Measuring and minimizing low-value care

Hospitals and health systems have often needed to restrict nonemergent care during COVID-19 surges, with mixed effects on patients. Some patients may experience worse outcomes when necessary treatment or surgery is postponed, while others may avoid receiving unnecessary and potentially harmful (low-value) care. Of course, relying on a pandemic to reduce low-value care is not a strategy; at best, it's a blunt instrument that will be discarded when the public health emergency ends. Recent studies of pre-pandemic low-value care have further demonstrated the need for sustainable interventions.

Dr. Ishani Ganguli and colleagues described the use of 41 low-value medical services in a retrospective cohort of more than 11 million Medicare beneficiaries across 556 health systems. They found that the most common services were preoperative laboratory testing, prostate-specific antigen testing in men older than 70 years, and antipsychotic medications in patients with dementia. Characteristics of health systems associated with greater low-value care (based on a composite measure of the 28 most common services) were having a smaller proportion of primary care physicians, a larger proportion of patients of color, no teaching hospital, higher health care spending, and headquarters in the Southern or Western U.S.

Another recent study of Medicare claims data examined the prevalence and costs of hospital-acquired conditions and patient safety indicator events associated with a selection of low-value inpatient procedures. The investigators identified 231 hospital-acquired conditions and 1,764 patient safety indicator events associated with these procedures from 2016 to 2018, resulting in $3.16 million and $26.7 million in additional health care costs, respectively. For example, hospital-acquired conditions occurring during an admission for percutaneous coronary intervention extended length of stay by an average of 17.5 days and increased the cost of hospitalization by $22,000.

The Cochrane Library has created a special collection of systematic reviews on resource-intensive interventions "for which there is high or moderate certainty evidence that they confer clinically small or no effects, and for which there is some evidence of harm to patients." Examples include preoperative testing for cataract surgery, percutaneous vertebroplasty for vertebral compression fractures, and intensive follow-up strategies after treatment of non-metastatic colorectal cancer.

As Dr. Jennifer Middleton pointed out in a previous AFP editorial, changing physician behavior to minimize low-value care requires creating new workflows and systems of care. A systematic review of 131 articles on Choosing Wisely interventions in the U.S. through June 2019 found that the most effective interventions target clinicians rather than patients, are active rather than passive, and include multiple components. The type of low-value service targeted did not affect outcomes. Components of effective clinician-focused interventions included behavioral nudges, feedback / report cards, clinical decision support, electronic health record enhancements, clinician champions, education and academic detailing, and creating new clinical pathways.