STUDY: PATIENTS, NOT SURGEONS, DRIVING DEMAND FOR SURGERY (Orthopedics This Week)
Study: Patients Want MORE Surgery
According to a new study, it’s not the doctors that are pushing for surgeries. It’s the patients! Chad Mather, M.D., an attending orthopedic surgeon at Duke University, and a former AAOS [American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons] Washington Health Policy Fellow, tells OTW, “We are working on an exciting new area of study in the field of personalized and customized medicine. This is an effort that grew out of my policy work in traditional economic analysis which commonly compares two interventions. I observed that in simulations of these models that while we could determine if strategy A or B was better for a population of patients, some patients had better outcomes with A and some with B. Therefore, the best strategy was not to pick between treatment A or B, but rather to get treatment A and B to the right patients. Our current work utilizes a common marketing research tool, conjoint analysis which involves a personalized assessment of risks and tradeoffs to measure patient preferences. Our pilot work focuses on the treatment decision for a first time anterior should...
