SHM is participating in the ABIM Foundation’s Choosing Wisely Campaign (CWC).1 Launched earlier this year, the CWC aims to increase awareness about medical practices that may be of little or no benefit to patients. Presently, 26 physician organizations have teamed with the ABIM Foundation to each create a list of “five things physicians and patients should question.” In addition, Consumer Reports (the product ratings organization well known for grading the quality of such items as automobiles and vacuum cleaners) is coordinating the efforts of 11 consumer groups to advance the CWC agenda.
The CWC aims to highlight two pillars of healthcare reform that will receive enhanced attention in the near future: 1. Cost of care, and 2. Patient experience of care. Heretofore healthcare reform efforts have largely been focused on the quality and patient-safety movements. Equally important, however, to policymakers is affordability and care experience. By focusing on tests and procedures of questionable benefit, the CWC aims to directly address costly unnecessary treatment by encouraging care planning that incorporates patient preferences. This is necessary work because research suggests that physician decisions account for 80% of healthcare expenditures, while the tradition of patients entrusting their doctors with complete decision-making authority leads to care that they do not want.2
Choosing Wisely Begins with Medical Professionalism
In 2002, the ABIM Foundation collaborated with the American College of Physicians Foundation and the European Federation of Internal Medicine to jointly author “Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter.”3 The charter has since been endorsed by more than 130 organizations and triggered countless improvement initiatives to advance its fundamental principles of patient welfare, patient autonomy, and social justice.
Through project grant support, the ABIM Foundation is emphasizing two key Physician Charter commitments (see Table 1) to advance appropriate healthcare decision-making and encourage stewardship of healthcare resources. The CWC naturally augments this work by focusing on care affordability and decision-making through shared discussions between patients and providers.
SHM’s Involvement
SHM convened a workgroup of hospital medicine quality improvement experts led by John Bulger, DO, the chief quality officer at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania. This group solicited from SHM committee members 150 suggested tests and treatments that HM clinicians and their patients should question. After critical analysis, the list was narrowed to exclude suggestions already being advanced by the CWC while focusing on those that represent the largest opportunity for hospitalists to impact on affordability and patient experience.
The list was then submitted to SHM members for comment via survey, resulting in 11 recommended medical interventions that were subjected to comprehensive literature review. Workgroup members then rated these 11 interventions according to the following criteria: validity of supporting evidence, feasibility and degree of hospitalist impact, frequency of occurrence, and cost of occurrence.
Finally, the workgroup collaborated with the SHM board of directors to submit to the ABIM Foundation the ultimate list of “five things hospitalists and their patients should question.” Ricardo Quinonez, MD, at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, led a similar process that generated a list of questionable practices in pediatric HM. It, too, was submitted to the ABIM Foundation.