MINNESOTA
FEBRUARY 2020
PHYSICIAN
THE INDEPENDENT MEDICAL BUSINESS JOURNAL
Volume XXXIII, No. 11
Adverse medical outcomes Creating a principled response BY MARISSA K. LINDEN, JD, AND RUTH E. FLYNN, JD
A
cademic medical centers—along with private health care practices—require a comprehensive strategy to deal with potential adverse medical outcomes, one that is tailored to meet their unique needs and cultures. Some large institutions rely on comprehensive legal advice to develop and implement these strategies, but small practices could also benefit from the lessons learned from academia and the law firms that represent them—and should consider the principles detailed in this article.
Learning health systems Bridging the gap between research and practice
University of Minnesota Physicians (M Physicians) could provide a roadmap. No longer c ontent with the status quo, the academic physician practice—which, in addition to providing direct patient care, trains medical students, residents, fellows, and graduate students, and pursues new Adverse medical outcomes to page 124
BY TIMOTHY BEEBE, PHD
M
ore than one-fifth of all medical care may be unnecessary, according to a 2017 article in Health Affairs by Jason Buxbaum and colleagues. This low-value care—that is, patient care with no net benefit in specific clinical scenarios— costs patients, purchasers, and taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The United States spends more on health care per capita than any of the world’s wealthiest countries, comprising 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2017. Work needs to be done on many fronts to change low-value care to high-value care across populations and across the country. One way to start is to bring-up-to-date, highly informed public health research to the physician in the exam room and to the patient they serve through a learning health systems (LHS) approach. Learning health systems to page 104