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Net Effect of Expanding Medicaid

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By SAURABH JHA MD 

What is the effect of expanding Medicaid on overall healthcare costs and use of the emergency room? This type of question can’t easily be answered by observational studies and requires a randomized controlled trial (RCT). But an RCT isn’t easy to perform. However, a natural RCT serendipitously happened in Oregon a few years ago when Medicaid was expanded and the eligibility was deemed by a lottery system.

On this episode of Firing Line, Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad) speaks to Professor Katherine Baicker, a leading economist and the Dean of the Harris School of Public Policy, and principal investigator of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, about the landmark study.

Listen to our conversation here at Radiology Firing Line Podcast.

Commissioning Healthcare Policy: Hospital Readmission and Its Price Tag

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By ANISH KOKA MD 

The message comes in over the office slack line at 1:05 pm. There are four patients in rooms, one new, 3 patients in the waiting room. Really, not an ideal time to deal with this particular message.

“Kathy the home care nurse for Mrs. C called and said her weight yesterday was 185, today it is 194, she has +4 pitting edema, heart rate 120, BP 140/70 standing, 120/64 sitting”

I know Mrs. C well. She has severe COPD from smoking for 45 of the last 55 years. Every breath looks like an effort because it is. The worst part of it all is that Mrs. C just returned home from the hospital just days ago.

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Not Fake News! A Trump Administration Rule Models Government Civility

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By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON 

A Trump administration regulation issued just hours before the partial federal shutdown offers quiet hope for civility in government.

What happened, on its face, was simple: an update of the rules governing a particular Medicare program. In today’s dyspeptic political climate, however, what didn’t happen along the way was truly remarkable – and may even offer some lessons for surviving the roller-coaster year ahead.

A regulatory process directly connected to Obamacare and billions in federal spending played out with ideological rhetoric completely absent. And while there were fervid objections to the draft rule from those affected, the final version reflected something that used to be commonplace: compromise.

Think of it as Survivor being replaced by Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Or, perhaps, a small opening in the wall of partisan conflict.

More on that in a moment. First, let’s briefly examine the specifics.

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New Study: Medicare’s Readmission Penalties May Be Killing Patients

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By KIP SULLIVAN JD 

On the morning of December 21, I opened my copy of the New York Times to find an op-ed that said almost exactly what I had said in a two-part article The Health Care Blog posted two weeks earlier. The op-ed criticized the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), one of dozens of “value-based payment” programs imposed on the Medicare fee-for-service program by the Affordable Care Act. The HRRP punishes hospitals if their rate of readmissions within 30 days following discharge exceeds the national average. The subtitle of the op-ed was, “A well-intentioned program created by the Affordable Care Act may have led to patient deaths.”

The first half of the op-ed made three points: (1) The HRRP appears to have reduced readmissions by raising the rate of observation stays and visits to emergency rooms;  (2) the penalties imposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for “excessive readmissions” have fallen disproportionately on “safety net hospitals with limited resources”; and (3) “there is growing evidence that … death rates may be rising.”

That’s exactly what I said in articles published here on December 6 and December 7. In Part I, I described the cavalier manner in which the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee (MedPAC) endorsed the HRRP in its June 2007 report to Congress. In Part II, I criticized the methodology MedPAC used to defend the HRRP in its June 2018 report to Congress, and I compared that report to an excellent study of the HRRP published in JAMA Cardiology by Ankur Gupta et al. which suggested the HRRP is raising mortality rates. In its June 2018 report, MedPAC had claimed the HRRP has reduced the rate at which patients targeted by the HRRP were readmitted within 30 days after discharge without increasing mortality. Gupta et al., on the other hand, found that for one group of targeted patients – those with congestive heart failure (CHF) – mortality went up as 30-day readmissions went down.

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Google Is Quietly Infiltrating Medicine — But What Rules Will It Play By?

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By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON 

With nearly 80 percent of internet users searching online for health-related information, it’s no wonder the catchphrase “Dr. Google” has caught on, to the delight of many searchers and the dismay of many real doctors.

What’s received little attention from physicians or the public is the company’s quiet metamorphosis into a powerhouse focused on the actual practice of medicine.

If “data is the new oil,” as the internet meme has it, Google and its Big Tech brethren could become the new OPEC. Search is only the start for Google and its parent company, Alphabet. Their involvement in health care can continue through a doctor’s diagnosis and even into monitoring a patient’s chronic condition for, essentially, forever. (From here on, I’ll use the term Google to include the confusing intertwining of Google and Alphabet units.)

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Last Month in Oncology with Dr. Bishal Gyawali

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By BISHAL GYAWALI MD 

Long list of news in lung cancer

September was an important month in oncology—especially for lung cancer. The World Conference in Lung Cancer (WCLC) 2018 gave us some important practice-changing results, also leading to four NEJM publications. The trial with most public health impact is unfortunately not published yet. It’s the NELSON trial that randomised more than 15000 asymptomatic people at high risk of lung cancer to either CT-based screening for lung cancer or to no screening and found a significant reduction in lung cancer mortality rates among the screened cohort compared with the control cohort. This reduction was more pronounced among women, although they constituted only 16% of the trial population. I am looking forward to reading the full publication and am particularly interested in knowing if there were any differences in all-cause mortality rates and the rates of overdiagnoses.

A new ALK-inhibitor on the block—brigatinib—has significantly improved PFS versus crizotinib when used as first-line therapy in ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. However, I assume that it will be difficult for brigatinib to replace alectinib in this setting, since the latter has already been tested in two different RCTs and has more mature data.

With Keynote 407, pembrolizumab has entered into the treatment arsenal for squamous NSCLC by improving overall survival in combination with chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone as a first-line regimen. However, when A B is compared with A, it is important to know whether A B is better than A followed by B. In this trial, 32% of patients who were in the control arm received a PD-1 inhibitor upon progression. Nivolumab is already approved as a second-line option in this setting after first-line chemo; so how much benefit in Keynote 407 is due to more than half of control arm patients not getting PD-1 inhibitor at all versus the benefit of combining pembrolizumab with chemo upfront is an important question.

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Into America: The Odds Against a Foreign Trained Doctor

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By SAURABH JHA MD 

In this episode of Firing Line, Saurabh Jha (aka @RogueRad), has a conversation with Chadi Nabhan, MD MBA FACP, who is a preeminent oncologist, speaker and the Chief Medical Officer of Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions.

At the great heights of his career, and a secure American citizen, Chadi recalls the struggle and effort it took to get from Syria to Boston. He credits his journey to good luck and a tenacious drive and uncompromising desire to work in the U.S. Chadi speaks for thousands of international medical graduates to fight odds to get here.

Listen to our conversation at Radiology Firing Line Podcast.

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 Root Cause of Physician Burnout: Neither Professionals nor Skilled Workers

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BY HANS DUVEFELT MD 

Too many specific theories about physician burnout can cloud the real issue and allow healthcare leaders to circle around the “elephant in the room”.

The cause of physician burnout isn’t just the EMRs, Meaningful Use, CMS regulations, the chronic disease epidemic or any other single item.

Instead, it is simply this: Healthcare today has no clear definition of what a physician is. We are more or less suddenly finding ourselves on a playing field, tackled and hollered at, without knowing what sport we are playing and what the rules are.

Historically, physicians have been viewed as professionals and also, more lately, as skilled workers. But we are more and more viewed and treated as neither. Therein lies the problem.

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The Death of Cancer: Book Review and Reflections

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By CHADI NABHAN MD, MBA, FACP

Some books draw you in based on a catchy title, a provocative book jacket, or familiarity with the author. For me, recollections of medical school primers written by the renowned lymphoma pioneer Vincent DeVita Jr. and my own path as an oncologist immediately attracted me to “The Death of Cancer.” I felt a connection to this book before even reading it and prepped myself for an optimistic message about how the cancer field is moving forward. Did I get what I bargained for?

Co-authored with his daughter, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, DeVita brings us back decades ago to when he had just started at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under the wings of Jay Freireich and Tom Frei. At the time, he was a clinical associate and a “chemotherapist”; the field was ultimately renamed and defined as medical oncology. (Note to self: I am ecstatic the field was renamed; I would prefer to be called a medical oncologist anytime than a chemotherapist, but that’s just me). He recounts how chemotherapy was frowned upon in favor of the two preferable ways to treat cancer at the time: surgery and radiotherapy. DeVita eloquently describes how his mentors were ridiculed when they announced their pursuit to cure childhood leukemia using combination chemotherapy; their approach and determination provided him with inspiration to push his research further. He goes on to describe in a fascinating manner the way he designed the MOPP regimen, which cured many patients with Hodgkin lymphoma. He recounts events when he presented his own MOPP data, and how he was verbally attacked by radiotherapists who claimed his data were insufficient and attempts to drive them “out of business”. Even in 2018, my radiation oncology colleagues protest when medical oncologists challenge the role of radiation therapy in Hodgkin lymphoma. I have actually grown tired of attending debates between any two prominent lymphoma figures discussing whether to use radiation or not in such setting; there are better topics to argue about, like who might win the Super Bowl.

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Creating an Infrastructure of Health Data to Support Amazon’s Leap into Healthcare

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Claudia Williams, Manifest MedEx, Amazon

By CLAUDIA WILLIAMS 

Amazon has transformed the way we read books, shop online, host websites, do cloud computing, and watch TV. Can they apply their successes in all these other areas to healthcare?

Just last week, Amazon announced Comprehend Medical, machine learning software that digitizes and processes medical records. “The process of developing clinical trials and connecting them with the right patients requires research teams to sift through and label mountains of unstructured clinical record data,” Fred Hutchinson CIO Matthew Trunnell is quoted saying in a MedCity News article. “Amazon Comprehend Medical will reduce this time burden from hours to seconds. This is a vital step toward getting researchers rapid access to the information they need when they need it so they can find actionable insights to advance life-saving therapies for patients.”

Deriving insights from data and making those available in a user-friendly way to patients and clinicians is just what we need from technology innovators. But these tools are useless without data. If an oncology patient is hospitalized, her provider may not be informed of her hospitalization for days or even weeks (or ever). And the situation is repeated for that same patient receiving care from cardiologists, endocrinologists, and other providers outside of her oncology clinic. When it comes to personalized health and medicine, both the quantity and quality of data matter. Providers need access to comprehensive patient health data so they can accurately and efficiently diagnose and treat patients and make use of technology that helps them identify “actionable insights.”

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