For Better Treatment, Doctors and Patients Share the Decisions

An NPR story noted: “Many of us get confused by claims of how much the risk of a heart attack, for example, might be reduced by taking medicine for it. And doctors can get confused, too.”

“Just ask Karen Sepucha. She runs the Health Decisions Sciences Center at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. A few years ago she surveyed primary care physicians, and asked how confident they were in their ability to talk about numbers and probabilities with patients. ‘What we found surprised us a little bit,’ Sepucha says. ‘Only about 20 percent of the physicians said they were very comfortable using numbers and explaining probabilities to patients.'” (more…)

Scale of Medical Decisions Shifts to Offer Varied Balances of Power

A Los Angeles Times article noted: “Patients never used to worry about making healthcare decisions. They didn’t have to. Their doctors made just about all of their decisions for them. Everyone simply assumed that doctors knew what was best.”

“But that paternalistic view of doctors as know-it-alls has gone by the board, says Dr. Clarence Braddock, vice dean for education at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Now doctors are seen as the experts on medical information and choices,” he explains, “but patients are seen as the experts on what those choices mean in their own lives.” (more…)

Fee-for-Service Thwarts Value-Based Care’s Intention

A Modern Healthcare article noted: ”Society wants the healthcare system to improve the population’s overall health while caring for the sick at a lower overall cost. The term of art is providing value-based care. Yet system leaders are stuck with a reimbursement system that still rewards volume through fee-for-service medicine.”

“Those differing approaches to providing healthcare—actually, only value-based care can truly be called healthcare since fee-for-service medicine is more properly called sick care—present providers with two diametrically opposed incentive schemes.” (more…)

Chemo Costs in U.S. Driven Higher by Shift to Hospital Outpatient Facilities

A Kaiser Health News article noted: “The price of cancer drugs has doubled in the past decade, with the average brand-name cancer drug in the U.S. costing $10,000 for a month’s supply, up from $5,000 in 2003, according to a new report by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, a health information, services and technology company.”

“And those are just average prices; some drugs may cost as much as $30,000 a month.In Europe, where governments negotiate for national discounts, the list prices of cancer drugs are at least 20 to 40 percent lower than in the U.S., the report found.” (more…)

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