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Overdiagnosis

Overdiagnosis threatens to harm health and health system sustainability. The team at the Institute is a national and international leader in understanding and addressing the problem of overdiagnosis.

Overdiagnosis occurs when commonly-used, correct diagnoses in health and medical care do more harm than good. Overtreatment, which generally follows overdiagnosis, occurs when people receive treatment they don't need. When people are overtreated, they are unlikely to gain any benefit from the treatment, but may experience harms from it.

In addition to research to understand the nature and drivers of overdiagnosis, the team researches potential solutions to address overdiagnosis and reduce the number of people who are unnecessarily impacted. Alongside other organisations in the healthcare landscape, we engage with consultant community members and develop national responses to overdiagnosis.

  • In preparation for a national plan of response, a map of possible drivers of overdiagnosis and its potential solutions was developed by our team from the medical literature. Examples of the key drivers across the five interrelated domains include:
  • Cultural beliefs that more tests and treatments are better,
  • Financial incentives at the health system level,
  • Technological change enabling identification of smaller and more minor abnormalities,
  • Professional fear of missing disease and cognitive biases in decision making, and
  • Public expectations that clinicians will "do something".

Our achievements

A $9.6M NHMRCprogram grant (2017-2021) โ€œUsing healthcare wisely: reducing inappropriate use of tests and treatmentsโ€ with the University of Sydney and Monash, forms the core of the WiserHealthCare research group as well as a Partnership Centre on Health Care Sustainability (2017-2022) working to understand and reduce the problem of overdiagnosis, overtreatment and low value care. 

The Wiser Healthcare group was recently awarded another $2.5M NHMRC CRE grant: Wiser Healthcare: Better value for All Australians (2022-2026).

A national action plan to prevent overdiagnosis and overtreatment in Australia. An international working group to reform the composition of panels that define diseases and process of how they do this.

Videos

Too Much Medicine in Low-and-Middle-Income Countries
Treatment overload: Lifting the burden of too much healthcare

New study reveals cancer overdiagnosis | Nine News Australia