Costs of Care project will help doctors reduce medical expenses

A new program seeks to curb healthcare expenses by educating providers to consider issues of cost and value when ordering medical tests and treatments.

Costs of Care is a nonprofit 501c3 organization that helps doctors understand how the decisions they make impact what patients pay for care. By harnessing social media, mobile applications and other information technologies, the program gives doctors and patients the information they need to deflate medical bills, according to Neel Shah, executive director of Costs of Care.

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"’Do no harm’ is one of the first principles of patient care and as a result, most clinicians are taught a basic framework to consider patient safety. Unfortunately, in an era when many patients are saddled with increasingly expensive medical bills and insurance premiums, no similar framework exists when it comes to considering issues of cost and value," said Shah. “When we’re considering ‘doing no harm,’ it should be realized that financial harm to patients is a kind of harm.”

“A lot of doctors may have no idea what patients are paying for medical care, but the doctors are the ones making most of the decisions for patients when it comes to what tests should be done,” he said.

A new Costs of Care project, "Teaching Value," comes on the heels of several other high-profile initiatives to improve the value of bedside care delivery, including the ABIM Foundation’s Choosing Wisely campaign, and the American College of Physicians’ High-Value, Cost-Conscious Care Initiative.

Funded with a grant from the ABIM Foundation, Costs of Care has partnered with medical educators at Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago to create a series of web-based videos and accompanying didactic curricula that will initially engage trainees in graduate medical education programs.

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The videos will use clinical vignettes to illustrate core principles of cost-consideration, including how to communicate with patients about avoiding unnecessary care and reducing overused or misused tests and procedures, according to Shah.

“We’re realizing it’s not enough to just teach doctors about how much everything is costing – it’s part of what we call the cost-conscious initiative,” Shah said. “Sometimes it’s not about what medical tests should be done but where they should be done. A CAT scan done in an emergency room is much more costly than in an outpatient setting.”

As part of the Teaching Value project launch, Costs of Care released a new teaser video called "What if Your Hotel Bill Was Like a Hospital Bill?". The video is a tongue-in-cheek depiction of the challenges patients face in deciphering medical expenses, and their additional confusion when they learn doctors are not trained to consider costs.

"How can we expect others to understand if we are not even teaching those in medical training about costs of care?" said Vineet Arora, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who is helping co-author the Teaching Value scripts, in a press release.

The full-length training videos in the Teaching Value series are targeted for release beginning this summer and will focus on training both practicing physicians and residents in teaching hospitals, as well as students during third-year internal medicine clerkships.

More information about Costs of Care and the Teaching Value Project can be found at www.costsofcare.org.

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