Scaling back in health care: more shared decision making and thoughtful consideration of recommendations

Identify recommendations for stopping or reducing unnecessary routine primary care

Summary by Cécile Bour, MD, September 15, 2020

September 14, 2020 “Identifying Recommendations for Stopping or Scaling Back Unnecessary Routine Services in Primary Care”.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2770724

A study by Eve A. Kerr, MD, MPH; Mandi L. Klamerus, MPH; Adam A. Markovitz, BS; et al.

Eve A. Kerr is a Research Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan School of Medicine. She is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member and responsible for measures of Choosing Wisdom International. 

The concept of Less is More[1][2] medicine emerged in North America in 2010. It is an invitation to practice medicine with an awareness of the potential dangers of over-medicalization, challenging the principle that more medicine means better care.

In response, several medical societies around the world have launched campaigns focusing on choice and appropriateness of care (Choosing wisely [3]) and calling for discussion with patients about the usefulness of medical tests, treatments and procedures.

As the rate of discoveries in therapeutics slowed in the late 1980s, the focus shifted from the search for further innovation to a more reasonable application of existing knowledge. Evidence-based medicine (EBM) was born and is the current driving force for achieving a better level of general practice.

What is EBM?

The EBM is based on a tripod:

1) external experience, basically scientific studies

2) Internal experience: what we learn from our professional practice

3) patient preferences and values.

Among these criteria, guidelines, or recommendations, serve as standards to facilitate medical practice.

Guidelines are a kind of… ways developed to help clinicians and patients make better decisions together, in a spirit of sharing perspectives, all in the best interests of the patient. 

But…

The guidelines, as the authors describe, generally act in the cumulative sense of ‘more is better’. The solution proposed by the authors is that the guidelines should be reshaped in the sense of de-escalation, in order to achieve ‘less is more’.

The problem often pointed out is that the guideline is the result of a more or less valid consensus reached among several experts. Uncertainties about the health processes that are analyzed by the experts are hardly mentioned and often replaced by the opinion of the expert(s). The independence of the experts can also be a subject of discussion…

Recommendations that drive decisions for patients and clinicians may unintentionally discourage real sharing in decision making, and encourage compliance with the guideline, or may result in rejection and less compliance, depending on the patient’s values.

Another challenge is the need to re-evaluate the guideline over time as new knowledge about the risk-benefit balance becomes available.

In addition, we are continually witnessing an encouragement to do rather more tests and treatments, an incentive that is societal, administrative and financial at the same time, by remunerating doctors when including patients in screening procedures.

What does Kerr’s study say, and what is its purpose?

The conclusion is that a large part of health care involves the agreed and routine use of medical processes as part of the treatment of chronic disease or as part of what is referred to as ‘prevention’. It is the latter that interests us.

The authors argue that it is essential to stop these processes and health services when the evidence on their relevance changes, or if the benefits no longer outweigh the risks as is the case with screening. 

 Yet currently most guidelines focus on escalation of care and procedures, and provide few explicit recommendations for reducing or even stopping treatment and screening tests.

The objective of the Choose Wisely group is to develop a systematic, transparent and consistent approach to identifying, specifying and validating recommendations for deintensification in routine adult primary care [4].

A targeted review of existing guidelines and recommendations was conducted to identify and prioritize potential indications of deintensification. 

Validity of these recommendations is examined according to several items: high-quality evidence that deintensification is likely to improve patient outcomes, evidence that intense testing and/or treatment could cause harm in some patients, absence of evidence on the benefit of continued or repeated intense treatment or testing, and evidence that deintensification is consistent with high-quality care.

Finally, in this study, a total of 178 opportunities to deintensify primary care services were identified, 37 of which were validated as high-priority deintensification recommendations. To date, this is the first study to develop a model for identifying, specifying and validating deintensification recommendations that can be implemented and monitored in clinical practice.

Concerning screening, what are these recommendations for deintensification (de-escalation?)

There is no great revolution in this area except that in the additional recommendations given by Choosing Wisely, clinicians are no longer supposed to recommend screening for breast, colorectal, prostate or lung cancer without considering life expectancy (no screening if life expectancy is less than 10 years) and without considering the risks of screening: overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

This is in contrast to the USPSTF and American College of Physicians’ guidelines that urge screening with a strong recommendation for women aged 50-74 years, and the American Cancer Society’s recommendations for screening as young as 45 years, all of these bodies not considering information on overdiagnosis or overtreatment in the recommended age groups.

For prostate cancer screening, its non-recommendation is recalled by the Choosing Wisely group, which is asking for at least a shared decision aid for men who would like to be screened.

Conclusion

The guidelines for deintensification proposed by Choosing Wisely, although modest on screening, can initiate this necessary change that will enable health care professionals to reverse the trend of ‘more care’.

But the evolution towards sharing medical decision making with patients cannot take place, in our opinion, without active assistance through decision support tools, and without the willingness of official health authorities to support practitioners.

Public health education is also needed. Between financial incentives (ROSP: remuneration of doctors on public health objectives in France) to physicians and societal messages to screen more and more (general public TV programs such as “naked stars” [5] and Pink October campaigns in France), there is for the moment only a very timid effort to achieve this informed sharing, too little academic training in this sense (despite local initiatives in medical schools), and certainly too little official and media support to make it clear that it is in the best interests of patients to review our practices towards a deintesification of routine care.

References 

[1] https://www.revmed.ch/RMS/2013/RMS-381/Less-is-more

[2] https://cancer-rose.fr/en/2020/12/15/less-is-more-medicine/

[3] http://www.lessismoremedicine.com/blog/tag/choosing+wisely

[4] https://www.irdes.fr/documentation/syntheses/soins-de-sante-primaires.pdf Primary care includes : – prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of patients; – dispensing and administration of drugs, medical products and devices, as well as pharmaceutical counselling; – orientation in the health care system and the medico-social sector; – health education.

[5]https://cancer-rose.fr/2020/02/06/ah-mais-quelle-aubaine-ce-cancer/

 

 

 


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