Healthcare is such a potent combination of art, science, social work, and hard economics. And where these varying approaches touch each other, there can be friction.

So many healthcare providers view what they do as a combination of art, science, and social work — with hard economics never (or rarely) entering their mind.

But many times, healthcare economists come from a perspective that assumes something very different about how healthcare functions and how providers make decisions. Many times, healthcare economists use as a fundamental premise the idea that: providers are self-interested and will bill for as many services as they can; and it’s crucial to focus on hard outcomes of services, not on overall well-being of patients. Their perspective tends to be that hard economics reign and that these other approaches are dreamy intangibles.

A new study in JAMA challenges all of that.

JAMA published a study described as a “US national, population-based cross-sectional study [examining] the association between county well-being and Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) spending.”

In other words, researchers looked at whether Medicare spending was lower when people’s overall (non-medical) well-being was better. The results?  Medicare spent almost $1,000 less per patient for those in the 20% of well-being scores, compared to the bottom. And this is after adjusting for independent factors like income, urbanity, educational level, etc.

As the JAMA study explained, “Well-being is a positive state of being beyond the absence of disease, measured by not only physical health but also other dimensions, such as emotional, social, and economic health. Well-being may be modifiable by a broad range of interventions across different sectors.”  It’s all the stuff that we tend to see as “outside the scope” of a given medical intervention.

We think this is an incredibly important insight and study highlighting something not commonly spotlighted. Certainly, new models have gone up one level to reward fee-for-performance rather than fee-for-service. But the truth is that this measure of overall well-being is up several levels beyond that. And to capture the economic value of our patient's overall health and happiness is important. 

The whole goal of what we do as doctors is to support our patient’s well-being. But if you really needed another reason to pursue that measure, this is evidence that a broader view, a more holistic approach, is cost-effective too.

One of the challenges that we get into with iClickCare utilization is that it might be more efficient to just allow secure text-messaging, rather than having a fulsome, team-based, archivable healthcare collaboration system. The very reason we do what we do is because we believe that this kind of more holistic, team-based approach may not be the fastest way to get a simple, discrete answer — but it is the most efficient, effective, and cost-conscious way of approaching the whole patient. The "whole patient" includes all aspects of their medical condition as well as the other factors in their life that interrelate with that condition. 

The components of well-being in the study that decreased cost-per-patient so dramatically were largely non-medical. That means that any collaboration system that doesn’t allow non-medical caregivers and providers (social workers, teachers, caregivers, etc) to collaborate is misguided and ultimately wasteful in terms of ROI. 

We're glad that this kind of study is being done. And we continue to applaud the efforts of all of those healthcare providers who take the holistic view of their patient's well-being -- rather than simply addressing the malady in front of them.