EP321: How to Point Out Low-Value Care Without Starting a Fistfight, With Rich Klasco, MD

In Episode 321, Stacey Richter talks with Rich Klasco, MD, chief medical officer at Motive Medical Intelligence, about how to identify low-value care and get physicians, patients, and payers on the same page about what actually counts as appropriate care.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why patients often struggle to recognize high-value versus low-value care

✅ How looking at practice-pattern data and outlier physicians can surface low-value care

✅ Why payers are often well positioned to understand what high-value care really looks like

✅ The difference between cost cutting and true utilization optimization

✅ How teams can build consensus and move forward on delivering appropriate care

WHY THIS MATTERS

Everyone agrees in theory that health care should deliver only high-value care, but the wheels fall off once you try to define, in practice, what counts as low-value. One reliable approach: look at practice-pattern data across a specialty, find the outliers, and simply show physicians where they stand — often enough to change behavior on its own. Combined with published guidelines and real-world evidence, this kind of data-driven approach offers a genuine path toward identifying appropriate care without a fight.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

🔗 Healthcare Industry Acronyms and Terms

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00:00 Introduction.

03:31 How do you define high-value care?

04:40 How do we define what isn't appropriate care?

05:26 Why aren't patients good at recognizing high-value care?

07:02 "He was in the 'more is more' school of medicine, which is always wrong."

11:54 Are payers good at identifying high-value care?

13:41 Why are payers so adept at understanding what high-value care really is?

15:53 "It's not just cost cutting; it's utilization, optimization of resources."

16:02 "This is, again, an innovation of appropriateness."

18:38 "We have to deal with the world that we have in front of us now."

19:55 How do we get everyone on the same page about high-value and appropriate care?

24:16 How does a team recognize the path forward for appropriate care?