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Approximately 30 percent of health care costs (more
than $750 billion annually) are spent on wasted care,
according to the American College of Physicians (ACP).
The ACP is committed to reducing unsustainable
financial burdens to our health care system and believes
that it is the responsibility of medical professionals to
become cost-conscious and decrease unnecessary care
that does not benefit patients.
To help physicians provide the best possible care to their
patients while reducing unnecessary health care costs,
the ACP has developed the High Value Care (HVC)
initiative, which implements high value care principles.
The ACP recently launched an HVC website for
physicians, which focuses on optimal diagnostic
and treatment strategies designed to prevent
wasted care. The website includes ACP Guidelines
and Clinical Recommendations designed to help
physicians understand the benefits, harms, and costs
of interventions and to determine whether services
provide good value. The goal is to help physicians
determine whether their patients? quality of care would
be negatively affected if certain tests and care options
were eliminated.
Through the site, physicians can access curriculum,
interactive case studies, medical news, public policy
recommendations, and an ethics manual. There is also
a Patient Resources page, designed to help patients
understand the benefits, harms, and costs of tests and
treatments for common clinical issues.
The HVC curriculum covers relevant and timely topics
such as eliminating health care waste, over-ordering of
tests, overcoming barriers to high value care, and high
value medication prescribing. It was jointly developed by
the ACP and the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine
in an effort to train physicians to be good stewards of
limited health care resources. The curriculum can be
completed in six hours and includes audio/video content.
It is available at
http://hvc.acponline.org/curriculum.html.
For more information, please visit the HCV website
at hvc.acponline.org.
]