[skwb]

Yes, it is. You appear to be conflating my point of how healthcare is changing with regard to payment structures with clinical guidelines which tend to have potentially more subtleties.

There are some areas of healthcare where it is very cut and dry what defines good healthcare management. These are where we've developed good reporting outcomes that tie closely to clinical and resource utilization outcomes from the published literature. Think of your high volume routines cases such as diabetes (monitoring of A1C)[0] and knee replacements [1] that make of a large portion of health care cases. These are certainly not covering all healthcare episodes, but represent areas where significant fat can be trimmed.

With regard to your above clinical case, there are specific approaches for (what I assume is an incidental finding from a coronary CTA) reporting lung nodules and requesting follow up studies [2]. However, this represents an area where there is significant good faith professional disagreement of reporting.

I will agree that high-evidence clinical guidelines are not always followed, and payment reform has not been influenced all medical professions equally. The way healthcare is delivered is changing, and is being highly influenced by national policy level decisions.

[0]: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20121011.90233/f... [1]: http://files.kff.org/attachment/Evidence-Link-FAQs-Bundled-P... [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5903561/

[VikingCoder]

The medical field doesn't have the discipline to ignore signals that it knows are meaningless. That's what I'm driving at.

Also, healthcare absolutely sucks at pain management, specifically in being disciplined enough to say no to opioids.