Measuring low-value care in Medicare.

ABSTRACT:

Importance

Despite the importance of identifying and reducing wasteful health care use, few direct measures of overuse have been developed. Direct measures are appealing because they identify specific services to limit and can characterize low-value care even among the most efficient providers.

Objectives

To develop claims-based measures of low-value services, examine service use (and associated spending) detected by these measures in Medicare, and determine whether patterns of use are related across different types of low-value services.

Design, setting, and participants

Drawing from evidence-based lists of services that provide minimal clinical benefit, we developed 26 claims-based measures of low-value services. Using 2009 claims for 1,360,908 Medicare beneficiarie

SUBMITTER: Schwartz AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4241845 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature