Eleanor Fleming, PhD, DDS, MPH, Julie Frantsve-Hawley, PhD, and Myechia Minter-Jordan, MD, MBA
Continued separation of dental and oral health from general medical care generates unnecessary prescriptions and pain management that are neither restorative nor responsive to patients’ primary complaints.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(1):E48-56. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.48.
More transparent pricing would allow patients and families to make better decisions, but there are limitations to how reliably it promotes efficiency and market discipline.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(11):E1069-1074. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.1069.
The objective is to compare the costs of providing the same level of quality. When resource-use and quality measures are juxtaposed, the resources used to provide the same level of quality can be compared.
The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.