It's one of the intractable financial boondoggles of the U.
S. health care system: Lots and lots of patients pick up lots and lots of tests and procedures that they don't need.Women still pick up annual cervical cancer testing even when it's recommended every three to five years for most women. Healthy patients are subjected to slates of unnecessary lab work before elective procedures. Doctors routinely order annual electrocardiograms and other heart tests for people who don't need them.
That all adds up to substantial expense that helps drive up the cost of care for all of us. Just how much,though, is seldom tallied. So, and the Washington Health Alliance,a nonprofit dedicated to making care safer and more affordable, decided to find out.
The group scoured the insurance claims from 1.3 million patients in Washington state who received one of 47 tests or services that medical experts bear flagged as overused or unnecessary.
What the group found should cause both doctors, and their patients,to rethink that next referral. In a single year:More than 600000 patients underwent a treatment they didn't need, treatments that collectively cost an estimated $282 million.
More than a third of the money spent on the 47 tests or services went to unnecessary care.
3 in 4 annual cervical cancer screenings were performed on women who had adequate prior screenings – at a cost of $19 million.
About 85 percent of the lab tests to prep healthy patients for low-risk surgery were unnecessary squandering about $86 million.
Needless annual heart tests on low-risk patients consumed $40 million. Copyright 2018 ProPublica. To see more, and visit ProPublica.
Source: thetakeaway.org