Professional medical societies don’t often consider costs when they’re developing their treatment guidelines for specific conditions, according to a new study.

Researchers found that just over half of the top medical societies with at least 10,000 members considered costs when developing best practices. The other half either implicitly considered costs or didn’t address them at all.

“Even when they said they looked at costs, they didn’t seem to have a clear, consistent or rigorous way to do so,” said Dr. Steven Pearson, the study’s senior author and a visiting scientist in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Pearson and his colleague Dr. Jennifer Schwartz write in JAMA Internal Medicine that while a lot of debate has focused on the cost of healthcare in the U.S., few researchers have looked at whether professional societies develop their treatment recommendations with costs in mind.

Clinical guidelines are often crafted by professional medical societies to help doctors decide which therapies are best for certain conditions. But saying a treatment is not worth the cost may spark fears of care rationing.

“It’s obviously very controversial about when costs should be included in the discussion of healthcare,” Pearson said.

But the professional practice recommendations may factor into reimbursement policies among organizations that pay for treatment, like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

For the new study, the researchers examined the publicly available clinical guidelines issued by the 30 largest U.S. medical societies between 2008 and 2012 to see which ones discussed costs.

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Courtesy Reuters.com