Money and Medicine - A documentary
This documentary explores healthcare spending that is
devoted to unnecessary care. The documentary compares healthcare
spending at UCLA medical center and Intermountain healthcare, Utah. The
documentary compares healthcare spending at these centers during first 2 years
of life, the last two years of life, excess imaging use, spending related to mammography screening
and breast cancer treatment, PSA screening and prostate cancer treatment. The
documentary doesn’t really discuss much in terms of solutions but does provide
a good basic framework to understand differences in healthcare spending across
geographic areas and discusses some factors that drive physician and patients to seek excess
care.
The full documentary is available at the link below
http://video.pbs.org/video/2283573727/
1 comment:
I'll have to check this out when I have some free time. It reminds of some similar work done at Dartmouth that talks about regional price variation and health care utilization in terms of supply side economics:
"Supply-sensitive care refers to services where the supply of a specific resource has a major influence on utilization rates. The frequency of use of supply-sensitive care is not determined by well-articulated medical theory, much less by scientific evidence; rather, it is largely due to differences in local capacity, and a payment system that ensures that existing capacity remains fully deployed. Simply put, in regions where there are more hospital beds per capita, patients will be more likely to be admitted to the hospital. In regions where there are more intensive care unit beds, more patients will be cared for in the ICU. More specialists will result in more visits to specialists. And the more CT scanners are available, the more CT scans patients will receive. The Dartmouth Atlas has consistently demonstrated these relationships."
http://www.dartmouthatlas.org/keyissues/issue.aspx?con=2937
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