Overuse of Healthcare System: Causes and Intervention Strategies

This essay addresses the issue of healthcare system overuse in the United States, highlighting the disparity between high healthcare expenditure and lagging health outcomes compared to other developed countries. It identifies factors contributing to this overuse, which leads to physical, psychological, and financial harm to patients. The essay emphasizes the need for targeted interventions to address overuse, focusing on identifying patients for whom specific procedures are inappropriate and assessing the trade-offs between harms and benefits. It also suggests that informing health systems and policymakers about the problems within the healthcare system is a crucial step in addressing systematic overuse. The essay references a conceptual model for systematic overuse of healthcare services.

Running head: OVERUSE OF THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
OVERUSE OF THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
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1OVERUSE OF THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
Although, the expenditure in healthcare in the United States is disproportionately high,
the health outcomes still lag behind other developed countries. The disparity in terms of
outcomes and costs made the healthcare services assumed to be overused. A number of factors
impacts the overuse of the healthcare services in the United Sates and has led to physical,
psychological and financial harm to the patients (Nassery, et al., 2015).
There has been a lot of efforts put on to facilitate a targeted appropriate use of the
healthcare services, however, these effects have found to be focused on the reduction of underuse
instead of addressing overuse of the healthcare services. Overuse of the healthcare services
includes utilizing a huge volume of the service provided and does not implicates the
appropriateness of the care and also involves a high utilization of the resources inappropriately
(Nassery, et al., 2015).
In order to respond to the above issue an intervention strategy would include
investigating patient’s details related to the above issue and identifying the patients for whom a
particular procedure is inappropriate. In order to implement the same, there is a need to conduct
assessments of the subjective trade-off between the harms and benefits which is again combined
with uncertainty and unpredictability that indicates individual measures to overuse (Nassery, et
al., 2015). The primary step is to identify and evaluate the systematic overuse which is a very
challenging task. On the contrary, approaches that are taken targeting the specific populations,
clinical specialities or particular conditions, a common measure recognized globally is to inform
the health systems and policy makers about the serious problems within the entire healthcare
systems (Nassery, et al., 2015).

2OVERUSE OF THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
Nassery, N., Segal, J. B., Chang, E., & Bridges, J. F. (2015). Systematic overuse of healthcare
services: a conceptual model. Applied health economics and health policy, 13(1), 1-6.