Value Champion Webinars
These webinars were presented to a national audience by faculty and former fellows on topics that were important to them in the conduct of their overuse project:
- What is Value and Why Take Action in the Safety Net?
Provides a deep dive on the concept of value within safety-net settings and examines the impact on health equity of delivering low-value services. - Leadership Engagement: From Crafting Charters to Planning Spread
An experienced clinical value champion provides 5 tips on how to continuously engage leadership support throughout your overuse reduction initiative. Use of a project charter in this process is described with a specific example. - A Recipe for Choosing a High Value Care Project
Six important ingredients to consider in choosing an overuse reduction topic that is feasible and a good fit within your organization are provided, along with insights from a value champion in shifting the targeted service based on these ingredients. - What Is a Stakeholder's Assessment and Why are They Important?
Describes how to identify and engage your organization’s stakeholders when reducing the use of services with a case study of one value champion's efforts to do so in a hospital setting. - The Role of the Patient’s Voice in Overuse Projects
Explores how incorporating patient voices into overuse reduction efforts is a critical step to decreasing unnecessary services and provides an example of how a value champion navifated this step in an emergency department.
Implementation Resources
The selected resources below can support implementation of the Taking Action on Overuse Framework and initiatives to reduce medical overuse.
Informed Conversations
“The role of conversation in health care interventions: enabling sense-making and learning”
Drawing on literature from sociolinguistics and complex adaptive systems theory, this article describes how conversation can increase the success of health care change efforts by promoting sense-making and learning.
Choosing Wisely® Physician Communication Modules
This set of interactive instructional modules are designed to help clinicians talk with patients about the overuse of health care services. The modules include strategies for building trust and responding to patient attitudes and beliefs.
Choosing Wisely® Patient-Facing Materials
These informational materials from Choosing Wisely® and Consumer Reports are designed for patients and their families to learn more about overused tests and procedures. They can support conversations and shared decision making among clinicians and patients.
Getting Started with the Work
A How-To Guide to Reducing Unwarranted Variations in Care
This is a collection of lessons from clinical and organizational leaders who have addressed practice and practitioner variation within their own organizations. Produced by an action group of California Health Care Foundation’s California Improvement Network, it is intended to help organizations get started in this work.
Cultivating a Culture of Trust, Innovation, and Improvement
“Creating the exceptional patient experience in one academic health system”
University of Utah Health Care system led a 7-year initiative to deliver an exceptional patient experience. The article describes the process of culture change, factors that affected the organization’s ability to provide exceptional patient experience, and lessons learned.
Helping Doctors Choose Wisely: Three Innovative Principles for Health Care Organizations
This Health Affairs blog post describes 3 ways that health care organizations can cultivate an environment supporting efforts to reduce overuse and includes links to relevant articles and initiatives.
“Getting Doctors to Make Better Decisions Will Take More than Money and Nudges”
This Harvard Business Review article describes the importance of organizational culture in supporting efforts to decrease medical overuse and increase evidence-based care.
Creating a Shared Language and Purpose
“Overuse: when less is more… more or less”
This article proposes a conceptual framework for defining potential areas of overuse and developing a shared understanding of the reasons for reducing overuse. The framework is organized around 3 areas: the tradeoff between benefits and harms, the tradeoff between benefits and costs, and consideration of patient preferences.
“Engaging doctors in the health care revolution”
This Harvard Business Review article offers a framework — based on the writings of economist and sociologist Max Weber — for engaging clinicians in redesigning health care. It describes 4 motivations driving social action in health care organizations: shared purpose, self-interest, respect, and tradition.
“Low-value care: an intractable global problem with no quick fix”
This editorial describes the challenges of reducing overuse and strategies to overcome these challenges, and it incorporates insight from the Taking Action on Overuse framework.
Commitment of Resources to Measurement
“Measuring low-value care in Medicare”
This JAMA Internal Medicine article describes 26 measures of low-value care developed using Medicare claims data, which assessed low-value service usage and the proportion of spending devoted to these services.
Choosing Wisely Claims-Based Technical Specifications
This Washington State Choosing Wisely Task Force document aims to promote discussion and refinement of measures of overuse and includes technical specifications for measures of overuse that correspond to recommendations from the Choosing Wisely® campaign.
General Overuse Resources
Mapping the Scope of Patient Harm from Overuse
This article describes domains of potential patient harm from overuse to inform clinician discussions of overuse with patients and facilitate health delivery system efforts to curb overuse.
“Overkill”
In this New Yorker essay, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the problem of unnecessary medical care through data, personal stories, expert interviews, and policy analysis.
Overuse Case Scenarios: Summary of Findings
This summary features three overuse case scenarios that expand on how to address overuse in specific health care settings.
“Preventing overdiagnosis: how to stop harming the healthy”
This article examines the underlying causes of overdiagnosis, the potential harms of unnecessary tests and treatments, and strategies for reducing overuse.
Quality Improvement in Overuse Tip Sheet
This tip sheet provides constructive advice on how to effectively communicate about overuse within the frame of quality improvement across health care roles.
When Less Is More: Issues of Overuse in Health Care
This Health Affairs blog post explores the growing problem of overuse and how it contributes to patient harm, and includes links to relevant articles and initiatives.
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