Unnecessary ordering of tests and inappropriate bundling of tests is contributing to an increase in health care costs, asserts a health care expert in a recent editorial published in a major medical journal. “‘What is the biggest driver of health care costs in the hospital?’ Answer: the physician’s pen,” writes Cheryl Bettigole, M.D., chief medical officer at Complete Care Health Network in New Jersey, in a perspective piece published in the Oct. 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. “A mouse or a keyboard, rather than a pen, now drives the spending, but we physicians and our staff are responsible for ordering these unnecessary tests and hence responsible for the huge bills our patients are receiving. Yet we are not doing this alone. Laboratories have learned that one easy way to increase revenue is to make it easy for clinicians to order more tests.” As an example Bettigole cites a single-vial women’s health test being “heavily marketed” that takes a cheap, cost-effective Pap test previously priced at $20 to $30 and makes it “a four-figure budget item.” Without alerts, checking the Pap box in an electronic record may lead to unnecessary testing for human papillomavirus as well as […]
Unnecessary ordering of tests and inappropriate bundling of tests is contributing to an increase in health care costs, asserts a health care expert in a recent editorial published in a major medical journal.
“‘What is the biggest driver of health care costs in the hospital?’ Answer: the physician’s pen,” writes Cheryl Bettigole, M.D., chief medical officer at Complete Care Health Network in New Jersey, in a perspective piece published in the Oct. 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. “A mouse or a keyboard, rather than a pen, now drives the spending, but we physicians and our staff are responsible for ordering these unnecessary tests and hence responsible for the huge bills our patients are receiving. Yet we are not doing this alone. Laboratories have learned that one easy way to increase revenue is to make it easy for clinicians to order more tests.”
As an example Bettigole cites a single-vial women’s health test being “heavily marketed” that takes a cheap, cost-effective Pap test previously priced at $20 to $30 and makes it “a four-figure budget item.” Without alerts, checking the Pap box in an electronic record may lead to unnecessary testing for human papillomavirus as well as for tests for multiple infections that would rarely have been ordered.
Given the increasing cost-consciousness of health care consumers, providers are being called on not only to be good stewards of limited health care resources, but also to understand the financial effects that ordering tests has on patients. For more information on the increasingly cost-conscious consumer, please see Inside the Diagnostics Industry on page 5.
