The appeal of precision medicine is the promise that we can understand disease with greater specificity and fashion treatments that are more individualized and more effective.

A core tenet (or “central dogma,” as I wrote in 2015) of precision medicine is the idea that large disease categories – like type 2 diabetes – actually consist of multiple discernable subtypes, each with its own distinct characteristics and genetic drivers. As genetic and phenotypic research advances, the argument goes, diseases like “type 2 diabetes” will go the way of quaint descriptive diagnoses like “dropsy” (edema) and be replaced by more precisely defined subgroups, each ideally associated with a distinct therapy developed for that population.

In 2015, this represented an intuitively appealing idea in search of robust supporting data (at least outside oncology).

In 2017, this represents an intuitively appealing idea in search of robust supporting data (at least outside oncology).

The gap between theory and data has troubled many researchers, and earlier this year, a pair of cardiologists from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Broad Institute, Sek Kathiresan and Amit V. Khera, wrote an important – and I’d suggest underappreciated – commentary in the journal Circulation that examined this very disconnect, through the lens of coronary artery disease (CAD).

Practicing Medicine While Black
(Part II)

Nov 27, 2017• 3

By KIP SULLIVAN

Managed care advocates see quality problems everywhere and resource shortages nowhere. If the Leapfrog Group, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or some other managed care advocate were in charge of explaining why a high school football team lost to the New England Patriots, their explanation would be “poor quality.”

If a man armed with a knife lost a fight to a man with a gun, ditto: “Poor quality.” And their solution would be more measurement of the “quality,” followed by punishment of the losers for getting low grades on the “quality” report card and rewards for the winners. The obvious problem – a mismatch in resources – and the damage done to the losers by punishing them would be studiously ignored.

This widespread, willful blindness to the role that resource disparities play in creating ethnic and income disparities and other problems, and the concomitant widespread belief that all defects in the US health care system are due to insufficient “quality,” is difficult to explain. I will attempt to lay out the rudiments of an explanation in this essay.

In my first article in this two-part series, I presented evidence demonstrating that “pay-for-performance” (P4P) and “value-base purchasing” (VBP) (rewarding and punishing providers based on crude measures of cost and quality) punish providers who treat a disproportionate share of the poor and the sick.

Who Owns Your FitBit Data? Biometric Data Privacy Problems

Nov 25, 2017• 4

By JASON CHUNG

The following blog post is adapted from a talk the author gave at the “Data Privacy in the Digital Age” symposium on October 26th sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Today, I’ll be focusing on the data privacy issues posed by sports wearables, which I define to include both elite systems such as WHOOP or Catapult and more consumer-oriented products such as Fitbits, and why the U.S. needs an integrated federal regulatory framework to address the privacy challenges posed by private entities commercializing biometric data.

Sports wearables have evolved from mere pedometers to devices that monitor heart rate and sleep, tell athletes how to maximize recovery, and even track food intake and sexual activity – all uploaded to the cloud.

These technologies are now ubiquitous and have wide appeal to consumers – in fact, I’m wearing a Fitbit right now.

But these devices raise several key problems for consumers that are not yet being adequately addressed by the U.S. legal and regulatory system.

The P.A. Problem: Who You See and What You Get

Nov 24, 2017• 124

By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

Recently, the New York Times published an article on excessive costs incurred by mid-level providers over-treating benign skin lesions. According to the piece, more than 15% of biopsies billed to Medicare in 2015 were done by unsupervised PA’s or Nurse Practitioners. Physicians across the country are becoming concerned mid-levels working independently without proper specialty training. Dr. Coldiron, a dermatologist, was interviewed by the Times and said, “What’s really going on is these practices…hire a bunch of P.A.’s and nurses and stick them out in clinics on their own. And they’re acting like doctors.”

They are working “like” doctors, yet do not have training equivalent to physicians. As a pediatrician, I have written about a missed diagnosis of an infant by an unscrupulous midlevel provider who embellished his pediatric expertise. This past summer, astute physician colleagues came across an independent physician assistant, Christie Kidd, PA-C, boldly referring to herself as a “dermatologist.” Her receptionist answers the phone by saying “Kidd Dermatology.”

The Doctors, a daytime talk show, accurately referred to Ms. Kidd on a May 7, 2015 segment as a “skin care specialist.” However, beauty magazines are not held to the same high standard; the dailymail.com, a publication in the UK, captioned a picture of “Dr. Christie Kidd”, as the “go-to MD practicing in Beverly Hills.”

The article shared how Ms. Kidd treats the Kardashian-Jenner family, “helping them to look luminous in their no-make-up selfies.”

While most of us cannot grasp the distress caused by not appearing luminous in no-makeup-selfies, this is significantly concerning for Kendall Jenner. At the tender age of 21, she inaccurately referred to Ms. Kidd as her “life-changing dermatologist.” Cosmopolitan continues the charade, publishing an article on the Jenner family “dermatologist.”

Amazon (Probably) Is About to Lose Out

Nov 23, 2017• 4

By ROGER COLLIER

Dear Jeff Bezos:

It looked like a great idea when you started to build a team of healthcare specialists back in the summer. Despite — or perhaps because of — endless attempts to control costs and improve quality, American healthcare remains (in the words of a recent THCB post) “a version of Afghanistan…replete with tribal conflicts, warlords, corruption, a bad communication system, [and] language problems.” Surely, there must be opportunities for Amazon.

Healthcare reporters were quick to pick up on rumors of your company entering the pharmacy business. If Amazon’s purchasing, distribution, delivery and marketing skills could be applied to the Whole Foods grocery business, imagine what might be achieved in the $500 billion pharmacy market. And imagine how this base could be used to transform the entire healthcare industry. No wonder drugstore chains and drug manufacturers saw their stocks swoon as the rumors spread.

Now it seems Amazon may have been aced out.

CVS Health, the largest retail pharmacy chain and a major pharmacy benefits manager, is in talks to buy Aetna, the third largest US health insurer, for more than $66 billion. While some analysts see this as primarily a defensive maneuver to thwart Amazon, it has the potential to dramatically change the healthcare playing field.

In the short run, both CVS and Aetna would be better protected against their current weaknesses. CVS’ PBM business is increasingly vulnerable as major insurers bring drug negotiations in-house, while its retail stores face growing competition from on-line pharmacies and – more recently – from federal approval of Walgreens’ acquisition of Rite-Aid. Aetna has its own weaknesses: it lost money on the Obamacare exchanges, and the continuing move of large groups to ASO contracts means less profitable underwritten business.

Purging Healthcare of Unnatural Acts

Nov 21, 2017• 32

BY UWE REINHARDT

In tribute to Uwe we are re-running this instant classic from THCB’s archives. Originally published on Jan 31, 2017.

Everyone knows (or should know) that forcing a commercial health insurer to write for an individual a health insurance policy at a premium that falls short of the insurer’s best ex ante estimate of the cost of health care that individual will require is to force that insurer into what economists might call an unnatural act.

Remarkably, countries that rely on competing private health insurers to operate their universal, national health insurance systems all do just that. They allow each insurer to set the premium for a government-mandated , comprehensive benefit package, but require that each insurer “community-rate” that premium by charging the company’s individual customers that same premium, regardless of their health status and even age (with the exception of children).

American economists wonder why these countries do that, given that in the economist’s eyes community-rated health insurance premiums are “inefficient,” as economists define that term in their intra-professional dictionary.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA, otherwise known as “ObamaCare”) also mandates private insurers to quote community-rated premiums on the electronic market places created by the ACA, allowing adjustments only for age and whether or not an applicant smokes. But within age bands and smoker-status, insurers must charge the same premium to individual applicants regardless of their health status.

As fellow economist Mark V. Pauly points out in an illuminating two-part interview with Saurabh Jha, M.D., published earlier on this blog, aside from the “inefficiency” of that policy, it has some untoward but eminently predictable consequences. It happens when healthier people disobey the mandate to purchase insurance, leaving the risk pools of those insured in the ACA market places with sicker and sicker individuals, thus driving up the community-rated premiums. As Pauly points out at length, a weakly enforced mandate on individuals to be insured can become the Achilles heel of community rating.

The Great American Hypertension Epidemic of 2017

Nov 16, 2017• 14

By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

On November 15, 2017, an epidemic of hypertension broke out and could rapidly affect tens of millions of Americans. The epicenter of the outbreak was traced back to the meeting of the American Heart Association in Anaheim, CA.

The pathogen was released in a special 488-page document labeled “Hypertension Guidelines.” The document’s suspicious content was apparently noted by meeting personnel, but initial attempts to contain it with an embargo failed and the virus was leaked to the press. Within minutes, the entire healthcare ecosystem was contaminated.

At this point, strong measures are necessary to stem the epidemic. Everyone is advised not to click on any document or any link connected to this virus. Instead, we are offering the following code that will serve both as a decoy and as an antidote for the virulent trojan horse.

Only a strong dose of common sense packed in a few lines of text can possibly save us from an otherwise lethal epidemic of nonsense. Please save the following text on your EHR cloud or hard-drive, commit it to memory or to a dot phrase, and copy and paste it on all relevant quality and pay-for-performance reports you are asked to submit.

What Baseball Can Teach Doctors

Nov 16, 2017• 5

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

Baseball, like medicine, is deeply imbued with a sense of tradition, and no team more so than the New York Yankees, disdainful of innovations like placing players’ names on the backs of their jerseys and resistant to eroding strict standards related to haircuts and beards.

It’s why doctors and patients alike should pay special attention to why the Yankees parted ways with their old manager and what they now seek instead. In a word: “collaboration.”

That’s the takeaway from a recent New York Times article examining why the Yankees declined to re-sign manager Joe Girardi despite his stellar “outcomes” (to use a medical term); i.e., the best record in baseball during his 10 years at the Yankees’ helm. But Yankees executives believe the game has changed. The model for future success is the Los Angeles Dodgers, the tradition- and cash-rich franchise on the opposite coast that went to this year’s World Series while the Yankees sat home.

The new way to win? According to Dodgers executives, it requires a combination of statistical analysis, shared decisions and communication between and among all stakeholders based on collaborative relationships.

Remembering Uwe

Nov 15, 2017• 3

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

The healthcare world learned with great sadness this week of the passing of our friend, Uwe Reinhardt. I met Uwe in 1982 at the Federation of American Hospitals meeting in Las Vegas. Uwe opened the meeting by apologizing, in his disarming German accent, for not being his usual sharp self. He had, he said, skipped breakfast because his wife May had instructed him not to pay for anything in Las Vegas that he could get for free at home. This was vintage Reinhardt, innocent and knowing at the same time. That meeting was the beginning of a long and warm friendship.

Uwe would have been acutely uncomfortable with his colleagues referring to him as a “giant” in our field, because he was genuinely humble, and had not forgotten what it felt like growing up poor in devastated post-War Germany after WWII. And there was no sterner test of humility that occupying the James Madison Professorship of Political Economy at Princeton, just about as flossy an academic title as you will find.

For many years, Uwe taught a standing-room-only undergraduate course in Accounting at Princeton. The way he taught it was as a cleverly disguised course in moral philosophy. A main trope: “how would a ‘seasoned adult’ look at this problem?” A ‘seasoned adult’ was someone who had lost his or her moral compass and sense of shame. So, where would a ‘seasoned adult’ book a bribe paid to a foreign official to obtain a contract, etc.? He was cleverly goading them not to lose their sense of outrage and their own moral compass, a tricky task without patronizing them.