In a survey conducted over August and September 2020, the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions found that 53% of employers cited overuse of low-value services/waste as a significant threat to health care affordability. Those employers aren't alone. A recent JAMA Network Open investigation defined "overuse" relating to medical treatments and tests as "the delivery of tests and procedures that provide little or no clinical benefit, are unlikely to have an impact on clinician decisions, increase health care spending without improving health outcomes, or risk patient harm in excess of potential benefits." The investigation estimated such overuse contributed between $75.7 billion and $101.2 billion to wasted annual health care spending in the U.S. The Lown Institute, a health care think tank, has released a new study examining the overuse of unnecessary hospital procedures and tests, and includes a ranking of over 3,100 hospitals in the U.S. based on their success in avoiding those procedures. The study measured 12 low-value services, including knee arthroscopy, head imaging for fainting, and hysterectomy for benign disease. The Institute found that more than 1 million tests and procedures performed on Medicare patients in hospitals from 2016-2018 met the established criteria for overuse. Another finding: The nation's top hospitals for avoiding overuse are mostly regional health care providers. Of the most recent U.S. News Honor Roll Hospitals, the Cleveland Clinic ranked the highest at 58. Nine of the top performing hospitals on the Institute's list are in New England, and 10 are in the Pacific Northwest. The South has 41 of the lowest-performing hospitals, with Florida being home to five of the bottom 10. One of the low-value services used in the study is vertebroplasty, a procedure where cement is injected into the spine. According to the Institute, the procedure has been found to be ineffective in numerous trials for osteoporosis-related fractures, but is still utilized in several hospitals. In the years studied, more than 3,600 vertebroplasties were performed in Florida hospitals alone, The Cleveland Clinic was ranked number one on the list of avoiding that particular service. See our slideshow above for the 5 best and worst states for avoiding care overuse, and click here to read the full study.