According to Sahni et al. (2015), clinical waste is one of the most common types of healthcare waste in the United States. In particular, this type of waste refers to the inefficient prevention. Differently put, the health care system in the United States does not implement the best practices commonly enough to achieve the best and most successful patient outcomes or the practices that are utilized are not conducted thoroughly enough to produce the best effects.
For instance, the rates of patient readmissions or injuries resulting from the wasteful care delivery at the hospitals are very high (Sahni et al., 2015). Practically, the patients who could have been helped effectively and right away by means of utilizing better practices and more efficient ways of care delivery tend to be hurt by the wasteful health care provision and end up being readmitted to the hospitals where the health care system has to spend even more costs to facilitate another treatment.
Sahni et al. (2015) argue that clinical waste is one of the primary concerns of the United States health care system and it needs to become the priority among all the other types of waste to address. In particular, the authors emphasize that about 600 billion dollars could be saved by the elimination of clinical waste (Sahni et al., 2015).
Namely, the reduction of this type of health care waste requires innovations and technologies aiming at the optimization of the clinical practices and service delivery. Besides, research needs to be conducted in order to identify the most resource-intensive practices to replace them with more cost-effective ones that could be standardized for the entire system.
Reference
Sahni, N., Chigurupati, A., Kocher, B., & Cutler, D. M. (2015). How the U.S. Can Reduce Waste in Health Care Spending by $1 Trillion. Web.