Year: 2014

Developing Physician Culture in New Risk Models

May 18, 2014• 4

By Craig Tanio, MD

There is a saying that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Never has this been truer than when looking at primary care or physician group delivery system innovation. Health care industry leaders must invest more time creating and scaling the right culture as they innovate.

There has been a great deal of controversy on the ability of the Primary Care Medical Home (PCMH) to impact total medical costs. Critics have noted that PCMH is adding additional costs to the structure without systematically demonstrating improvement in total costs and quality.

A great deal of time has been spent debating the proper structures, processes and financial incentives that are necessary to create value in physician-led-risk or shared-savings models. However, I suspect the real issue is that culture is a major driver of performance, and it has not been systematically measured or managed.

At ChenMed, we have developed a primary-care-led model focused on the care of seniors with multiple and chronic health conditions. Funded through full-risk arrangements with Medicare Advantage plans, we outlined an overview of the original Miami-based model in Health Affairs last year [1].

Over the last three years, we have scaled the model from five centers in Miami to 36 centers in eight markets in the Southeast and Midwest. This has required us to adjust our model in ways that allow it to readily scale. We have been able to make the fundamental economics work while rapidly scaling the medical practice, and are actively working on innovations to improve value every day.

One of the foundations of our strategy is getting the physician culture right. This is not easy to measure from a health services and policy research perspective.Yet, it matters a great deal from a practical and business perspective. McKinsey and Company has developed an influence model on how organizations create the right behavior and mindset shifts, which we have found useful [2].

The Case for Dropping MU Stages 2 and 3

May 17, 2014• 31

By DALE SANDERS

Physicians are lining up against Meaningful Use.

In a detailed letter sent this week to CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner and National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, the American Medical Association presented a long list of ideas to make Meaningful Use better for doctors.

The AMA warned that “unless significant changes are made to the current program and future stages,” doctors will drop out of the meaningful use program, patients will suffer as existing EHRs fail to migrate data for coordinated care, thousands of doctors will incur financial penalties, and new delivery models requiring data will be jeopardized.”

All of which is true. But the AMA didn’t go far enough.

Meaningful use is well intentioned, but like a teacher who “teaches to the test,” the program has created a byzantine system that might pass the test of meaningful use stages, but is not producing meaningful results for patients and clinicians.

A formal study published in the April 2014 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine reveals there’s no correlation between quality of care and meaningful use adherence. This study validates what common sense has told many of us for the last few years.

Meaningful Use Stage 1 was a jump-start for EMR adoption in the industry. That’s a good thing, I suppose, although meaningful use also created a false economic demand for mediocre products. It’s time to put an end to the federal meaningful use program, eliminate the costly administrative overhead of meaningful use, remove the government subsidies that also create perverse incentives, and let “survival of the fittest” play a bigger part in the process.

Let the fruits of EMR utilization go to the organizations that commit, on their own and without government incentives, to maximizing the value of their EMR investments toward quality improvement, cost reduction, and clinical efficiency.

Harvard MOOC: Patient Safety and Quality with Ashish Jha

May 15, 2014• 22

By Ashish Jha, MD

Last year, about 43 million people around the globe were injured from the hospital care that was intended to help them; as a result, many died and millions suffered long-term disability. These seem like dramatic numbers – could they possibly be true?

If anything, they are almost surely an underestimate. These findings come from a paper we published last year funded and done in collaboration with the World Health Organization. We focused on a select group of “adverse events” and used conservative assumptions to model not only how often they occur, but also with what consequence to patients around the world.

Our WHO-funded study doesn’t stand alone; others have estimated that harm from unsafe medical care is far greater than previously thought. A paper published last year in the Journal of Patient Safety estimated that medical errors might be the third leading cause of deaths among Americans, after heart disease and cancer.

While I find that number hard to believe, what is undoubtedly true is this: adverse events – injuries that happen due to medical care – are a major cause of morbidity and mortality, and these problems are global. In every country where people have looked (U.S., Canada, Australia, England, nations of the Middle East, Latin America, etc.), the story is the same.

Patient safety is a big problem – a major source of suffering, disability, and death for the world’s population.The problem of inadequate health care, the global nature of this challenging problem, and the common set of causes that underlie it, motivated us to put together PH555X.

It’s a HarvardX online MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) with a simple focus: health care quality and safety with a global perspective.

Introducing PH555X: Improving Global Health: Focusing on Quality and Safety

May 15, 2014• 6

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00wx9NaGA8g[/youtube]

Another Step toward Open Health Education

May 14, 2014• 17

By Gaglani, Haynes & Painter

Earlier this month Shiv and Ryan published a piece in the Annals of Internal Medicine, entitled What Can Medical Education Learn from Facebook and Netflix? We chose the title because, as medical students, we realized the tools our classmates are using to socialize and watch TV use more sophisticated algorithms than the tools we use to learn medicine.

What if the same mechanisms that Facebook and Netflix use—such as machine learning-based recommender systems, crowdsourcing, and intuitive interfaces—could transform how we educate our health care professionals?

For example, just as Amazon recommends products based on other items that customers have bought, we believe that supplementary resources such as questions, videos, images, mnemonics, references, and even real-life patient cases could be automatically recommended based on what students and professionals are learning in the classroom or seeing in the clinic.

That is one of the premises behind Osmosis, the flagship educational platform of Knowledge Diffusion, Shiv’s and Ryan’s startup. Osmosis uses data analytics and machine learning to deliver the best medical content to those trying to learn it, as efficiently as possible for the learner.

Since its launch in August, Osmosis has delivered over two million questions to more than 10,000 medical students around the world using a novel push notification system that syncs to student curricular schedules.

Osmosis is aggregating medical school curricula and extracurricular resources as well as generating a tremendous amount of data on student performance. The program uses adaptive algorithms and an intuitive interface to provide the best, most useful customized content to those trying to learn.

With November Elections Six Months Away Obamacare Is Up for Grabs

May 14, 2014• 3

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI

House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans seemed surprised last week when representatives of the insurance industry reported that they didn’t have enough data yet to forecast prices for next year’s health insurance exchanges, the market was not about to blow up, and that so far at least 80% of consumers have paid for the health insurance policies they purchased on the exchanges.

The executives also reported there are still serious back-end problems with HealthCare.gov––particularly in being able to reconcile the people the carriers think are covered and the people the government thinks are covered.

These are all things that you have read about a number of times on this blog.The insurance companies are doing their best to make Obamacare work.

Why?

Because if they want to be in the individual and small group markets, Obamacare is the only game in town––it has a monopoly over these markets. The same rules that apply to the individual market also apply to the even larger small group health insurance market.

Unless Obamacare is repealed this is the business reality insurance companies have to deal with. So, you make the best of it.

Republicans are right to think Obamacare is unpopular. The latest Real Clear Politics average of all major polls taken since open-enrollment closed still has 41% of those surveyed favorable to the law and 52% opposed to the law––about as bad it is always been.

But Obamacare is not going to be repealed. The sooner Republicans come to understand that the better for them.

I really think Democrats have the potential to take back, or at least neutralize, the health care issue by the November elections if Republicans aren’t careful.

Government (Or, How My Cousin the President Nearly Killed My Company)

May 14, 2014• 59

By Jonathan Bush

I WAS NOW the CEO of a rising medical data company.We built automated systems to handle the administrative chores for thousands of medical practices. They didn’t buy anything from us. Instead, they subscribed to a service on the Internet.

This was what would later be called a cloud-based service, but in these early days of Internet era, we were still searching for a name for it. My partner Todd used to say in speeches that he would give Polynesian fruit baskets for life to anyone who came up with a single name for the combination of software, knowledge and work that we were selling. We had moved back east and had a new headquarters in a historic brick armory building along the Charles River near Boston.

Our future looked fabulous, except for one problem: My cousin, the 43rd president of the United States, was about to sign a bill that could destroy us.

This bill, like so many governments initiatives, stemmed from the best of intentions. The idea was to encourage the migration of the health care industry from cumbersome binders full of paper to electronic records. How was this to be accomplished? Well, hospitals and doctors were forbidden by so-called anti-kickback laws from exchanging services, information or products of value with each other. (It’s a law that infuriates me, for reasons I’ll go into later.) The bill before Congress in 2004 offered a regulatory safe harbor for hospitals to provide doctors with all the digital technology the bureaucrats could think of: servers, software licences, and training. That was absolutely the right answer . . . for 1982. The long and short was that hospitals could buy all the old stuff from our competitors, but none of the new still-to-be-named services from us. As often happens, the technology was advancing much faster than the law.

I caught the shuttle down to Washington and commenced lobbying with the fervor of a man with a gun to his head. I raced up and down the marble halls Congress, looking for someone, anyone, who would take the time to learn why this bill was so very wrong, so backward, so devastating, so lethal—at least to athenahealth.

But let me tell you, if you walk into Congressional offices sputtering about a clause in a bill that practically no one has read, something that has to do with hardware and software and online services, people tend to hurry away, or point you toward the door. I could find no one to pay attention. And as I grew more frantic, I started talking louder and faster. That didn’t help things.

Some might find my frustration strange, considering that during this drama my cousin was sitting a mile away, in the Oval Office. Wouldn’t a Bush, facing legislative trouble in Washington, contact someone in the White House entourage? The answer is no. Placing a call to him was not even a remote possibility. For starters, it’s unethical. It is also politically foolish. It would place him, me, and my company in scandal and bring shame upon our family. I would be much more willing to climb the steeple of the tallest church and bungee jump naked in the middle of the night than to call my cousin. And even if I were dumb enough to make the call, I trust George would have the good sense to tell me to get lost.

Some Serious Medication Instructions …

May 14, 2014• 5

By THCBist

mercilon tabs

HAT TIP : @nickdawson

Cheeseburger Please, and Make It a Double

May 14, 2014• 36

By Vik Khanna

Consider that for the last year or so, we have been treated a deluge of entreaties to reduce our salt intake, with the American Heart Association going so far as to claim that daily sodium intake should not exceed 1,500 mg. This puts it at odds with the Institute of Medicine, and now European researchers whose data indicates that the healthy range for sodium intake appears to be much higher.

Our conversation about sodium, much like advice about purportedly evil saturated fats and supposedly beneficial polyunsaturated fats, exemplifies a national obsession with believing eating more or less of a one or a small number of nutrients is the path to nutritional nirvana.

A few weeks back, an international team of scientists did their level best to feed this sensationalistic beast by producing what’s become known since then as the meat-and-cheese study, because it damned consumption of animal proteins.

The authors correlate cancer mortality with age and protein intake, but they never bother to correlate it with body mass index or waist circumference, the latter of which is an increasingly important measure of body composition. Average waist circumference of the mostly older study subjects was just barely below risk thresholds, meaning that they were fat. Abdominal adiposity induces a damaging pro-inflammatory metabolic state than abets cancer development. Cancer is predominantly a disease of aging with incidence and death rates after age 50 that are 13x greater than before.

Growing Up in the Era of Work-Hour Restrictions

May 14, 2014• 2

By Danielle Jones, MD

In 2008, the IOM study on resident work hours came out and in the years that followed the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) subsequently implemented a gamut of “recommendations.”

As a medical student, I remember thinking it was a much needed change – why wouldn’t it be a good idea to improve patient safety and decrease resident fatigue?

Alas, as a newly minted intern growing up in the era of work-hour regulations, it’s become apparent that many of these changes may actually make life harder without achieving their main goal of improving patient care.

The 80-hour work week cap is fine; it’s been in effect on its own since 2003 and overall it seems to have made residency more humane. Most programs have found reasonable ways to limit work hours to this full-time-times-two amount, at least when hours are averaged over four-week periods.

However, the additional bullet point “recommendations” from 2010 seem to play out very differently in real life than they do on paper. Many of them seem to be arbitrary lines drawn in political sands hiding behind a facade of patient safety, but that’s another blog for another time.

So, what do the bullet point regulations look like in the hospital?

They look like: Interns can’t work 24-hour shifts.

So, what used to be a two-and-a-half shift weekend turns into a four shift weekend. At a four intern/year program like mine, that means instead of two people splitting the weekends and having a post-call day after 24 hours on, one intern is committed to night-float six nights/week for a month while the remaining three interns take the three leftover weekend shifts.

The result: Fewer hours at a time in the hospital, but more working days in a row and more days/month away from your family.