What Is Value-Based Care?
Value-based care (VBC) is a healthcare model that rewards providers for delivering high-quality, patient-centered care, not for the number of procedures performed. [1] Instead of paying for volume, payers focus on outcomes: better health, better experience, and lower costs.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) defines VBC as care that prioritizes quality, provider performance, and the patient experience.
At its core, VBC is about making care more effective, more equitable, and more meaningful for both patients and providers.
How Online Consents & Forms Support Value-Based Care
1. Supporting Shared Decision-Making (SDM)
Too often, patients head into surgery unclear about what’s actually happening — what the risks are, how long recovery might take, or even how long the procedure lasts. They end up Googling, calling the overworked receptionist, or scrolling Reddit for answers.
When I was a practicing physician, the most common question I got from women before a C-section was:
“How long does it take?”
As a surgeon, I knew it could be 20 minutes—or way longer depending on complexity. But for an expecting mother, the way we answer that question sticks. It shapes how safe, informed, and reassured she feels going into one of the biggest moments of her life.
This is where shared decision-making (SDM) comes in—a core principle of value-based care. SDM ensures patients are informed, involved, and confident in their care decisions. But traditional surgical consent processes rarely support this well - especially when you’re shoved a pile of papers to sign from consent forms to HIPAA compliance forms. There’s often no clear, trusted source for patients to review information ahead of time.
Yet here we are, in a digital era transforming every corner of healthcare — and we’re still relying on paper for one of the most critical steps in patient care.
Imagine a clear, easy-to-understand form sent before surgery — complete with verified info on risks, benefits, recovery time, and more. Patients can read it on their own schedule, prepare questions, and engage meaningfully with their care team. When patients feel informed, they’re more confident. When they’re more confident, outcomes improve.
2. Enhancing Patient Experience
Online consents may be part of a toolbox to empower patients to participate actively in their healthcare by providing information at their convenience. In many cases, patients face mandatory waiting periods — 3 days for private insurance and up to 30 days for Medicaid — before surgery can proceed. But the process is far from smooth. Patients often come in person to sign a paper consent, then have to request a scanned or photocopied copy, wait out the cooling-off period, and then receive their surgery date.
Digital consents can enable more tele-consultations, time to read and review, and make the whole consent process less rushed and more human. This proactive engagement leads to more meaningful patient-provider interactions and aligns with VBC’s emphasis on patient-centered care. From a provider’s point of view, online consent could mean fewer last-minute delays due to incomplete forms or patient questions that could’ve been addressed earlier.
3. Improving Efficiency and Enabling Data-Driven Care
Moving from paper to digital forms doesn’t just save trees—it lightens the burden of storing, rewriting, and correcting them.
When I was training, one running joke was that every physician had to redo a consent form at some point—because we’d written “C-section” instead of “Cesarean Section,” or “ORIF” instead of spelling out “Open Reduction and Internal Fixation.”
With digital forms, those kinds of errors can be avoided. Automating and standardizing the process means less time fixing paperwork, and more time where it really counts: with patients. Digital forms standardize patient data collection, making it easier to track outcomes, identify care gaps, and assess performance — key requirements for delivering value-based care.
How to measure Impact of Online Forms on Value-Based Care delivery?
It is easy to say “yes, we know online forms can drive VBC” but it always begs the question: how do we measure their efficiency and efficacy? [2]
1. Patient Understanding & Engagement
📋 Patient-reported understanding (via short surveys)
✅ Percentage of consents completed before the day of surgery
2. Administrative Time & Cost Savings
🕒 Time saved per form (consent, assessments)
🧾 Reduction in printing/scanning costs
🔄 Number of forms needing rework (e.g. due to errors or abbreviations) [3]
3. Workflow & Operational Efficiency
⏱️ Surgery delays linked to paperwork issues (pre/post implementation)
📂 Time to complete consent-to-scheduling process
💡 Staff feedback on workflow friction before vs. after online rollout
4. Outcome Tracking & Quality Reporting
📈 Screening completion rates (e.g. PHQ-9, ASQ, GAD-7)
🧠 No. of Referrals triggered by form results
5. Patient & Provider Experience
😊 Patient satisfaction with digital forms/consent experience
🩺 Provider satisfaction with documentation burden
Conclusion
While online forms may seem like a small change, they have the potential to meaningfully support value-based care. From improving patient understanding to reducing administrative burden and enabling better data for decision-making, their impact can be measured across key areas of care delivery.
There’s still much to learn, and every organization is different—but for those looking to align their workflows with the goals of value-based care, rethinking how forms are handled may be a good place to start.
Notes
Elwyn, Glyn et al. “Shared decision making: a model for clinical practice.” Journal of general internal medicine vol. 27,10 (2012): 1361-7. doi:10.1007/s11606-012-2077-6
Efficacy refers to the tool achieving its’ intended results ie. if Standard Form helps a patient fully understand Percutaneous Cutaneous Intervention, it is effective and has high efficacy. Efficiency, on the other hand, refers to how resourcefully (time, effort, or cost) a tool works. ie. if Standard Form saves 20 mins per patient for form-filing, its’ efficient.
Should be zero :)
At Standard Form, we help healthcare teams modernize their form workflows without disruption — supporting better care, clearer communication, and stronger compliance from day one.
