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Matthew Holt

The Future of the Affordable Care Act: Unscathed by Attacks from the Right, Overtaken on its Left?

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By ETIENNE DEFFARGES 

Having survived years of attacks from Republicans at the federal level, will the surviving ACA be rendered obsolete by Democrats’ local and state efforts towards universal health care? This could be an ironic twist of fate for Obamacare. Conceived out of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s ideas and an early experiment in Massachusetts under a Republican governor, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement could very well survive its most recent judiciary challenge. But over time the ACA is susceptible to obsolescence, because of the many universal health care solutions being pushed at the state level.

Let’s start this brief outlook for Obamacare by reviewing how it has played defense, quite successfully thus far: During most of 2017 and 2018, the future of the ACA was always discussed in the context of Republican efforts to repeal it. After all, the GOP controlled the White House and both Chambers of Congress. Hadn’t Republicans spent the last four years of the Obama administration promising to repeal Obamacare the instant they could? And so they went after the ACA in 2017 with all the levers of Washington power. But repealing is one thing, legislating another: We know what happened in July 2017, when the last “repeal and replace” effort was defeated in the U.S. Senate by the narrowest of margins, because three Republican Senators, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and the late and much regretted John McCain, voted against the repeal. With their December 22 tax law, Republicans did succeed in eliminating the ACA’s individual mandate tax penalty owed by individuals failing to maintain “minimum essential coverage.” Most medical plans qualify for this, as long as they meet a number of requirements, such as not charging more for pre-existing conditions. For good measure, the Trump administration used executive orders in 2018 to allow low-cost plans not meeting these ACA guidelines to be offered by employers. Twenty state attorney generals from Republican states, led by Texas and Wisconsin, also initiated litigation against the ACA, arguing that without the tax penalty the law had become unconstitutional.

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The Perfect Storm: When Parkinson’s Patients Enter the Hospital

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By HOOMAN AZMI MD, FAANS 

When a patient enters a hospital either in an elective or more urgent manner, the main focus of the care team is to address the chief complaint. Other diagnoses, while important, may not receive as much attention. While this may not affect patients in most circumstances, it can be very impactful in patients who have Parkinson’s disease (PD). Studies have demonstrated that when patients with Parkinson’s disease enter the hospital, they are more susceptible to developing hospital related complications. Patients with Parkinson’s disease have a higher length of stay (LOS) than those entering the hospital for the same diagnosis without PD and can develop complications such as dysphagia, confusion and falls, impacting their outcomes and increasing their LOS.

Awareness about PD and its treatment and implications thereof are critical in ensuring reduced risks for this patient population. People with PD are very dependent on their medication, and timing of this medication is critical to maintaining good symptomatic control. In the outpatient setting, the main goal of medication management for these patients is to provide as much ON time as possible while minimizing side effects of the medications, such as dyskinesia. ON time describes a period of time when the medications are working and symptoms are controlled. Patients with advanced PD may have considerable difficulty with motor fluctuations if they transition from the ON state to an OFF state when the medication effect has worn off and they are symptomatic. The fine tuning of the medication regimen is pain-staking and often the result of multiple office visits and telephone calls to arrive at the best schedule customized for the patient.  This can often result in seemingly unconventional timings (sometimes on the quarter after the hour) and at time q3 or even q2 intervals. Deviations from these regimens, even as little as 15 minutes delays, can have deleterious effects on patients with PD, as detailed above.

When patients with PD enter the hospital, attention is seldom paid to the exact timing of medication administration.  If a patient takes a particular medication six times daily, ordering the medication six times daily in the hospital defaults to standard timings that often are different from the patients’ own regimen, causing timing errors.  Almost 75% of PD patients who enter the hospital have delays in their medications and more than 60% of these patients can have complications during their hospitalization because of these delays.

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Has U.S. Health Care Spending Finally Stabilized? An Outlook for 2019

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By ETIENNE DEFFARGES 

The official 2017 statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) are out, and there are some good news: The annual growth rate of health care spending is slowing down, and is the lowest since 2013 at 3.9%—it was 4.3% for 2016 and 5.8% for 2015. The bad news is that our health care cost increases are still well above inflation, and that we spent $3.5 trillion in this area, or 17.9% of GDP. Americans spent $10,739 on health care in 2017, more than twice as much as of our direct economic competitors: This per capita health care spending was $4,700 in Japan; $5,700 in Germany; $4,900 in France; $4,200 in the U.K.; $4,800 in Canada; and an average of $5,300 for a dozen such wealthy countries, according to the Peterson -Kaiser health system tracker from the Kaiser Family Foundation, and OECD data. Spending almost a fifth of our GDP on health care, compared to 9-11% for other large developed economies (and much less in China), is like having a chain tied to our ankles when it comes to our economic competitiveness.

Could 2019 be the year when our health care spending actually decreases, or at least grows at a slower pace than inflation? Or will we see instead an uptick in costs for health care consumers?

To answer these questions, we need to look in more detail at the largest areas of health care spending in America, and at the recent but also longer term spending trends in these areas. Using the annual statistics from the DHHS, we can compare the growth in spending in half a dozen critical health care categories with the growth in total spending, and this for the last three years as well as the last decade. Over the last decade, since 2007, these costs grew 52% in aggregate (from $2.3T to $3.5T) and 41% per capita (from $7,630 to $10,740).

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 65 | Microsoft-Walgreens, Google, and HIMSS

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess is braving the oncoming blizzard in Boston for MassChallenge. In this episode, Jess asks me about some crazy things happening in health tech, from the recently announced Microsoft-Walgreens partnership to compete with Amazon, to Google buying new smartwatch technology from Fossil, to Jim Cramer’s suggestion that Apple should buy Epic. Also in some HIMSS news, Atul Gawande has pulled out of HIMSS. But—I’ve got a booth for Smack Health at HIMSS this year, so stop by to find some Smack startups & Jess doing WTF Health interviews as well. –Matthew Holt

A Bizarre Claim of Right to Try

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Kelly McBride Folkers
Andrew McFayden
Arthur Caplan

By ARTHUR CAPLAN, KELLY MCBRIDE FOLKERS, and ANDREW MCFADYEN 

A patient with glioblastoma recently received an experimental cancer vaccine at the University of California, Irvine. Notably, this is being hailed as the first case of someone utilizing the Right to Try Act of 2017. ERC-USA, a U.S. subsidiary of the Brussels-based pharmaceutical company Epitopoietic Research Corporation, says it provided its product, Gliovac, to the patient at no cost. The vaccine is currently undergoing Phase II clinical trials. A handful of people in Europe have received access to it through “compassionate use.” This patient did not qualify for ongoing clinical trials in the U.S. The patient, who remains anonymous, is the first known individual to receive an experimental medicine that has not been approved by the FDA, as permitted under the federal right to try law.

Glioblastoma is a nasty cancer – John McCain and Ted Kennedy passed away after battling the disease for just over a year. We believe that patients with terminal illnesses, like those with glioblastoma, should have every reasonable tool at their disposal to treat their disease.

That being said, we’ve argued before that right to try laws are not the best way to help desperate patients. They still aren’t. The number of cases claimed to date is exactly one. And, further examination of what we know about this case does not make a strong argument for the widespread usage of the right to try pathway.

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Venture Capitalism & Radiology

By SAURABH JHA MD 

Can radiologists make their way to Silicon Valley? In this episode of Radiology Firing Line, Ajay Kohli MD, a physician entrepreneur, explains what it takes to make a medical app.

Listen to our conversation here.

Saurabh Jha is a contributing editor to THCB and host of Radiology Firing Line Podcast of the Journal of American College of Radiology, sponsored by Healthcare Administrative Partner

The Perfect Office Note? SOAP, APSO or aSOAP?

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By HANS DUVEFELT MD 

I’ve been toying with this dilemma for a while: SOAP notes (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) are too long; APSO just jumbles the order, but the core items are still too far apart, with too much fluff in between. We need something better – aSOAP!

Electronic medical record notes are simply way too cumbersome, no matter in what order the segments are displayed, to be of much use if we quickly want to check what happened in the last few office visits before entering the exam room.

It is time we do something different, and I believe the solution is under our noses every day, at least if we read the medical journals:

I can be aware of what’s going on in the medical literature without reading every article. How? Think about it…

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The Growing Problem of Military Suicides

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By MSW@USC STAFF

U.S. veterans are dying by suicide at an alarming pace.

The national veteran suicide rate was almost 30 per 100,000 people in 2015, or about 20 deaths every day, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The age-adjusted rate of suicide among veterans increased more than 30 percent from 2005 to 2015, compared to an almost 20 percent increase among the non-veteran population. Female veterans in particular saw a 45 percent spike over that time period.

“Military life is hard for a variety of reasons, including an increased exposure to trauma, frequent moves that disrupt one’s social support networks and prolonged separations due to deployments,” said Carl Castro, associate professor, retired U.S. Army colonel and director for USC’s Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families (CIR).

To address climbing suicide rates among active-duty service members and veterans, the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS), in collaboration with USC CIR and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering External link , will use artificial intelligence to examine engagement on social networks by military personnel to identity risks such as depression and anxiety.
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Despite Youth On Farm, Abbott Ventures Chief Avoids Spreading Manure

By MICHAEL MILLENSON 

Abbott Ventures chief Evan Norton may have spent part of his youth on a farm, but there’s no manure in his manner when speaking of the medical device and diagnostics market landscape. The key, he says, is to avoid being blindsided by the transformational power of digital data.

“We’ve been competing against Medtronic and J&J, so that has the risk of us being disintermediated by other players that come into the market,” Norton told attendees at MedCity Invest, a meeting focused on health care entrepreneurs. “Physicians are coming to us and asking for access to data for decisions, and they don’t care who the manufacturer [of the device] is. Are we enabling data creation?”

Abbott, said Norton, wrestles with whether they are simply data creators or want to get paid for providing algorithmic guidance on how the data is used. (Full disclosure: I own Abbott shares.) Other panelists agreed making sense of the digital data deluge remains the central business challenge.

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 64 | J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

Today, for the first episode of Health in 2 Point 00 of 2019, Jess and I are reporting from the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. In this episode, Jess asks me about the big news from the conference and whether there should be a second event in New York. We also have our special guest star, Dr. Iya Khalil, to tell us about the non-profit Female Equity –Matthew Holt