By STEPHEN SOUMERAI  and ROSS KOPPEL

U.S. health care policies should be based on solid evidence, especially those policies with life-and-death consequences. All too often, though, they are not. Consider the recommendation by congressional advisors that the government should favor basic ambulances with only minimal equipment and less trained staff over advanced ambulances with more life-saving equipment and better trained staff. A poorly controlled study, however, claimed that patients were more likely to die during or after riding in the advanced ambulances than in the basic (but cheaper) ambulances.

Why would “basic” ambulances (with less life-saving equipment and with lesser trained staff) be better than the more advanced ambulances? They probably were not, and we’ll show how the data supporting the benefits of “basic” ambulances are unreliable, and often confuse cause and effect. Worse perhaps, the study offers yet another example of economic research devoid of context generating dubious national policy.

The Study    

Researchers at the University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School used insurance data to examine how well a large sample of Medicare beneficiaries fared after ambulance transport for out-of-hospital emergencies. They compared those sent in basic life support ambulances vs. people transported in advanced life support ambulances.

The results, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, are of course counterintuitive: patients transported to the hospital in Advanced Life Support ambulances were more likely to die than those riding in the simpler, basic ambulances.

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By MANEESH JUNEJA

This is the most difficult blog post I’ve ever had to write. Almost 3 months ago, my sister passed away unexpectedly. It’s too painful to talk about the details. We were extremely close and because of that the loss is even harder to cope with.

The story I want to tell you today is about what’s happened since that day and the impact it’s had on how I view the world. In my work, I spend considerable amounts of time with all sorts of technology, trying to understand what all these advances mean for our health. Looking back, from the start of this year, I’d been feeling increasingly concerned by the growing chorus of voices telling us that technology is the answer for every problem, when it comes to our health. Many of us have been conditioned to believe them. The narrative has been so intoxicating for some.

Ever since this tragedy, it’s not an app, or a sensor or data that I turned to. I have been craving authentic human connections. As I have tried to make sense of life and death, I have wanted to be able to relate to family and friends by making eye contact, giving and receiving hugs and simply just being present in the same room as them. The ‘care robot’ that had arrived from China this year as part of my research into whether robots can keep us company, remains switched off in its box. Amazon’s Echo, the smart assistant with a voice interface that I’d also been testing a lot also sits unused in my home. I used it most frequently to turn the lights on and off, but now I prefer walking over to the light switch and the tactile sensation of pressing the switch with my finger. One day last week, I was feeling sad, and didn’t feel like leaving the house, so I decided to try putting on my Virtual Reality (VR) headset, to join a virtual social space. I joined a virtual computer generated room where it was sunny and in someone’s back yard for a BBQ, I could see their avatars, and I chatted to them for about 15 minutes. After I took off the headset, I felt worse.

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By KIP SULLIVAN, JD

CMS has now conducted three demonstrations of the “accountable care organization,” and all of them have failed. The Physician Group Practice (PGP) Demonstration, which ran from 2005 to 2010, raised Medicare costs by 1.2 percent. [1] The Pioneer ACO program, which ran from 2012 through 2016, cut Medicare spending by three- or four-tenths of a percent on average over its first four years. And the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), which began in 2012 and may lumber on indefinitely, has raised Medicare costs by two-tenths of a percent on average over its first four years.

It is way past time for CMS and health policy researchers to determine why all three ACO demos failed. In the first two installments in this three-part series I laid out one of the reasons: CMS’s method of assigning patients to ACOs guarantees ACOs must apply their magic to a rapidly changing pool of patients and doctors. In the first essay , I demonstrated that this method, which assigns patients first to doctors based on where they get the plurality of their primary care visits and then to ACOs if their doctors are in ACOs, guarantees high churn rates among doctors and patients, shunts sicker patients away from the ACOs, and assigns few ACO patients to each ACO doctor. In the second essay I reviewed the series of evidence-free decisions that led to CMS’s plurality-of-visits method. I noted that the first of these decisions was one Congress made: They instructed CMS to figure out how to assign patients to ACOs without making patients enroll in ACOs.

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