Ensuring High-Value Health Care After the Pandemic

CADTH is partnering with Choosing Wisely Canada to identify actions that could lead to better post-pandemic care for Canadians. The organizations are developing recommendations for reducing low-value care that, if implemented, could make more resources available to deliver the priority services that are most beneficial to patients.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of delayed non-urgent care and elective procedures have been a top concern of patients, health care professionals, and policy-makers. As health systems begin to reopen, tackling the issue of low value care — the tests and treatments that offer little benefit to patients and can waste health system resources — is important to help ensure patients receive high quality and necessary care.

Choosing Wisely Canada is reviewing its existing evidence-based recommendations with clinician experts and curating an initial shortlist of low-value treatments. Recommendations about tests and treatments will be considered to be included on the shortlist if they are:

• common in clinical practice, can cause harm, relatively frequent, and resource intensive
• associated with an area of need delayed by the pandemic or where there is an existing backlog
• a potential strain on health care human resources and system capacity
• aligned with categories of overuse identified by Choosing Wisely Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information

CADTH will then convene a panel of Canadian clinician, patient, and policy experts to review the shortlist and develop final recommendations for clinicians and senior policy decision-makers.

The results of this work will be presented at Choosing Wisely Canada’s National Meeting in May 2021 and will be published in CADTH’s Canadian Journal of Health Technologies.

For more information about this work, contact [email protected] or [email protected]