The founder and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Donald Berwick, is convinced that the U.S. health-care system can reduce costs by 30 percent while improving overall quality-just by getting health care professionals to adopt improvements others already have discovered.
Many children, possibly up to 30 percent, are being treated with new, broad spectrum, expensive, and potentially unsafe antibiotics despite national research and expert guidelines urging use of simple, inexpensive antibiotics as a far better initial treatment.
MRI scans in the first week of back pain rarely produce useful information compared with "watchful waiting," but many doctors order MRIs for such patients.
Simple, inexpensive medications such as aspirin and beta blocker drugs can significantly reduce the likelihood of dying from heart attacks, but only one in five eligible patients currently receives such medications.
Inhaled steroid medications can prevent disability and complications among asthmatic patients, but fewer than one-third of eligible patients receive such medication.
One HMO-based study showed an 80 percent decrease in hospital days and emergency room visits for asthma care among patients trained to avoid asthma triggers, measure their own lung function, follow a consistent treatment plan, and make adjustments in their own medications.
Indicate whether each selected finding mentioned represents effectiveness (EFT), efficiency (EFC), or both. If the finding represents either efficiency or both, indicate whether you consider it to be primarily cost understanding (CU), cost containment (CC), cost avoidance (CA), or cost reduction (CR). Justify each of your answers.