PHILADELPHIA – With the cost of medically unnecessary care estimated to be in the billions of dollars, a new campaign is setting out to change the medical profession’s and society’s usage of healthcare.
Choosing Wisely, a campaign developed by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation in partnership with Consumer Reports and nine medical societies, seeks to get patients and doctors and others in the medical profession to think and talk about overuse or misuse of healthcare resources.
[See also: Defensive medicine adds billions to annual U.S. healthcare costs.]
During the multi-year campaign, each specialty society will target five common tests or procedures that each designates needs discussion or should be questioned. The parameters used to narrow the options include limiting the five to the specialty’s purview and control; frequency and/or cost of the procedures; and having evidence supporting each recommended target. The societies will announce their self-developed lists in April of next year.
While some specialty societies have been putting out clinical guidelines based on evidence, the beauty of this campaign is that through Consumer Reports that same information doctors get will get out to patients said Christine Cassel, MD, ABIM Foundation’s president and CEO.
“The way this will help is that it will provide evidence-based, credible information from independent physician specialty voices about areas that are high potential for either not being useful or being misused in some way or another where the patient or the consumer can say to their doctor, ‘Do I really need this?’ And for the physician side, they will be able to have answers for the patients about that and hopefully lead to better shared decision making between doctors and patients,” Cassel said.
The campaign is not pushing rationing, Cassel stressed. “This is not about rationing. This is about choosing wisely.”
“When you’re sick or you’re worried about someone in your family, the instinct is to say ‘I want everything.’ Without having better information, that’s understandable,” she said. “I think that’s been the default mode up to now. In some ways the combination of recognizing the cost of care with also recognizing (that) a lot of times unnecessary medical care actually leads to harm – the combination of those two things really makes this moment in time a real opportunity to make progress.”
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.
