Texas Doctor Proposes Physician-Led Solution to Cut Health Care Costs

By Holly Hayes

The New York Times posted last week an interview with Dr. Howard Brody (pictured left), professor of family medicine and director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, discussing a proposal for health care reform involving physicians.

Physicians, Dr. Brody says, are not “innocent bystanders” to increasing health care costs but have made little effort to limit future medical costs. In an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, he writes “If physicians seized the moral high ground, we just might astonish enough other people to change the entire reform debate for the better.”

The New York Times spoke with Dr. Brody about his “Top Five” solution:

Q. You write that doctors have an ethical responsibility to advocate health care reform. Why?
A. Doctors have two responsibilities. First, they have a moral duty as an individual advocate. A doctor has a responsibility to his or her individual patients to make them healthier and to help them live longer.

But doctors have a second moral duty: they have an obligation to the general public to be prudent stewards of scarce resources. Doctors only get about 10 percent of health care costs in their pockets, but they control about 80 percent. That isn’t our money — it’s someone else’s — and the public has entrusted us to spend it as wisely as possible.

Q. How does your “Top Five” solution work?
A. The basic idea is that each specialty would decide on the top five procedures or diagnostic studies that are done commonly but only really help a small fraction of patients. These are things like arthroscopy for osteoarthritis of the knee or MRI’s and CAT scans, all of which are massively overused, not because they help but because of our enthusiasm regarding high technology.

Once each specialty has gone through the research evidence and decided on its “Top Five,” the respective professional organizations would take a public stand, issuing guidelines and recommendations against overuse of those “Top Five” procedures or studies.

By taking a public stand and making it harder for individual doctors to say, “Oh, I know better,” we could build real momentum for cost containment. And we would ultimately all benefit because we don’t need all that technology. You can still be as healthy without it.

A physician-led effort to determine guidelines and recommendations against overuse of the “Top Five” procedures or studies could have a tremendous impact on curtailing future medical costs. We suggest that the process outlined by Dr. Brody could benefit from applying conflict resolution techniques. For example, we recently posted a Four-step Approach to Problem-solving used by the program for Health Care Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Harvard. This approach could be applied to the “Top Five” process:

A Four-step Approach to Problem-solving

Four negotiation steps developed by the Program for Health Care Negotiation and Conflict Resolution guide minor and major negotiations in health care. The structured multidimensional problem-solving process is called “Walk in the Woods,” after a famous story in which international negotiators at loggerheads over a nuclear arms treaty went for a walk in the woods near Geneva and discovered common interests that led to new solutions.

Step one: self interests. Each participant articulates his or her view of key problems, issues, and options. They are encouraged to actively listen, question, and interact with one another.

Step two: enlarged interests. The participants reframe their understanding of current problems and possible options with a wider perspective, based on the integrative listening and confidence-building that occurred in step one.

Step three: enlightened interests. The group is ready to engage in innovative thinking and problem-solving, generating ideas and perspectives that had not previously been considered.

Step four: aligned interests. Participants build common ground perspectives, priorities, action items, agreement, or plans for moving forward. Depending on the scope of the intended objectives, at this point they recognize the tangible contributions and opportunities accomplished through the meeting.

We invite your comments on this topic.

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