UTILISING BIG DATA IN THE SEARCH FOR LOW-VALUE HEALTH CARE

Speaker: Kelsey Chalmers (CMCRC-HMQ PhD Student), University of Sydney Seminar Date: Tuesday 15 September 2015 Abstract: The practice of medical services with high costs and unlikely benefits for patients is concerning from both an economic and patient safety perspective. The aim of my PhD project is to describe the current prevalence of selected low-value services in a large Australian private patient claims data set. This has involved selecting suitable medical services that can be identified in claims data via Australian health codes. This talk reviewed international measurements of low-value procedures, developing operational definitions for services in the claims data, and the prevalence and descriptive analysis of the highest offending procedures so far.