Building our next health system: Highlights from the Lown Conference
The Lown Institute’s Annual Conference was held last week, with the theme of “Breaking the cycle of high cost and low value: America’s next health system.”
The Alliance’s Deputy Director, Susie Dade, presented on our “First, Do No Harm” report, which used Milliman’s MedInsight Health Waste Calculator to quantify low-value health care services in Washington state.
The report found that both lower cost (less than $500) and higher cost (more than $500) health care services are commonly overused, dispelling a belief that overuse only refers to a problem of over-utilizing expensive testing, imaging, etc. In fact, the problem of overuse is also one of excessive utilization of unnecessary low-cost services.
“There’s an inclination to say, ‘Just do the test, it’s cheap,’ but when you add them together you get hundreds of millions of dollars in waste,” Dade said during her presentation.
Read a great recap of the conference on the Lown Institute blog.