Screening for Cancer: Advice for High-Value Care

"Higher-intensity strategies are not necessarily higher value. High-value strategies provide a degree of benefits that clearly justifies the harms and costs incurred; low-value screening provides limited or no benefits to justify the harms and costs. When cancer screening leads to benefits, an optimal intensity of screening maximizes value. Some aspects of screening practices, especially overuse and underuse, are low value."

Screening for Cancer: Advice for High-Value Care From the American College of Physicians
TJ Wilt, RP Harris, A Qaseem
Annals of Internal Medicine. 2015;162(10):718-725. doi:10.7326/M14-2326

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Delivering Higher Value Care Means Spending More Time with Patients

"Attempting to improve a physician’s productivity by placing arbitrary limits on length of appointments or setting high targets for the numbers of patients that he or she should see each day lowers costs at the front end of a care cycle. But they incur much higher costs later in the cycle when preventable complications are treated in emergency rooms and intensive care units."

Delivering Higher Value Care Means Spending More Time with Patients
DA Haas, YC Krosner, N Mukerji, RS Kaplan
Harvard Business Review
December 2014

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Protecting resources, promoting value: a doctor’s guide to cutting waste in clinical care

"This report provides a framework for a way in which doctors can think critically about waste from a clinical perspective and provides examples of doctors improving the value of health care by reducing waste."

Protecting resources, promoting value: a doctor’s guide to cutting waste in clinical care
Academy of Medical Royal Colleges
November 2014

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RCS commissioning guide: emergency general surgery

"Emergency General Surgery (EGS), and specifically acute abdominal pain, represents a huge inpatient burden of heterogenous diagnoses. Historically, the care of this group of patients has been underfunded and overlooked and there has been resultant variability in the quality of care provided." 

Commissioning guide: emergency general surgery (acute abdominal pain)
Royal College of Surgeons, Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland
April 2014

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Design and use of performance measures to decrease low-value services and achieve cost-conscious care

"This paper gives an overview of performance measures for low-value services, provides specific examples of possible measures to assess use of low-value services, and discusses how these measures can be used in clinical practice and policy."

Design and use of performance measures to decrease low-value services and achieve cost-conscious care
DW Baker, A Qaseem, P Reynolds, LA Gardner, EC Schneider
Annals of Internal Medicine, Online First 30 October 2012

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