In much of the American health care system, providers charge patients for each procedure or treatment they offer.

But some health care experts argue that system may ignore the actual long-term health of a patient.

Researchers and policymakers are exploring value-based care models to better understand how to compensate health care providers based on providing holistic, high-value (high-quality and low-cost) care, rather than reimbursing the costs of procedures or other treatments.

A major challenge in moving any kind of hospital or health care system towards value-based care comes from challenging their compensation systems, marketing professor Mary Frances Luce said in a recent discussion on the LinkedIn page for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Although promising for its holistic approach to preventive medicine, value-based care faces challenges in terms of understanding the balance between what might make sense financially and what a health care provider or patient will actually do in practice, Luce said.

“To really get this right, we have to understand economics, we have to understand psychology and we have to have really good analytics,” Luce said.