Understanding One Challenge in Cutting Health Care Costs

November 23, 2020

One major opportunity for lowering health care costs without compromising outcomes is to persuade physicians and patients to use sites that provide high-quality services such as lab, tests, MRI scans, and procedures at a lower cost than others. But one challenge is changing ingrained practices or habits. Only by taking that challenge into account can payers and health systems estimate the potential savings, which affects the design and investments in such initiatives. This article describes a model developed by the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and Embedded Health Care to realistically quantify the potential cost savings by changing practice patterns.