Chapter 7: Low-value care

Mark Avery and Jennifer Kosiol

In working towards and enabling value-based healthcare, which has a patient- or client-centred focus, we strive to improve patient outcomes in the context of controlling cost but promoting equality and efficiency for care and services. Critical to this values-based agenda is the need to identify, understand and mitigate low-value care.

The expression ‘low-value care’ has emerged from the broader concepts of healthcare value and value-based healthcare. Consideration and discussion about low-value care have important positions in meaning in the constructs of healthcare delivery, policy and research. The development of the narrative of low-value care aligns with key changes in important elements associated with healthcare delivery (access, equity, financing, quality and processes of care) as well as in the growth and development of evidence-based practice of care (technology, models of care and information technology). The association between an understanding and debate related to low-value care and the growth and development of the healthcare sector is affected by the different environment and agendas related to healthcare and the geopolitical context.

The term ‘low-value care’ has been used as a way of describing medical and other direct patient and client services and interventions that have been found to have limited clinical personal benefit or that potentially create more harm or disadvantage than good. Identifying, reducing or eliminating low-value care is important to improve the quality and efficiency of service and delivery, reduce costs and economic burden, and particularly to improve patient and client care outcomes.

The use of low-value care therefore is synonymous with growth, development and change deep within healthcare provision. An example of the development of understanding and language associated with low-value care is the work by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg (Porter & Teisberg, 2006), who approach this area of knowledge development and understanding in the context of focusing on ensuring value of care and services for consumers through changes and improvements in the way healthcare systems operate.

An understanding of issues concerned with low-value care and the landscape that health managers need to operate in to achieve control and improvement are critical for the wider goals of value-based care outcomes and improvement. There is a need to deal with complexity and ambiguity in corrective change and creating improvement in this area that needs to be managed (Duckett, 2019).