Timely and accurate diagnostic testing is important to improving health outcomes, reducing length of stay and minimizing costs. However, providers need to balance the benefits of testing with the risks of overtreatment and of focusing solely on individual patients.
This was a major theme during an executive roundtable at Becker's 14th Annual Meeting, led by Dennis Deruelle, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Mendota Health.
Four key takeaways were:
1. Timely diagnosis and management are crucial for improving patient outcomes and reducing costs. Those are two of the four elements of the Quadruple Aim (the other two are improving patient experience and provider satisfaction). "If we can make a diagnosis faster and accurately, we can avoid some things that a patient shouldn't have and we can give them the treatment they need as soon as they need it," Dr. Deruelle said.
2. Overtreatment can lead to unnecessary costs and potential harm to patients. As much as 25% of healthcare spending is considered wasteful and 8.4% is related to overtreatment. Much of that spend is associated with running unnecessary tests, dedicating time and capacity to non-critical patients or prescribing antibiotics for conditions for which antibiotics are ineffective.
Overtreatment can also result in unintended health complications for patients. "When we overuse antibiotics, we spend money, we put patients at risk and we get to the problem of not having any antibiotics that can treat certain organisms, which is very scary," Dr. Deruelle noted.
3. The healthcare system needs to shift toward a population health approach and train healthcare professionals accordingly. Population health is a health system priority from multiple perspectives: economics, finances, quality of care and the Quadruple Aim itself. Yet, despite the importance of population health, medical residency programs still train up-and-coming doctors to look at only individual patients. "Our residency programs have not incorporated [a population health lens] as the prime function of becoming a provider of healthcare," Dr. Deruelle said.
4. Standardization and the use of technology, such as AI, can help improve healthcare delivery and outcomes. Standardizing testing across an entire organization is critical because a bad process can compromise all the good work that a clinician does.
In addition, integrating technology into clinical workflows and other healthcare processes is critical to scaling the provision of care without diminishing quality, while also lessening clinician burnout. "AI has the potential to help us with that specifically because it's very good at large data sets," Dr. Deruelle said.