Year: 2017

The Delta of Discomfort and
the Agony of Despair

May 24, 2017• 2

By ALAN PITT, MD

I’m a radiologist. I spend my day looking at CT scans and MRI scans. When it’s a good day, I have interesting scans to review, but much of my work is not too dissimilar from a TSA screener’s. One normal scan after the next, it’s akin to trying to stay alert so that the gun someone’s trying to sneak through in their luggage isn’t missed. In my case, of course, it’s a cancer or other unexpected medical abnormality finding.

Computer-Assisted Diagnosis

Most of my day I work on a computer workstation presenting the exams. In my dream, my workstation does more than simply display the exam. It assists in reading the case. If there’s an abnormality, I can click on the area, and the workstation takes the image and compares it to millions of other cases in the cloud. It tells me, based on that patient’s age and sex and other information, how likely it is the finding is a tumor and maybe even, if so, what kind of tumor. At other times the workstation tells me whether a study is normal or not, freeing me to do other activities. However, this dream is not shared by all of my colleagues.

When I mentioned this work-flow scenario to one of my residents—this idea of computer-assisted diagnosis with constant improvement, or what is known as artificial intelligence, or AI—he said it sounded awesome, but he really didn’t want to have it if it was available to everyone. His comment is something of a mixed message: Yes, I see value but no, I don’t want it.

It’s largely based on fear of being replaced by computers. And it’s a song I’ve heard before.

Compete for 2017’s Startup Spotlight at Health 2.0’s Traction Competition!

May 24, 2017

By DEEPA MISTRY

Pitch and Get Funded!

With a new political climate, exponential growth in tech, and an increasing awareness on key issues, the health care industry is ever changing, and now’s the best time for your startup to breakthrough in the digital health community.

Demonstrate your company’s potential to prominent investors and enter your startup in Health 2.0’s Startups Pitch competition, Traction, and give your company the perfect opportunity to pitch to a room full of attendees looking to get involved with your startup. You’ll work with industry experts to perfect your pitch and to ensure it is stage-ready by the time of the conference. Investors will be so impressed they’ll be left with no choice but to invest in your company!

On Teaching Hospitals and Conflict of Interest and Other Politically Charged Topics

May 23, 2017• 4

By ASHISH JHA, MD

How much does it matter which hospital you go to? Of course, it matters a lot – hospitals vary enormously on quality of care, and choosing the right hospital can mean the difference between life and death. The problem is that it’s hard for most people to know how to choose. Useful data on patient outcomes remain hard to find, and even though Medicare provides data on patient mortality for select conditions on their Hospital Compare website, those mortality rates are calculated and reported in ways that make nearly every hospital look average.

Some people select to receive their care at teaching hospitals. Studies in the 1990s and early 2000s found that teaching hospitals performed better, but there was also evidence that they were more expensive. As “quality” metrics exploded, teaching hospitals often found themselves on the wrong end of the performance stick with more hospital-acquired conditions and more readmissions. In nearly every national pay-for-performance scheme, they seemed to be doing worse than average, not better. In an era focused on high-value care, the narrative has increasingly become that teaching hospitals are not any better – just more expensive.

But is this true? On the one measure that matters most to patients when it comes to hospital care – whether you live or die – are teaching hospitals truly no better or possibly worse? About a year ago, that was the conversation I had with a brilliant junior colleague, Laura Burke. When we scoured the literature, we found that there had been no recent, broad-based examination of patient outcomes at teaching versus non-teaching hospitals. So we decided to take this on.

Only Alternative Facts Can Support the Protecting Access to Care Act

May 23, 2017• 5

By CHARLES SILVER and DAVID HYMAN

In late March of this year, JAMAInternal Medicine published a study finding that the “the overall rate of [malpractice] claims paid on behalf of physicians decreased by 55.7% from 1992 to 2014.” The finding wasn’t new. In 2013, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies published a study co-authored by one of us (Hyman) which found that “the per-physician rate of paid med mal claims has been dropping for 20 years and in 2012 was less than half the 1992 level.” In fact, peer-reviewed journals in law and medicine have published lots of studies with similar results. It is (or should be) common knowledge that claims of an ongoing liability crisis are phony.

But inconvenient facts have never stopped interest groups or politicians from making false claims about med mal litigation. Since 1991, when Dan Quayle struck gold by asserting that the U.S. had too many lawyers, Americans have heard non-stop about “jackpot justice” in which patients who weren’t even injured win millions; about the flood of frivolous lawsuits in which doctors are sued even though they didn’t make any mistakes; about jury verdicts skyrocketing out of control; and about doctors working all their lives only to have their savings wiped out by a single malpractice suit. All of these charges are false—you can find the evidence here, here, here, and here. But in politics, it’s staying on message that counts; it doesn’t seem to matter whether the message is true.Continue reading…

House v. Price and the CSR
Payments Paradox

May 23, 2017

By STEVEN FINDLAY

Many countries in the world have dysfunctional governments. Some have corrupt and devious ones, or even deadly ones. We’ve lived with serious dysfunction in Washington for two decades. Now we join the ranks of countries with a corrupt and devious government, one without a moral compass.

And I’m not just talking about Trump.

The news and blogosphere is replete with this sentiment surrounding the White House, of course, a la the “Russia thing” and Comey’s firing and all the rest.

But the cynicism and political bankruptcy that suffuses our elected leaders’ failure to assure that the cost-sharing subsidies for people buying health insurance through the exchanges will be secured for 2017 and 2018 is a new low in the wretched ongoing saga of Obamacare vs. Trumpcare.

This is playing out right now and could affect 12 million people come this fall and in 2018.

ACO Turnover is High. Doctors Have Few Patients, and Those Patients are Unusually Healthy

May 22, 2017• 4

By KIP SULLIVAN, JD

ACOs suffer astonishingly high turnover rates among their doctors and patients; their patients are unusually healthy; and those unusually healthy ACO patients constitute about 5 percent of each ACO doctor’s panel of patients. These facts appear in three recent reports: CMS’s final evaluation of the Pioneer ACO program, and two papers published in Health Affairs by John Hsu et al.

Each of these facts – high turnover, healthier patients, and few ACO patients in each physician’s panel – poses problems that cannot be solved without a substantial redefinition of the ACO. How are doctors supposed to influence the health and cost of patients they see only sporadically or not at all? How are ACO doctors supposed to lower costs if their sickest and most costly patients are not in the ACO? How are ACOs supposed to alter physician behavior when their physicians see fewer than 100 ACO patients out of a typical panel of 1,500 to 2,000 patients?

Suppose It’s an Obligation and Not a Right?

May 22, 2017• 3

By THE DARK GODDESS OF REPLEVIN

Suppose we frame the current health insurance* debate in a different way?

*It is about insurance. “Health insurance”=/=”health care,” although the former should lead to the latter.

Rather than arguing whether American individuals have a right to health care (beyond what you can already find in EMTALA, and please God let’s not consider repealing that), because people get very huffy about this concept, can we ask a different question?

Should we Americans collectively assume an obligation to “promote the general Welfare” by providing everyone access to basic health services, in the way that we have obliged ourselves to provide all children with access to a free public education (largely from each state’s constitution, with the exception of protections for disabled children)?

Consider this:

We have already agreed, by enacting EMTALA in 1986, that as a society we don’t want to see people die because an ER turns them away if they can’t pay. We have already assumed that obligation. But waiting until people are very nearly dead before we assume any obligation for their care is extremely expensive, and in the case of many ailments, just cruel. Think heart disease. Think diabetes. Think cancer.

We have already agreed, by enacting mandatory vaccination laws (although we have wobbled a little on this one with exemptions), that we have an obligation to protect the herd by requiring this simple public health measure. We also have quarantine laws to fulfill our obligation.

Maintenance of Conflict of Interest?

May 21, 2017• 6

By WESTBY FISHER, MD

In the May 2nd issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the American Medical Association (AMA) discusses the subject of physician conflicts of interest in medicine. This puts them at an interesting juncture when the editor-in-Chief and executive editor of JAMA failed to disclose their relationship with the AMA and the AMA’s relationship with US physicians. The AMA still presents itself to the public and legislators as representing Americas’ doctors, even though representing US physicians’ interests has not been their financial priority for many years. In fact, it is telling that their mission statement no longer includes the words doctor or physician. If they do represent US physicians as they often claim, then the AMA (and its publication JAMA) are rife with numerous conflicts of interest and public clarification of this fact is desperately needed.

Which is it?

In June 2016 at the invitation of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, concerns regarding the conflicts of interest inherent to the American Board of Medical Specialties’ (ABMS) Maintenance of Certification (MOC) program were brought before the interim national AMA House of Delegates meeting. The AMA and ABMS are co-member organizations of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and each organization took interest. The room was full of concerned physician delegates who had taken time away from their practices to represent their colleagues, alongside the President and chief council of the AMA, senior executive officer of the American College of Physicians, and the President and CEO of the ABMS. These courageous practicing physician delegates issued a “vote of no confidence” in the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) – the largest ABMS member board representing approximately 200,000 US physicians – during a national panel discussion. They later passed a resolution to end the ABMS MOC program, which is a laborious recertification process plaguing overburdened physicians across this nation. Unfortunately, the AMA leadership has yet to honor this resolution.

GEHA’s Seven-Year “Glitch”

May 19, 2017• 10

By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

In a little piece of legislation known as the Affordable Care Act, preventive services are mandated to be covered with no out-of-pocket expense to consumers. According to the Healthcare.gov website, approved insurance plans must cover a “list of preventive services for children without charging a copayment or coinsurance.” Number 18 on that preventive care list is: childhood immunizations for children from birth to age 18, acknowledging regional variation in the standard recommendation schedule. After all, vaccinations are the cornerstone public health achievement of the last century and have saved countless pediatric lives.

Is Health Privacy a Human Right?

May 19, 2017• 5

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH PEEL, MD

Health privacy sits at an uncomfortable junction between three interests: individual human rights, public / population health, and private business interests. There’s no obvious reason for these three interests to be misaligned but a lot of pain and money are involved so either politics or competition are typically in the picture.

Health privacy is a subset of the human right to privacy, what Supreme Court Justice Brandeis called “the right to be left alone”. But privacy has never been defined, and is seldom enforced, in health care because of the competing interests of society to manage populations, and a $100 Billion industry in data brokerage that’s hidden from public view. Big Healthcare business seeks our trust on the one hand while doing their best to manipulate prices on the other.