward value-based care is real. The global value-based healthcare market is expected to grow from $29.9 billion in 2022 to $174 billion by 2032. CMS continues pushing Medicare toward value-based arrangements, and Medicare Advantage enrollment keeps growing.
But momentum doesn’t mean inevitability, and industry trends don’t necessarily determine what’s right for your organization. For an organization to thrive in this transformative time, it must honestly assess whether it can make value-based care work financially, invest in the infrastructure required, or recognize when fee-for-service remains its most profitable path forward. Understanding the nuances of this shift will become more and more essential for teams shaping patient engagement, growth strategy, and organizational positioning in the years to come.
