A new approach to preferred provider selection in health care

•This paper describes a novel method to identify expert health care providers.•This approach has been used to select preferred providers in health care.•The procedure empowers the health care professional and acknowledges their expertise.•The method makes affordable quality the core topic in negotiations with providers.•This approach to provider selection is complementary to innovations in reimbursement. In January 2015 Zilveren Kruis, the largest health insurer in The Netherlands, engaged in a new three-year, unlimited volume contract with five carefully selected providers of cataract surgery. Zilveren Kruis used a novel method, designed to identify the top expert providers in a certain discipline. This procedure for provider selection uses the principles of Best Value Procurement (BVP), and puts the provider in charge of defining key performance indicators for health care quality. The procedure empowers the professional and acknowledges that the provider, not the purchaser, is the true expert in defining what is high quality care. This new approach focuses purely on provider selection and is thus complementary to innovations in health care reimbursement, such as value-based hospital purchasing or outcome-based financing. We describe this novel approach to preferred provider selection and show how it makes affordable quality the core topic in negotiations with providers.