Joseph Rhatigan, Sachin Jain, Joia S. Mukherjee, Michael E. Porter
The care delivery value chain (CDVC) is a framework that allows a systemic analysis of value creation across the myriad of activities that occur during the care of a patient for a specific medical condition. The CDVC looks at care as an overall system, not as a series of discrete interventions. It describes the discrete activities that are required to deliver care and illustrates their sequence and organization. As clinical care requires many interdependent activities, value is measured as a product of the entire care cycle. The CDVC is a tool that allows one to outline and analyze the process of care delivery for a medical condition in order to use this information to configure this process to maximize value for patients. Individual activities within the care delivery cycle contribute value but do so in relation to other activities in the cycle. Thus the value of any discrete activity can only be understood by considering its relation to other activities within the care delivery value chain. The CDVC also highlights activities such as patient access, external factors, patient information, and patient engagement that are crucial in resource poor settings.