The April 20, 2021 session of Duke Medicine LEADS featured Suchita Shah Sata, MD, FACP, SFHM, presenting, "Upstream, Downstream, and Bridges Over Troubled Waters: Embracing High-Value Care."
Here are pearls and takeaways from the session:
- High-value care does NOT mean rationing care. It is about improving quality of care and minimizing costs where value of care can be estimated by thinking of quality of care divided by cost of care.
- We as healthcare providers are part of the problem but can also be part of the solution. Employ the 4 Es of choosing wisely if a patient or colleague suggests a low value practice: Empathize, Evaluate, Educate (bidirectional), Enquire. If a low-value practice is widespread, we can develop a QI project to tackle it!
- Price transparency is complicated. Simply displaying the price of what is ordered has not always been shown to be effective in reducing overall costs.
- There are multiple steps to develop the bridges necessary to avoid our goal of high-value care. These include starting with evidence-based guidelines around what waste is and what improves value, educating healthcare teams about appropriate use and costs of care, using behavioral economics principles to drive provider behavior change, redesigning healthcare systems to make it easier to practice high value care, and aligning financial incentives and payment structures with clinical value improvement.
Duke Medicine Learning, Education, and Discussion Series (LEADS) takes place each Tuesday at 12 p.m. Learn more and see schedule of upcoming sessions.
