The American Medical Association (AMA) announced on Monday that the nation’s physicians voted to approve a set of strategies for containing healthcare costs and achieving even greater value for health spending. Physicians at the AMA annual meeting asserted that successful cost containment must focus on balancing costs and benefits.
To manage healthcare costs and improve value, the AMA will advocate for the following four broad strategies:
• Reduce the burden of preventable disease.
• Make healthcare delivery more efficient.
• Reduce nonclinical health system costs that do not contribute to patient care.
• Promote “value-based decision-making” at all levels.
From these broad strategies follow a number of specific policy interventions to improve the cost-effectiveness of the U.S. healthcare system. Among the interventions identified by the AMA are promotion of patient lifestyle counseling, comparative cost-effectiveness research, continued development of health IT, use of clinical performance measures that promote efficient use of services, targeted insurance benefit design, and investigation of opportunities to reduce nonclinical activities that do not add value to patient care. Read the report.
