Low-Value Health Care Services and “Choosing Wisely”

Source: Penn Medicine News, October 23, 2012 David Asch, Kevin Volpp and George Loewenstein authored a JAMA Viewpoint article entitled “Choosing Wisely: Low-Value Services, Utilization and Patient Cost Sharing” The article follows the launch of the “Choosing Wisely” initiative which identifies procedures and tests that add little value and may be unnecessary or even cause harm. The authors suggest that the “value-based” strategies that have been proposed to discourage the use of low-value services could be designed more effectively by incorporating insights from psychology and behavioral economics.