In the constant battle against rising health care costs, payers and health systems are recognizing the importance of the site of service — for example, whether your MRI scan is performed in a hospital, a doctor’s office, or a freestanding facility. Indeed, the place where care is delivered heavily influences both health care prices and variation in prices.
Understanding One Challenge in Cutting Health Care Costs
Changing the places where some services are performed can yield big savings, but physicians’ behaviors must be taken into account.
November 23, 2020
Summary.
One major opportunity for lowering health care costs without compromising outcomes is to persuade physicians and patients to use sites that provide high-quality services such as lab, tests, MRI scans, and procedures at a lower cost than others. But one challenge is changing ingrained practices or habits. Only by taking that challenge into account can payers and health systems estimate the potential savings, which affects the design and investments in such initiatives. This article describes a model developed by the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and Embedded Health Care to realistically quantify the potential cost savings by changing practice patterns.