WIHI: Getting Right Care, Right!

Date: October 1, 2015

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Featuring: 

• ​Shannon Brownlee, MS, Senior Vice President, Lown Institute; Visiting Scientist, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
• Jim Conway, MS, Adjunct Faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Member, IOM Committee on Optimizing Scheduling in Health Care
• Kedar Mate, MD, Senior Vice President, IHI
• Aaron Stupple, MD, Hospitalist, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
   

There’s growing awareness of the need to curb health care’s overuse of interventions that lack a strong evidence base, unnecessarily subject patients to potential harm, and are more expensive than equally effective, cheaper alternatives. Initiatives like Choosing Wisely and Costs of Care have done a great job sounding the proverbial alarm about particular treatments and procedures doctors have grown too accustomed to prescribing automatically; antibiotics, certain screenings, and imaging tests often top the list. Costs of Care has put the spotlight on the financial harm of overtreatment on individual patients themselves, many of whom are now shouldering a larger and larger share of the health care bill. 

Against this backdrop, a new initiative called the RightCare Alliance encourages providers to take action to eliminate practices and procedures of little benefit to patients. They’re currently crowdsourcing a number of ways care providers across the US can engage in more thoughtful interactions with patients that can result in better treatment decisions. The most-favored suggestions will get top billing during RightCare Action Week, October 18-24. We explored those suggestions and more on this WIHI.