Doctors Share Their Top 5 Concerns
Experts Issue 'Top 5' List for Better Primary Care
To streamline and save money, reduce unnecessary antibiotics, screenings, report authors urge.
Cutting back on unnecessary antibiotics, delaying wasteful imaging for lower back pain and foregoing annual ECG screenings for healthy, low-risk patients are among the actions that could help streamline primary care, experts say.
Perhaps taking a page from David Letterman's Top 10 list, the authors of a new report came up with a "Top 5" list of action items for each of the primary care disciplines — family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics — to help save money and conserve health resources.
Many physicians are already behind the suggestions, according to the report, which appears online May 23 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
"I have seen many instances where I thought clinicians were not making the right and wisest decisions in ways that were not good for patients' health and not good for prudent use of finite resources," said Dr. Stephen Smith, one of the report's authors and professor emeritus of family medicine at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University in Providence, RI.
Smith is also a member of the National Physicians' Alliance (NPA), a group of 22,000 doctors promoting affordable and quality healthcare, which put together the lists.
None of the suggestions are particularly new, having been validated by scores of studies, yet few clinicians seem to be implementing them, Smith said.
Here are the Top Five recommendations for each discipline:
For family medicine:
For internal medicine:
In pediatrics:
The report was funded by a grant from the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation.
Several of the items — those involving cardiac screening, overuse of antibiotics, bone-density scans and lower-back imaging — appeared in more than one category.
But one item — not doing blood chemistry panels and urinalysis among healthy adults without symptoms — enjoyed only weak support from the practicing physicians who field-tested the suggestions.
The Top 5 lists will now be distributed to all NPA members. The researchers are also hoping to get funding to set up demonstration sites, creating training videos to help physicians hone their communication skills and finding ways to get patients on board, Smith said.
"These are certainly important issues," said Dr. Lawrence C. Kleinman, a primary care physician and associate professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
But he also pointed out that "the lists were done with some nuance, which [is] valuable and important to incorporate in the understanding of this."
As the report authors point out, Kleinman noted, it's not that all antibiotic use is bad, just that, in the case of sore throats, there should be a verification that the infection is really strep throat before prescribing them. Similarly, imaging for head injuries would need to be done for children with loss of consciousness or other risk factors.
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