Will there ever be a scenario where doctors will accept a third-party entity restricting care to patients?
Pauline Chen talks about comparative effectiveness research, and finds that, when recommendations are transparent and based on solid evidence, some doctors will accept this more regulated paradigm.
Dr. Chen is completely right when she observes that there is a “sense that some of [a health insurer's] decisions are based not on well-researched recommendations but on interests, agreements and circumstances that have little or nothing to do with good care.”
In her field of transplant surgery, which she calls “one of the most successfully regulated medical fields in this country,” every surgeon makes medical decisions based on “transparency, consistency and evidence-based research,” and indeed, “all transplant doctors and patients know where their third party stands.”
The hope is that comparative effectiveness research can bring that same level of authority and transparency to other fields of medicine, because I would rather have guidelines based on solid research telling me “no,” rather than the often bewildering decisions of a faceless Medicare or health insurer bureaucrat.
Related posts:
- Do doctors already have a source of comparative effectiveness research?
- Gift card for medical services
- Op-ed: Unbiased research for doctors is good medicine
- Can patients and doctors handle the truth?
- One doctor’s unnecessary procedure is another physician’s mortgage payment
- Will comparative effectiveness research really save money?
- Doctors who deny
{ 2 comments }
We sort of have it now to a minor degree. Would you really call up and fight for a patient who wants brand name Solodyne for their rosacea at >$500 a month when the insurance only covers generic minocycline? How many people would fight for an MRI on day one of a low back pain episode with no neurologic features just because the patient came in asking for one?
At some point people need to accept responsibility for the fact that they picked sucky insurance, they made a foolish decision in depending on their emploerer to pick sucky insurance for them, or of being part of a body politic that idioticly asked the government to take care of them. One individual doctor on the phone can’t defray the consequences of all of these bad individual and collective decisions nor should he have to try at his own expense.
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