Smarter patients = fewer procedures = lower cost

Educating patients leads to better outcomes – and lower costs.  A study found that over a quarter of the patients considering hip or knee replacement surgery decided against the procedure after learning more about the costs and consequences.

We’ll let Gary Schwitzer of HNR discuss the impact and implications below…

From a terrific piece in The Atlantic by way of Health News Review…

[the State of] Washington legislature recognized back in 2007 that decision aids are a valuable tool for improving medical care by helping patients make better decisions. They passed a law providing greater legal protection to providers who use shared decision making, rather than standard informed consent, and that law required the state to study the effects of shared decision making.[emphasis added] As part of that study, Group Health Cooperative (an integrated insurer and hospital system) gave all 660,000 of their patients access to decision aids when they were considering any of a dozen preference-sensitive treatments. They also made all of the doctors and staff watch the decision aids, and kept physicians informed of how many of their patients were choosing surgery.

If shared decision making is so wonderful, why aren’t we already using it in every hospital and every doctor’s office?

The results were striking. The paper, published in the September edition of Health Affairs, covers two orthopedic procedures — knee replacement and hip replacement for arthritis of those joints. During the year and a half immediately after they introduced the decision aids, rates of hip replacement fell over 25%; knee replacement went down 38%. Total spending went down 21% on patients with hip osteoarthritis and 12% for knee patients — not just on those patients who skipped surgery, but for the whole study population. That amounts to well over $1000 a year in true medical savings — money that can be spent on something else entirely, and isn’t just shifted from one payer to another.

Allow us to reinforce something from that last paragraph: over a quarter of patients were choosing not to have surgery once they were better informed. Looking at that one way, it’s great news: We can save a ton of money and make patients better off, just by doing a better job of targeting elective surgery. But it’s also a vicious indictment of our current practices: every day we continue not using decision aids, our medical system knowingly puts patients at risk of a wrong-patient error.

A series noted in Health News Review provides clear evidence that we Americans are the “worried well”; over-diagnosed and over-treated, often for conditions that aren’t very harmful in the first place.  The series, authored by a researcher in Australia, begins with this trenchant observation:

“over-diagnosis happens when people are diagnosed with diseases or conditions that won’t actually harm them. It happens because some screening programs can detect “cancers” that will never kill, because sophisticated diagnostic technologies pick up “abnormalities” that will remain benign, and because we are routinely widening the definitions of disease to include people with milder symptoms, and those at very low risk.”

Here’s the net.  Americans get far too much crappy information about health, health care, and treatments from media, friends, and [sometimes their] physicians.

But – and it’s a BIG BUT…

When Americans get GOOD information, they make smart decisions.