TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — If doctors and patients used prescription drugs more wisely, they could save the U.S. health care system at least $213 billion a year, by reducing medication overuse, underuse and other flaws in care that cause complications and longer, more-expensive treatments, researchers conclude.
The new findings by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics improve on numerous prior efforts to quantify the dollars wasted on health care.
Numerous experts previously have estimated that tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, could be better used each year to improve patient care and outcomes and to slow down spending by government health programs, insurers and consumers.
The institute, part of data analysis and consulting firm IMS Health, used its proprietary data on prescriptions written by doctors — many of which patients never fill — plus other information to produce a current, more reliable estimate of avoidable costs solely related to medication use.
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