• OronceCarlos Irwin ACIAVA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA, USA.National Clinician Scholars Program, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, USA., A Mark Fendrick, Joseph A Ladapo, Catherine Sarkisian, and John N Mafi.
• VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• J Gen Intern Med. 2021 Dec 1; 36 (12): 3711-3718.

BackgroundLow-value care, or patient care that offers no net benefit in specific clinical scenarios, is costly and often associated with patient harm. The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) Grade D recommendations represent one of the most scientifically sound and frequently delivered groups of low-value services, but a more contemporary measurement of the utilization and spending for Grade D services beyond the small number of previously studied measures is needed.ObjectiveTo estimate utilization and costs of seven USPSTF Grade D services among US Medicare beneficiaries.DesignWe conducted a cross-sectional study of data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) from 2007 to 2016 to identify instances of Grade D services.Setting/ParticipantsNAMCS is a nationally representative survey of US ambulatory visits at non-federal and non-hospital-based offices that uses a multistage probability sampling design. We included all visits by Medicare enrollees, which included traditional fee-for-service, Medicare Advantage, supplemental coverage, and dual-eligible Medicare-Medicaid enrollees.Main MeasuresWe measured annual utilization of seven Grade D services among adult Medicare patients, using inclusion and exclusion criteria from prior studies and the USPSTF recommendations. We calculated annual costs by multiplying annual utilization counts by mean per-unit costs of services using publicly available sources.Key ResultsDuring the study period, we identified 95,121 unweighted Medicare patient visits, representing approximately 2.4 billion visits. Each year, these seven Grade D services were utilized 31.1 million times for Medicare beneficiaries and cost $477,891,886. Three services-screening for asymptomatic bacteriuria, vitamin D supplements for fracture prevention, and colorectal cancer screening for adults over 85 years-comprised $322,382,772, or two-thirds of the annual costs of the Grade D services measured in this study.ConclusionsUS Medicare beneficiaries frequently received a group of rigorously defined and costly low-value preventive services. Spending on low-value preventive care concentrated among a small subset of measures, representing important opportunities to safely lower US health care spending while improving the quality of care.© 2021. Society of General Internal Medicine.

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