Choosing Wisely for Health: a Context Analysis through a Systematic Search of the Published Literature

Monica Giancotti, Giorgia Rotundo and Marianna Mauro

The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation and Consumer Reports initiated the Choosing Wisely campaign in 2012 to identify and develop lists of services that are overused, inappropriately used and potentially harmful. This study aims to identify all published literature on Choosing wisely for health, in order to answer to the following questions: 1) Which countries have published in this field? 2) According to the evidence, which scientific societies have defined recommendations? and 3) What are the main specialty areas affected? Web of Knowledge and Google scholar databases were searched systematically from 2012 to 2015. Analyse of the published literature allowed to identify 12 countries for which studies on this topic were published. United States and Canada were the countries major involved. Less published evidence was found for Germany, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, Denmark and New Zealand. Published literature returned 26 societies which have drawn up lists of recommendations for 20 specialty areas overall. An important gap exist between the published literature and the practice diffusion of the Choosing Wisely principles: many countries are participating or in process of implementing the Choosing Wisely campaign. For most of these, there are few or no publications as of yet.