The department of medicine David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has been awarded a $315,000 grant to support an initiative focused on reducing the use of tests and treatments that national specialty medical societies judge as overused.
The UCLA Department of Medicine will lead a coalition of six partners including the Los Angeles County health services and public health departments, the county primary care practice based research network, the Wellness Center at Historic General Hospital, and the Society of General Internal Medicine. The partners will focus on reducing imaging for nonspecific low back pain, pre-operative testing and antibiotics for viral-based upper respiratory illness.
The ABIM Foundation awarded similar grants to six other organizations participating in the Choosing Wisely program, which aims to reduce the use of antibiotics and tests that are unnecessary for treatment and may possibly be harmful for patients.
The grant program, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will bring together health care organizations from across the country that have built strong alliances to focus on implementation of at least three Choosing Wisely recommendations, including reducing the use of antibiotics for viral infections by at least 20 percent over nearly three years at participating health systems, hospitals and medical groups in their regions.
The focus on antibiotic overuse was driven by estimates from the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that more than half the antibiotics used in the United States are prescribed unnecessarily or used improperly.
