Subjects:
Administration/Practice Management, Quality Improvement
Topics:
low-value care, societies, medical, choosing wisely, obesity, health expenditures, arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid, asthma, celiac disease, childhood cancer, gastroesophageal reflux disease

The number is staggering. Conservatively, up to one-third of US health care could be considered waste.1 In a country in which health care spending to gross domestic product is the highest by a large margin of any other nation (18% of gross domestic product, projected to be 20% by 2020), this could represent as much as $1.2 trillion annually in wasted health care dollars.1 Overuse of medical services is a major contributor to this excess.1,2 In medicine, overuse has been previously defined as care in which “the risk of harm exceeds its potential for benefit” and one in which patients informed of this reality would likely forego this care.3,–5 Whether it is because the financial outlay for children’s medical care is comparatively less or because children are perceived as our most vulnerable patients, research addressing the possibility that too much medical...

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