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John Irvine

A Growing Chorus on the RUC

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By BRIAN KLEPPER

Yesterday on Kaiser Health News, Barbara Levy MD, the Chair of the AMA’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (or RUC), published a glowing defense of the RUC’s activities. Her article extols the work of the 29 physician volunteers who, “at no cost to taxpayers…generously volunteer their time,” “supported by advisers and staff from more than 100 national medical specialty societies and health care professional organizations.” She fails to mention that the physicians’ and organizations’ efforts to craft the RUC’s recommendations have direct financial benefit to the physicians, specialty societies and health care professional organizations whose representatives dominate the RUC proceedings.

She points to the openness and transparency of the RUC’s proceedings, noting that “the general public is able to comment on individual procedures, and processes are in place to ensure that input from all stakeholders is considered by CMS. Finally, the AMA ensures transparency of the process, making the data and rationale for each RUC recommendation publicly available.” This, from an immensely influential Committee that refuses to share the identities of its members except by their societal affiliation, that keeps its proceedings private, and that can not be observed except by an invitation from the Chair. If anything, the RUC’s goings-on have been secretive and opaque. Go into any health care professional audience and ask, as I have, for a show of hands of people who know what the RUC is. It has been virtually unknown except in wonkiest circles.

Dr. Levy also points out that, in Medicare’s budget-neutral environment, hard decisions have to be made, and that in 2006, $4 billion – a little more than  one percent of that year’s Medicare allocation – was transferred to primary care. The clear implication is that this came at the expense of specialists. But she conveniently ignores the vast majority of coding valuations that have increased specialty income while strangling primary care. (More comprehensive background on the RUC, including articles by the AMA that describe the RUC’s perspective in detail, may be found here.)

Dr. Levy’s article presumably responded to a growing chorus of recent voices that have detailed the RUC’s disastrous impact on American health care, beginning most recently last October with a Wall Street Journal expose by Anna Mathews and Tom McGinty, and an explanation in the New York Times by Princeton health care economist Uwe Reinhardt. With David Kibbe MD, I wrote about this topic on Kaiser Health News in January, calling on the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) to abandon the RUC. Then Paul Fischer MD joined in with his Family Physician’s Manifesto. All this work built on the foundation of many health care professionals – John Goodson, MD; Robert Berenson, MD; Thomas Bodenheimer, MD; Roy Poses, MD to name a few – who have carefully documented the biases and excesses that have been wrought by the RUC’s shadowy process.Continue reading…

The Neverending Story

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By STEVE SANDERS

We’re hearing a lot about the use of electronic medical records (EMR) in medicine. The government is all for it—providing financial incentives for those with EMRs and disincentives for those still relying on paper charts to make their way through the world. Most health professionals, especially new physicians in training, simply can’t imagine a world without an EMR at their fingertips.

The ability to electronically capture discrete bits of data on each patient allows us to categorize, tally, and build unbelievably beautiful charts and graphs.

These systems also uncover deficiencies in patient care; with the push of a button, we know whose blood pressure or blood sugar is out of control, or how many patients weigh too much for their height. Clinicians click-through as many templates as possible in order for the system to capture these professional nuggets of information. Nuggets worth their weight in gold to researchers and pharmaceutical companies, eager to market their next blockbuster drug to physicians whose patients just happen to fit their marketing profile.

The trouble is when you’ve seen one template–built patient medical record, you’ve seen them all. These systems do such a great job of capturing discrete bits of data that patients become just that—only discrete bits of data.The essence of who they are, their story, becomes lost in attempts at efficiency.

What interests me about each patient is their story: what’s happening in their life that brings them stress or joy. Are they wanting medication for their cough, or really just needing assurance they don’t have lung cancer. Each visit brings a new chapter, a peeling of the onion allowing me to see the various layers of their personality over time. This is more important than almost any other discrete piece of data we could fit into a template. It takes time and effort to build an electronic medical record that speaks for the patient; time that is often in short supply for busy clinicians.Continue reading…

The Incredible and Wasteful Complexity of the US Healthcare System

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By HUMPHREY TAYLOR and IAN MORRISON

During the health care reform debate, we wrote that most people’s attitudes to it were “confused, conflicted, clueless and cranky.”  A major reason was that the American health care “system” is fiendishly complicated and few people really understand it.   As a result hardly anyone knows much about what is actually in the reform bill (but that does not prevent them from having strong opinions about it).    Sadly, the reforms, whatever their merits, will make the system even more complicated, the administration more Byzantine and the regulatory burden more onerous.

System complexity.

The American healthcare system is already by far the most complex and bureaucratic in the world.  We were once asked to spend ninety minutes explaining American health care to a group of foreign health care executives.  Ninety minutes?  We probably needed a few weeks.  Most other countries have relatively simple systems, whether insurance coverage is provided by a government plan or by private insurance or some combination of these.  But in the United States insurance coverage, for those who have it, may be provided by Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D, 50 different state Medicaid programs (or MediCal in California), Medicare Advantage, Medigap plans, the Children’s Health Insurance Plan, the Women, Infants and Children Program, the Veterans Administration, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the military, the hundreds of thousands of employer-provided plans and their insurance companies, or by the individual insurance market.  This insurance may be paid for by the federal or state governments, by employers, labor unions or individuals.  Some employers’ plans cover retirees, others do not. The result is that the system is pluralistic, mysterious, capricious and impossible for most patients and providers to understand.

Administrative complexity

The administrative complexity is amplified by the multiplicity of insurance plans.  About half of all Americans with private health insurance are covered by self-insured plans, each with its own plan design.  Employers customize their plan documents, led by consultants who make a good living designing their plans and tailoring their contracts. As one prominent consultant told us recently, if all the self-insured plan documents were piled on a table they would not just exceed the 2,700 pages of Obamacare, they would probably reach the moon. For the rest of the commercially insured population, health plans may be traditional indemnity plans, Preferred Provider Organizations or Health Maintenance Organizations.

The coverage provided by different plans varies dramatically.  They may or may not include large or small deductibles, co-pays or co-insurance.  Beneficiaries may pay a large, small or no part of their health insurance premiums.  Some plans cover dependent family members and children, others do not.  The Medicare Part D pharmaceutical benefit plan involves a “doughnut hole,” which will disappear as health reforms are implemented.  Surveys have found that few people fully understand their own insurance plans let alone the bigger picture.  While health reform takes some steps toward standardization of insurance offerings and improving transparency, overall it is likely to increase complexity.Continue reading…

Is That Thorazine in the Baby’s Bottle?

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By PSYCH GRIPE

One of the most disturbing trends in mental health today is the increasing use of powerful antipsychotic medication to treat behavioral problems in children, even very young children. According to a 2009 report by the Food and Drug Administration, there are 500,000 children in the United States being administered regular doses of antipsychotics. Medicaid data shows public health monies spent on antipsychotic drugs for children exceeding $30 million in New Jersey and topping $90 million in Texas. It is a trend that has built relentlessly for the past ten years and continues unabated.

I find the use of these drugs on children to be appalling almost beyond words. Having worked as a mental health professional for many years, I am well acquainted with these medications. This class of drugs, sometimes referred to as neuroleptics, are major tranquilizers and are primarily used and intended for controlling hallucinations and delusions in cases of psychosis and schizophrenia. For an adult with severe schizophrenia, these medications may be a glimmer of hope, but it is always a difficult risk-benefit analysis because there are potentially severe side effects and reactions. Permanent neurological damage can occur in the form of tardive dyskenisia, and sudden death can occur from a reaction called neuroleptic malignancy syndrome. With newer forms of antipsychotics, these type of side effects are less frequent and less severe, but continue to be a risk depending on the reaction of the individual’s body. However, newer, “atypical,” antipsychotics present new dangers to the patient, metabolic changes that result in a dramatic increase in the instances and severity of diabetes and heart disease. The result is that adults on antipsychotic medications have a life span that is 20 years shorter then the average person.Continue reading…

No One Cares About Your Health (or No One is Willing to Pay For It)!

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By JOSEPH KVEDAR, MD

Of course that is not true, but it seems like that sometimes, doesn’t it?  If you are working to promulgate a solution that promotes health in the context of our current healthcare system, there is no end to the challenges you will face.  Lets think a bit about the various actors, why they should care and why they do not.

I’ll start off with you. No one should care more about your health than you.  But as the behavioral economists remind us, we are not rational beings.  We are more likely to focus on tangible things in the moment rather than long-term uncertain benefits. So we persist in participating in unhealthy behaviors that provide short-term pleasure and lead to downstream sickness.  In addition, we’ve been addled into believing that once we are diagnosed, we are victims and that we can abdicate all responsibility for our care. (see 5-17-2010, Are Individual’s with Chronic Illness More Passive?).  This insidious combination makes it hard to hold ourselves accountable for our own health.  Most times, we’d rather blame the environment, or bad luck, and ask if we can take a convenient pill to make it better.

Next, how about your loved ones?  They are the best targets. In most cases our loved ones (the more current phrase is ‘social network’) can and do affect our health (See Nicholas Christakis’ book Connected and related articles).  It has, however, been challenging to get loved ones to open their wallet to pay for service offerings that improve your health.  In my experience, this is most often because of the same mentality that makes you a passive victim once you get sick.  We feel that society owes a victim.  We all feel like we’ve paid into various insurance programs – public and private – and that they should be the ones to pay for health-related services, particularly in the setting of chronic illness.  So your loved ones do care, but they have been trained not to open their wallet to support your care.  I can think of a dozen or so business plans I’ve seen over the years where the service to support a chronically ill individual was to be paid for by the “sandwich generation.” There is an appeal to this on the surface, but I haven’t seen one of those businesses scale yet.Continue reading…

Nurse Staffing, Patient Mortality, And a Lady Named Louise

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By BOB WACHTER

How many nurses does it take to care for a hospitalized patient? No, that’s not a bad version of a light bulb joke; it’s a serious question, with thousands of lives and billions of dollars resting on the answer. Several studies (such as here and here) published over the last decade have shown that having more nurses per patient is associated with fewer complications and lower mortality. It makes sense.

Yet these studies have been criticized on several grounds. First, they examined staffing levels for hospitals as a whole, not at the level of individual units. Secondly, they compared well-staffed hospitals against poorly staffed ones, raising the possibility that staffing levels were a mere marker for other aspects of quality such as leadership commitment or funding. Finally, they based their findings on average patient load, failing to take into account patient turnover.

Last week’s NEJM contains the best study to date on this crucial issue. It examined nearly 200,000 admissions to 43 units in a “high quality hospital.” While the authors don’t name the hospital, they do tell us that the institution is a US News top rated medical center, has achieved nursing “Magnet” status, and, during the study period, had a mortality rate nearly 40 percent below that predicted for its case-mix. In other words, it was no laggard.

As one could guess from its pedigree and outcomes, the hospital’s approach to nurse staffing was not stingy. Of 176,000 nursing shifts during the study period, only 16 percent were significantly below the established target (the targets are presumably based on patient volume and acuity, but are not well described in the paper). The authors found that patients who experienced a single understaffed shift had a 2 percent higher mortality rate than ones who didn’t. Each additional understaffed shift carried a similar, and additive, risk. This means that the one-in-three patients who experienced three such shifts during their hospital stay had a 6 percent higher mortality than the few patients who didn’t experience any. If the FDA discovered that a new medication was associated with a 2 percent excess mortality rate, you can bet that the agency would withdraw it from the market faster than you could say “Sidney Wolfe.”

The effects of high patient turnover were even more striking. Exposure to a shift with unusually high turnover (7 percent of all shifts met this definition) was associated with a 4 percent increased odds of death. Apparently, patient turnover – admissions, discharges, and transfers – is to hospital units and nurses as takeoffs and landings are to airplanes and flight crews: a single 5-hour flight (one takeoff/landing) is far less stressful, and much safer, than five hour-long flights (5 takeoffs/landings).Continue reading…

Insurance Companies Dancing Without Touching

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By PAUL LEVY

A story in the Washington Post talks about health insurance companies seeking new lines of unregulated business as the profitability of health insurance falls and as more and more requirements are placed on that line of business as a result of the federal health reform law. Here’s an excerpt: “Insurers have moved into technology, health-care delivery, physician management, workplace wellness, financial services and overseas ventures in wide-ranging efforts to mitigate the new rules imposed by the law.”

I raised some of these issues several months ago, where I also suggested that a merger of the Number 2 and Number 3 Massachusetts health plans might be forthcoming. Well, they tried, but decided not to, as they announced a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is clearly laying the groundwork to shed its non-profit status. And, really, why not? It is in no way a charitable organization of the sort envisioned in earlier years, and the constraints of being a nonprofit bind in a number of ways.

When the HPHC and Tufts merger fell through, the operative statement was: “We have now determined that we are stronger as individual competitors than one company.”

I predict that will turn out to be a strategic error. In the new world order, scale matters. This statement is, to me, revealing in its own way: “Our operations are very different and, in many important aspects, not fully compatible without significant changes to existing processes and applications.” In other words, they chose not to merge because it felt like it was not currently cost-effective to change. This suggests that the operations of the two plans as presently configured are not scalable. But if they don’t merge, they will be left behind by those with stronger market power. For now, that is BCBS of MA. In the future, as the business becomes less about taking on insurance risk and more about other services, it could well include some major national players as well. Now, rather than later, would be a better time to consolidate assets and use the cash on hand to make the investments that will be needed to grab market opportunities in the future.

Unjust Enrichment

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By MARGALIT GUR ARIE

A new lawsuit has been filed this month in an attempt to curtail the unconsented and currently legal traffic of de-identified medical records, this time against pharmacy giant Walgreens. The class action suit brought by Todd Murphy, a citizen of the State of California, on behalf of his children, is alleging that the company’s sale of prescription histories to data mining companies, servicing the marketing efforts of pharmaceutical companies, is an unfair, unlawful and deceptive business practice allowing Walgreen Co. to unjustly enrich itself while depriving the rightful owners of the data of their ability to benefit from the commercial value of their prescription records. There is no mention of privacy violations anywhere in the brief, and this is what makes this legal action very unique and potentially a landmark in the effort to control unauthorized sales of medical records.

The deceptive business practices are pretty straight forward to understand, since it seems that Walgreens makes all customers sign a privacy notice stating unequivocally that the company will not disclose patient information without first obtaining authorization from the patient. Furthermore California law prohibits pharmacists from disclosing prescription information to unauthorized third parties, which arguably makes the sale of data also unlawful. The bulk of the brief is describing the injury to plaintiffs caused by “detailing”, i.e. targeted in-person marketing by pharmaceutical reps to physicians, which is substantially aided by information extracted from plaintiffs prescription patterns. Detailing is portrayed as a ruthless drug company strategy to increase sales of newer and more expensive brand-name drugs, thus increasing the costs of health care, endangering patients and harming the doctor-patient relationship.

And here is where the complaint gets interesting.Continue reading…

A World Without Breast Cancer?

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By VIPAN NIKORE

There isn’t a country on this planet where there isn’t someone dreaming of curing cancer. What if there was something even more spectacular than curing cancer? What if you could stop cancer right in its tracks and eliminate its existence. Prevent it. Squash it before it starts.

Vincent Tuohy, PhD, an immunologist at Cleveland Clinic, may be on a path toward living this dream. This month at our hospital’s quarterly meeting, Tuohy was awarded Cleveland Clinic’s F. Mason Sones Award for 2010 Innovator of the Year for his recent breakthrough that may one day prevent breast cancer and perhaps revolutionize our approach to fighting all cancers.

Tuohy has spent the past eight years working to create a vaccine to prevent breast cancer. He and his team have found that vaccination with the protein α-lactalbumin prevents breast cancer in mice. His results were published in Nature Medicine, one of the most respected science journals, last summer.

The study yielded dramatic results. A group of mice that were at high risk to develop cancer according to their genetic profile was selected. Half of the mice were given the vaccine and half were not. All the ones given the vaccine did not develop breast cancer. All the ones not given the vaccine developed breast cancer. Yes, these are mice, and human trials are yet to begin. It may be ten years before we have a finished product, but such overwhelming results are promising and exciting.Continue reading…

The Quest for the “Not For Comfort” Healthcare Organization

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By JOE FLOWER

The current reorganization of health care could make it better and cheaper for everyone, harnessing real creative and competitive energies to build the “next health care”—or it could lead to local monopolies, higher prices and less real competition where it matters. The many and various moves toward accountability, competition and transparency could defeat themselves.

The theme of the reorganization is clear: new types of cooperation between physicians, hospitals and other providers that cut down on duplication and unnecessary procedures and tests; that make the system accountable both for processes and outcomes; and that share economic risk among the providers. This new and strange cooperation comes in many types, typically labeled “accountable care organizations” (ACOs), “bundling,” “patient-centered medical homes” (PCMHs) and “co-management.”

All these concepts require new structures: complex organizational, contractual, reporting, liability and payment structures that in one way or another stretch across specialties and providers throughout whole regions. What could these new structures (particularly ACOs) look like if they were to turn evil? They could look like monopolies, like regional health care cartels, capable of forcing other providers into disadvantaged relationships and jacking up prices to health plans and employers.Continue reading…

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