Speaking at an American Journal of Managed Care event, UnitedHealth Group and OptumCare executive Kenneth Cohen, MD, said the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that many day-to-day health practices might not be necessary.
Dr. Cohen is executive director of clinical research at UnitedHealth Group Research and Development and senior national medical director at OptumCare. He said during the event that a value-based model will be the only wide-ranging reform able to reduce the amount of low-value care in the health system, AMJC reported Jan. 17.
"There are perverse incentives in our current model that encourage the use of low-value care," he said.
Dr. Cohen said although patient visit frequency decreased during the pandemic, health outcomes did not.
"We know that, early on in the pandemic, office visits went down by 80 percent to 85 percent. Patient outcomes did not worsen by 80 percent to 85 percent, suggesting that a lot of the things that we do in our day-to-day office practice may not be necessary," he said.
"[The pandemic] allowed us to really get a bird's-eye view of what our healthcare system might look like with a lower intensity of care."