San Domenico Health Services, the most overused agency mentioned in the report, regularly reviews patient care and quality measures against the best-known clinical practices, said Scott Cashman, president of Health Systems Health Services Market Operations. While health system leaders have yet to fully review the Johns Hopkins findings, “we are committed to exploring this study and taking any necessary action to ensure the most excellent, safe and effective treatment for our patients, communities and regions. care,” he said.

USMD Health System, Community Medical Centers and Nursing New England Health System did not respond to requests for comment.

On the other end of the spectrum, the health systems that provide the least amount of these unnecessary services are more likely to be academic medical centers, employ more primary care physicians, provide disproportionate amounts of unpaid care or use an integrated delivery model, the research shows.

“Primary care physicians play a role in coordinating care and making sure that if procedures that have already been done are not repeated, and if they can be managed by the primary care physician, specialists are not used,” said Dr. Jodi Segal, lead author, Johns Hopkins Professor at the University of Sri Lanka School of Medicine.

Large nonprofit health systems, such as Allegheny Health System in Pittsburgh, Houston Methodist in Texas, and Memorial Herman Health System in Houston, provide below-average levels of unwanted care. According to research.

Dignity Health in San Francisco, along with Geisinger in Danville, Pa., and Group Health in Seattle (owned by Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., since 2017) were in the average category. All of these systems are not-for-profit.

The study determined that the more physician groups The more unnecessary care a health system has, the more care it provides, a finding that could help hospital leaders explore how to expand services while maintaining quality.

“As hospitals restructure themselves into larger and larger systems, the hospital’s senior leadership will have to deal with this,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, director of the Lown Institute. research overuse.

The Johns Hopkins researchers plan to continue their study by examining average or below-average health systems that use these procedures, particularly those whose characteristics are more similar to those of the largest overusers. The practices of these hospitals could provide their peers with more insights into the use of unwanted services, the study said. Further research is needed to determine what factors contribute to overuse, such as which medical specialists provide services, the types of patients who receive those services, and what are the rationale behind these practices.

The Johns Hopkins researchers did not include children’s hospitals, behavioral health centers, rehabilitation hospitals or mental hospitals in their analysis.