Medical Intervention Efficacy

Medical Interventions Efficacy are health determinants that impact patients health.

Adverse Outcomes

• OIG report: 30% of rehab hospital patients experience harm (7/21/16)
• About one-third of patients over 70 years old and more than half of patients over 85 leave the hospital more disabled than when they arrived (8/9/16)
• Medicare pays for nearly 500,000 hip and knee replacement surgeries each year. Approximately 25,000 patients undergo procedures to remove and replace a previous artificial joint. Medicare program is unable to identify product failures, patient safety problems or performance of medical devices. (6/29/16)
• If Patients Only Knew How Often Treatments Could Harm Them (3/2/15)

Cancer Treatments

• One In Three Women With Breast Cancer Treated Unnecessarily, Study Concludes (1/9/17)
• At a median of 10 years, prostate-cancer–specific mortality was low irrespective of the treatment assigned, with no significant difference among treatments. (10/13/16)

Low-Value Care

• 18 'low-value' tests cost Minnesota patients $54.9M, Mayo and state study finds (6/2/17)
• Roughly 93 percent of quality measures and initiatives have focused on underuse. Choosing Wisely focuses on the overuse that impacts quality and safety (12/3/15)
• Medicare spent $8.5 billion on 26 measures of low-value care (7/2014)

Medical Errors

• Physicians prescribe wrong antibiotic half of the time (10/25/16)
• Medical errors may kill 250,000 a year, but problem not being tracked (5/4/16)
• Medical errors officially the third leading cause of death in U.S., study finds (5/3/16)
• Medication errors or unintended drug side effects occurred in about half of all surgeries done at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital (10/26/15)
• Study: Medical Error Deaths 4.5 Times More Likely Than IOM Estimate 9/20/13)Medical Decisions'
  

Physician Preference Sensitive Treatments

• Physician Characteristics Strongly Predict Patient Enrollment In Hospice (6/2015)

Surgeries

• A review of 13 studies, involving nearly 1,700 patients, found that arthroscopic surgery for patients with degenerative knee problems did not provide lasting pain relief or improve function. (5/10/17)
• Total knee replacement of patients with knee osteoarthritis had minimal effects on quality of life. If procedure were restricted to more severely affected patients, its effectiveness would rise, with practice becoming economically more attractive than its current use. (3/28/17)
• 400,000 middle-aged and older Americans undergo meniscus surgery. Studies have concluded that meniscus surgery offers no additional benefits regular exercise could not. (8/5/16)
• For 99 percent of people in America, when they go in to have surgery, the outcome of that operation is not measured (5/3/15)
• One-third of knee replacements in the U.S. may be inappropriate (6/30/14)

Unnecessary Care

• Overtreatment in the United States - Study finds physicians believe that 20.6 percent of all medical care was unnecessary, including 22 percent of prescriptions, 24.9 percent of tests and 11.1 percent of procedures. (9/6/17)
• Professional Athletes And Back Surgery: A Teachable Moment On Overuse In Health Care? (8/1/17)
• OVERKILL: An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it? (5/11/15)
• Choosing Wisely: In addition to wasting valuable resources, the unnecessary use of medical tests, treatments, and procedures can sometimes harm patients (1/20/15)
• Study of 4,215 orders shows $226 spent per patient on unnecessary care (9/16/14)