We wanted to share an article from The Atlantic by David Epstein that deeply resonated with us. It is long, but we encourage you to take the time to read it, and share it with others you care about. The piece does a great job of encapsulating a number of our longtime concerns as healthcare consumers and consultants regarding unwarranted, and sometimes even harmful, treatments that are commonly provided to our plan members.
Our firm has created services like EdisonHealth and Specialty Drug Management to help deliver better care to plan members and to mitigate some of the most expensive scenarios. However, we are just scratching the surface. While it isn’t easy to negate macro trends in the marketplace, We hope you will join us by at least acknowledging the problem, and then working with your plan members and vendors to address these issues.
For all the truly wondrous developments of modern medicine—imaging technologies that enable precision surgery, routine organ transplants, care that transforms premature infants into perfectly healthy kids, and remarkable chemotherapy treatments, to name a few—it is distressingly ordinary for patients to get treatments that research has shown are ineffective or even dangerous.