There now is a wide consensus that health care products and services should be priced in relation to the additional value they produce. While cost-effectiveness analysis explicitly assumes allocation of resources based on added societal value, practitioners and health care policymakers in European institutions now increasingly promote value-based health care (VBHC) as a more holistic, patient-centered understanding of value. Although VBHC seems well aligned with cost-effectiveness analysis, there are several fundamental differences. Where VBHC is embraced by health care practitioners and hospital administrators because of its focus on patient value over the entire care pathways instead of single interventions, it lacks an operational definition of value in relation to cost. Another difference is that outcomes in VBHC are disease-specific, which implies they cannot be used for societal resource allocation decisions. This plenary session will therefore introduce VBHC in more general terms from a clinical and hospital perspective, and then will specifically discuss the challenges and main differences with cost-effectiveness analysis from an industrial, health economics, and patient perspective.