When creating lists of low-value and overused treatments, physicians tend to overlook lucrative treatments in their own specialties, according to a report from Kaiser Health News and The Chicago Tribune.
Medical specialty societies participating in the "Choosing Wisely" campaign, a project of the American Board of Internal Medicine, chose physician-administered services as high-cost, low-value items only 18 percent of the time. Radiology procedures (29 percent), cardiac testing (21 percent), medications (21 percent) and lab and pathology tests (12 percent) were the most common answers to the question of which care procedures are the lowest-value, according to an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Industry experts are concerned physicians overlook low-value procedures in their specialties because of the influence of device manufacturers, the fear of decreasing profits and the idea that low-value procedures in their own specialty are not a problem that need to be addressed immediately, according to the report.
Despite the tendency for medical societies to condemn procedures from other specialties first, some physicians have made a concerted effort to eliminate waste from their own areas of practice, including gastroenterologists, radiologists and clinical pathologists, all of which tended to place their own tests on lists of low-value procedures, according to the report.
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