Statements on Choosing Wisely by Wendy Levinson:
-> "Essentially, we think that patients and physicians have an underlying belief that more is better in healthcare and don’t understand that often more testing and more treatment can be harmful."
-> "We made a very, very clear decision in the US and in Canada that this campaign was going to focus on overuse and not inappropriate underuse. And the reason for that is very important: This is a campaign designed to educate and engage both physicians and patients. And it’s very difficult to have a campaign on a topic which includes both underuse and overuse."
-> "Choosing Wisely is not just an evidence-based activity. We’ve got lots of evidence, we know the evidence. We have trouble putting it into practice; and Choosing Wisely is an approach is to engage bottom-up and have this not be an academic exercise of creating more information that people have to integrate into practice."
-> "Often the guidelines don’t tell you what to stop doing. So here is the perfect example: You know, there are guidelines on treatment of dyspepsia. They can tell you when to start proton pump inhibitors, and so you can follow the guideline. But they don’t tell you when to stop. And there’s evidence to suggest that we overuse proton pump inhibitors, so we don’t stop them and there’s some potential side effects of that."
You can reay the full interview in our SPOTLIGHT Healthcare "Choosing Wisely" on pages 4 and 5.