The U.S. health care reimbursement system was built for a different era — one that prioritized high-stakes “cure” interventions over the nuanced “care” interventions better suited to the ongoing needs of today’s patients, physicians, and other providers. To improve outcomes, satisfaction, and value, we must upend this outdated approach and build a model that rewards thoughtful, relationship-driven care rather than volume and costly procedures. It’s time to fundamentally rethink how we pay for health care in America.

What we need is a reboot: change the underlying valuation to reward cognitive care services rather than high-tech cure services. This would yield something that is currently hard to imagine: providers incentivized to listen, think, communicate, and coordinate care with one another, and with patients and their families.

That’s what patients want — and so do doctors and other health care professionals. Over the past few decades, there has been a degradation in the personal side of medicine, the side that is the most gratifying for patients and doctors alike. Patients are frustrated by lack of access, fragmented care, and inability to see doctors of their choice or to see any doctor for any reasonable amount of time. Doctors, especially primary care doctors (including pediatricians), are burned out and retiring early. They don’t want to continue to be a slave to the electronic medical record and to wait for insurance companies to approve their recommended treatments. They suffer from moral injury, which is the frustration of not being able to do the right thing.