Insurers poised to increase use of RBMs as imaging surges
 | |
| Costs of medical scans called into question. Source: www.flickr.com |
Almost $100 billion a year is spent on imaging in the United States and that may double by 2013 unless costs are reined in, according to a report issued Monday by America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).
With U.S. healthcare costs projected to grow from the current rate of 16 percent to 25 percent of the economy in 2025, insurers are turning to RBMs who can reject scans they deem unnecessary, Shay Pratt of the Advisory Board, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant to hospitals, told Bloomberg.
Bloomberg News reported that CT and MRI scans can cost as much as $2,000 each. Almost 50 percent of scans for some conditions fail to improve patients' diagnoses or treatment.
The AHIP report said that “continued analysis of the success of these [RBM] programs, as well as identification of additional innovative strategies to address key cost drivers and ensure appropriateness, will be essential to realizing further improvements in quality and affordability.”
Insurers, led by WellPoint and Magellan Health Services, are increasingly rejecting imaging procedures recommended by physicians as the companies work to cut $30 billion annually that they claim is wasted on the diagnostic tests.
“We've seen radiology growth trends in the 20 percent-plus range drop to the low single digits” when pre-screening is used in a health plan,” Wayne DeVeydt, WellPoint's chief financial officer, told Bloomberg. He also noted that prior authorization “is going to be a huge growth area” for insurers.
AHIP said that several health insurance plans have reported reductions in the average growth of utilization from 25 percent to 1 percent after a RBM program was implemented. Others report an 82 percent decrease in utilization of inappropriate imaging and reductions of up to $2 per member per month over two years, according to AHIP.
However, Christopher Ullrich, MD, chair of the American College of Radiology’s managed care committee, told Bloomberg that lives may be endangered with the growth of a new bureaucracy dedicated to saving payors’ money.
“You're going to find patients with a headache who turned out to have an aneurysm or who had abdominal pain that wasn't investigated and turned out to be a tumor,” said Ullrich, a radiologist in Charlotte, N.C. It is “hard to live with arbitrary denials and a system with huge administrative burdens with no reimbursement for providing that.”
By using pre-screening, the largest U.S. payor, Minneapolis-based UnitedHealth, cut the imaging costs for certain medical plans to about 7 percent in 2007 from 12 to 18 percent annually previously, Sam Ho, a senior medical officer at UnitedHealth, told Bloomberg—a total savings of $65 million.