The Jewish Healthcare Foundation hosted a healthcare affordability event, “Spreading and Sustaining the Choosing Wisely Campaign,” on Thursday, April 12 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the QI2T Center (650 Smithfield Street, Suite 2600, Pittsburgh, PA 15222).  

Nationally, $750 billion—or one-third of total healthcare spending—is wasted, and 27% of this is spent on unnecessary care. Through a national campaign of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation, Choosing Wisely, over 80 specialty societies have published lists of more than 500 overused tests and treatments that providers and patients should question and discuss. 

Daniel Wolfson, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the ABIM Foundation, spoke about what it would take to make Choosing Wisely more widely accepted, adopted, and required. 

Following Daniel’s comments, Mark DeRubeis, MBA, CEO of Premier Medical Associates, and Jim Costlow , MD, Director of Value-Based Care, share how—and why now—Premier has embraced Choosing Wisely.

The conversation centered around the roles of health systems, providers, health plans, employers, consumers, and policymakers in spreading and sustaining Choosing Wisely. 

This event supported the Jewish Healthcare Foundation’s Health Activist Network and Affordability Initiative. The Affordability Initiative aims to demonstrate that a bottom-up approach to payment and healthcare delivery reform can remove low-value services from the system and produce quality care and improved health outcomes at an affodrdable cost. JHF and its non-profit operating arm, the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, are partnering with providers, payers, and employers to identify ways to improve care and eliminate avoidable costs for targeted health conditions, such as healthy pregnancies.