Recently, I overheard an attending asking a medical student, in a hallway, about why he would “order a Doppler ultrasound for a low-suspicion DVT in a patient?” The medical student gave an academic response that I would completely agree with. However, the attending proceeded to comment along the lines that unnecessary testing would bankrupt the hospital and that medical schools should start teaching the next wave of physicians in training about cost of healthcare.
That prompted me to think: should medical schools start teaching us about average prices of a hospital admission per diagnosis? Should we learn how much a chest X-ray, or an MRI, cost so we can be cognizant of what we order later as a resident? Would knowing about the price of the diagnostic test, procedure, or medication make us a better doctors?
As medical students, we may get lectures about the current national healthcare system; and if we are lucky we may understand a bit more about other countries’ health care system and their issues, but rarely we are educated on the cost, or saving of cost, of a hospital admission. We are often told that knowing about cost benefits is the “health care administration’s” issue and not a physician’s issue. Thus, we are shielded from the business side of medicine for the most part.
During a third-year rotation, I once asked the question about the cost-effectiveness of ordering a generic brand versus a brand-name medication for a patient. The response I received was “worry about the mechanism of medication and difference in management of diseases and leave it up to the hospital to figure the cost-effectiveness.”
Even since, I stopped asking…until now.
You can follow Jimmy on Twitter (@JimmyTamHuyPham) or at his personal website jimmytamhuypham.com.
This post originally appeared on Medscape's "The Differential" on August 12, 2015.
That prompted me to think: should medical schools start teaching us about average prices of a hospital admission per diagnosis? Should we learn how much a chest X-ray, or an MRI, cost so we can be cognizant of what we order later as a resident? Would knowing about the price of the diagnostic test, procedure, or medication make us a better doctors?
As medical students, we may get lectures about the current national healthcare system; and if we are lucky we may understand a bit more about other countries’ health care system and their issues, but rarely we are educated on the cost, or saving of cost, of a hospital admission. We are often told that knowing about cost benefits is the “health care administration’s” issue and not a physician’s issue. Thus, we are shielded from the business side of medicine for the most part.
During a third-year rotation, I once asked the question about the cost-effectiveness of ordering a generic brand versus a brand-name medication for a patient. The response I received was “worry about the mechanism of medication and difference in management of diseases and leave it up to the hospital to figure the cost-effectiveness.”
Even since, I stopped asking…until now.
You can follow Jimmy on Twitter (@JimmyTamHuyPham) or at his personal website jimmytamhuypham.com.
This post originally appeared on Medscape's "The Differential" on August 12, 2015.