Many healthcare organizations have been making an effort to reduce diagnostic testing where clinically feasible since it is known to contribute to increasing healthcare costs. But achieving lab testing reductions is not as simple as it sounds. However, a new study suggests educating doctors via real-time price comparison might do the trick.
According to a new Atrius Health study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, doctors who regularly viewed lab test cost data in the electronic health record both decreased their ordering rates for certain tests and saved up to $107 per 1,000 visits per month.
[See also: Docs need training in cost awareness]
Thomas Sequist, MD, Atrius Health director of research, Harvard Vanguard primary care physician and co-author of the study, said these findings have big implications.
For a smaller physician practice that typically sees 1,000 patients per month, the financial savings is smaller, but for a large physician practice bringing in 20,000 visits per month, that’s $2,140 per month and more than $25,000 each year.
"Physicians don’t really have a sense of how much stuff costs," said Sequist in an interview with Healthcare Finance News’ sister publication, Healthcare IT News. "The primary goal of our project was to try to give doctors that background information so that they could be more educated."
The study, led by Daniel Horn of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Division of General Medicine, surveyed 215 primary care doctors at Atrius Health.
[See also: Medical specialty societies expand assault on unnecessary procedures]
Physicians in the intervention group received real-time information on laboratory costs for 27 individual tests when they placed their electronic orders, while the control group did not.
Significant decreases in ordering rates were observed in five out of 27 of the high- and low-cost lab tests. When asked why this proportion wasn’t higher, Sequist said overall they observed a decrease in utilization rates for all 27 tests, but not all were statistically significant.
"Even though it didn't hit the statistical significance for that individual test, the fact that all of them are going in the right direction is probably real," he said.
Also important, however, as Sequist pointed out, was that 49 percent of their doctors actually felt like they had enough information to make that ordering decision. "This project is really an attempt at trying to help those 51 percent of doctors who don’t think they have enough information, to try to get them more of that information," he said.
Getting doctors more of that cost information is important, the study notes, because doctors are key decision makers whose decisions directly impact costs. The study shows that doctors are willing to make efforts to control costs but that they need the tools to help them do that. Using EHRs to passively provide cost information to doctors is a potentially effective tool in the effort to control costs.
"It’s like putting price labels on goods you buy in the supermarket. When you know the prices, you tend to buy more strategically,” Sequist in a news release announcing the study results.
This report is taken from a story originally posted on Healthcare IT News.