Apr 8, 2026
Dr. John Birkmeyer, President of the medical group at Sound Physicians, defines value-based care as an evolution from older managed care models, with closer alignment of incentives for quality of care and cost-effectiveness. Working within the hospital environment, this approach emphasizes standardizing patient-centered care and communication across multiple hospital departments, reducing redundant tests and improving patient outcomes. The use of AI is one way to reduce the administrative burden on physicians, freeing up more time for patient care, a departure from earlier technologies that added to clinicians' workload.
John explains, "Sound Physicians is a multi-specialty medical group. It's distinguished in a couple of ways from a lot of the physician groups that your listeners and patients are used to. Number one, it focuses exclusively on specialties that are practiced inside the hospital. So in that context, we work in anesthesia, in the ICU, in hospital medicine, and in the emergency department. And we're different to the extent that we're a very large group. So we're in our 25th year of operations, but we currently run over 400 practices in about the same number of hospitals across most of the states of the US. So in that context, we've learned a lot about what care looks like in different parts of the United States, what things are similar, what things are different, and most importantly, what things work."
"Some of the most important strategies for succeeding with value-based care are things that are very aligned with ensuring not just high quality, but high empathy care to patients. And most importantly, making sure that clinical decisions physicians make in partnership with their patients account for not just scientific evidence but also the values and preferences of patients and their families. More often than not, there's no single right answer for what that patient needs in terms of tests or procedures or other types of care that occur in the hospital. And many of them involve trade-offs between quality of life and length of life, how patients feel about being in the hospital and for how long, how they feel about risk, and what they want to do when they're ultimately discharged from the hospital."
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