Dive Brief:
- The level of physician services, hospitalizations, surgeries, imaging and prescriptions varies widely, suggesting that the medical care children get is more due to provider preference than patients' needs, a new study found.
- The report, done by the Dartmouth Atlas Project, used claims data generated between 2007 and 2010 from an all-payer data set; the data was collected for patients under age 18 in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
- The researchers found wide variance in a wide array of procedures and services, including emergency department visits, tonsillectomies and use of CT scans.
Dive Insight:
While these wide variances in care given don't necessarily mean the children are getting poor care, they do suggest that the care infants and children are getting may be more a matter of the doctors' and hospitals' practice styles, researchers said. So what should healthcare leaders do about this? It seems that healthcare organizations should take a careful look at how they're allocating resources to childrens' care -- and that throwing more resources at children's health may not be the best response to improving pediatric care overall. Bottom line, it's more than time for culling comparative effectiveness data to drive high-quality care.