The Big Question

What if we moved from a sick care system to one that truly rewards better health?

The Problem

For many Americans right now, preventative health care is not working. Over the past decade, life expectancy in the U.S. has declined sharply and currently trails well behind that of peer countries. This disparity is especially evident among low-income and rural populations, both of which die much earlier than their higher-income and urban counterparts – in part due to a lack of access to preventative care.

The Current State

Health care organizations in the U.S. today lack strong incentives to offer robust preventative care to their patients. In many instances, health care providers will only address an underlying medical problem after an acute event. This approach leads to lower quality of life and higher treatment costs for providers and patients than offering preventative care before the first signs of illness.

The Challenge

HEalth care Rewards to Achieve Improved OutcomES (HEROES) aims to trial and validate a radically different approach to creating preventative care incentives in the health market. This approach involves offering direct payments to individual “health accelerators” – such as non-profits or care consortiums – that successfully implement preventative care campaigns that improve the rates for specific health harms in an entire geographic population.

Examples of health challenges that HEROES may take on include cardiovascular disease and risks, alcohol-related harms, opioid overdoses, and severe complications during pregnancy or birth. To receive payment from the program, successful health accelerators must reduce the overall number of adverse health events – such as heart attacks or serious post-partum bleeds – that occur within a pre-defined target population.

To accelerate the program’s long-term sustainability, HEROES will invite outside entities – such as employers, philanthropic groups, or insurance providers – to partner with ARPA-H and purchase outcomes in the different regions that they serve. Over time, HEROES hopes that this novel incentive structure will eventually become self-sustaining and capable of “surviving in the wild” even after the program ends.

The Solution

HEROES calls for letters of interest from potential health accelerators, corporations, investors, health insurers, and philanthropists invested in addressing one of the four health challenges mentioned above. Teams with diverse backgrounds and capabilities will be important for fulfilling the program’s goals, and HEROES encourages applications from interested parties with many different specialties or areas of expertise. To learn more about the program, view the HEROES slides.

Why ARPA-H

With HEROES, ARPA-H will explore how a novel incentive structure focused on preventative care could radically change the health market and accelerate better health outcomes.