WASHINGTON, D.C.—SHM joined hands today with 15 other U.S. medical specialty societies in the fight to eliminate wasteful medical tests, drugs, and treatments.
The 10,000-member SHM, which represents more than 40,000 hospitalists, released two lists of common tests and procedures that clinicians and patients should seriously question as part of the ABIM Foundation’s Choosing Wisely campaign. The campaign debuted in April 2012 with nine medical societies providing input on medical decisions that lack evidence, waste finite healthcare resources, or potentially harm patients.
“We acknowledge that there is waste in our system,” says Gregory Maynard, MD, MSc, SFHM, senior vice president of SHM’s Center for Healthcare Improvement and Innovation. “We also believe that if you have an engaged, empowered patient, together you will make better choices, have less waste, and probably also reduce costs.”
SHM’s Hospital Quality and Patient Safety Committee created two lists of five recommendations: one for adult hospitalists and inpatients, and one for pediatric hospitalists and patients. Examples include:
- Do not prescribe medications for stress ulcer prophylaxis to medical inpatients unless they are at high risk for gastrointestinal complications;
- Do not order continuous telemetry monitoring outside the ICU without using a protocol that governs its continuation; and
- Do not order chest radiography in children who have uncomplicated asthma or bronchiolitis.
The “avoid” lists were chosen by SHM because they potentially represent significant, needless waste of healthcare resources, according to John Bulger, DO, MBA, SFHM, chief quality officer at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. Dr. Bulger, who chaired SHM’s Choosing Wisely committee, encourages hospitalists to stop and take a long look at the list and think about ways to improve their own practice. He encourages hospitalists to take the recommendations to their hospitals’ quality-improvement (QI) committee and start collecting baseline data, he says. “We should be able to come back a year from now and show that we’ve been able to change practice using these lists,” he says.
We acknowledge that there is waste in our system. We also believe that if you have an engaged, empowered patient, together you will make better choices, have less waste, and probably also reduce costs.
—Gregory Maynard, MD, MSc, SFHM, senior vice president of SHM’s Center for Healthcare Improvement and Innovation
HM pioneer Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, who heads the division of hospital medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, chairs the American Board of Internal Medicine, and sits on the board of the ABIM Foundation, agrees.
“I think you’ll be hearing similar kinds of drumbeats about waste from every national organization involved in healthcare,” says Dr. Wachter, author of the Wachter’s World blog. “I think hospitalists should be active and enthusiastic partners in the Choosing Wisely campaign and leaders in American healthcare’s efforts to figure out how to purge waste from the system and decrease unnecessary expense.”
Click here to listen to more of Dr. Wachter’s interview on the Choosing Wisely campaign.
A similar kind of focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness was part of the initial motivation for developing hospital medicine, Dr. Wachter says. He compares the current national obsession about healthcare waste with the medical quality and patient safety movements of the past decade.
“It’s the right time, the right message, and the right messenger,” he says. “But now we’re a little scared about raised expectations. Delivering on them is going to be more difficult, even, than patient safety was because, ultimately, it will require curtailing some income streams. You can’t reach the final outcome of cutting costs in healthcare without someone making less money.” TH