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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.

 

 

Published: April 17, 2018

About Washington Health Alliance

The Washington Health Alliance is a place where stakeholders work collaboratively to transform Washington state’s health care system for the better. The Alliance brings together organizations that share a commitment to drive change in our health care system by offering a forum for critical conversation and aligned efforts by stakeholders: purchasers, providers, health plans, consumers and other health care partners. The Alliance believes strongly in transparency and offers trusted and credible reporting of progress on measures of health care quality and value. The Alliance is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit with more than 185 member organizations. A cornerstone of the Alliance's work is the Community Checkup, a report to the public comparing the performance of medical groups, hospitals and health plans and offering a community-level view on important measures of health care quality (www.wacommunitycheckup.org).

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