Photo courtesy of thinkprogress.org

Health care costs continue to spiral out of control in this country. Medical schools generally do a poor job of teaching med students about what care costs patients. In the 1970s, a study showed that teaching interns and residents about the cost of care reduced patients’ length of stay in a hospital by 21%. Since then, there have been efforts to teach medical trainees about the impact of health care costs with mixed results. To help come up with new ideas for teaching med students and residents about containing costs, Costs of Care has launched a Teaching Value and Choosing Wisely competition, which will hopefully identify new and promising ways to educate medical trainees and physicians about reining in costs while providing outstanding care.

Dr. Andy Levy, a resident in internal medicine at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Christopher Moriates, a clinical professor at UCSF, wrote an outstanding blog post about the importance of teaching medical trainees about the cost of care; the post also contains a plethora of useful links to additional information on this topic.

–Liza Thompson, Expert Medical School Admissions Consulting