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My Triple Aim of Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Addicted Patients

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by HANS DUVEFELT, MD

My second foray into Suboxone treatment has evolved in a way I had not expected, but I think I have stumbled onto something profound:

Almost six months into our in-house clinic’s existence, I have found myself prescribing and adjusting treatment for about half of my MAT patients for co-occurring anxiety, depression, bipolar disease and ADHD as well as restless leg syndrome, asthma and various infectious diseases.

Years ago, working in a mental health clinic, we had strict rules to defer everything to each patient’s primary care provider that wasn’t strictly related to Suboxone treatment. One problem was that many of our patients there didn’t have a medical home or had difficulty accessing services. Another problem was that primary care providers unfamiliar with opioid addiction treatment were uncomfortable prescribing almost anything to patients on Suboxone.

Continue reading…

Medicare Holds Out Promise of Health Record Access Revolution

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By MICHAEL MILLENSON

This is the second of two posts from the Society of Participatory Medicine about the important policy issue regarding portability of our medical records. The first provided background, with link to a PDF of the comments SPM submitted, largely authored by Michael Millenson, who provides this essay for context.

The Trump administration is proposing to use a powerful financial lever to push hospitals into making the patient’s electronic medical record interoperable – that is, readable by other care providers – and easily available to patients to download and organize via an app.

The possible new mandates, buried in a 479-page Federal Register “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), could become part of hospital “conditions of participation” in Medicare. That means if you don’t do it, Medicare, which accounts for about a third of an average hospital’s revenues, can drop you from the program.

In a comment period that closed June 25, we at the Society for Participatory Medicine registered our strong support for taking the administration rhetoric heard earlier this year, when White House senior advisor Jared Kushner promised a “technological health care revolution centered on patients,” and putting it into practice. The American Hospital Association (AHA), on the other hand, while professing its support for the ultimate goals of interoperability and patient electronic access, was equally strong in telling CMS it was going too far, too fast and with too punitive an approach.

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 37

Jessica DaMassa asks me about the American Well mega funding round, Cerner investing in Lumeris, and the new NHS England app. Which naturally descends into a conversation about England’s chances in the world cup semi-final tomorrow!–Matthew Holt

SPM’s comments on important proposed CMS interoperability rules

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By E-PATIENT DAVE DEBRONKART

This is the first of two posts from the Society of Participatory Medicine about an important policy issue regarding portability of our medical records. The second part will be published tomorrow and is written by Michael Millenson, who did the lion’s share of this work, as noted below.

Our Society’s Advocacy and Policy chair Vera Rulon @VRulon has submitted our comments on the proposed rules that have been discussed at great length on social media.

These regulations are a big deal for participatory medicine – they’re the successor to the Meaningful Use rules that have governed patient access to their chart, among other things. The regulations do this by altering how a hospital gets paid based on how well their data moves out of their computers. We want this; we believe it is essential in enabling patients and families to achieve the best possible care. (More on this in Millenson’s companion post.)

Not surprisingly, some hospitals don’t like new rules that affect how they get paid, and have lobbied heavily to NOT be required to give us our data. Some observers say there are ulterior motives – for instance see these 30 seconds of Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz at Connected Health 2016, on how a health system CEO told him flat out:

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Health in 2 point 00, Episode 36

Back in the US of A to celebrate the nation’s birthday, Jessica DaMassa asks about Amazon buying Pill Pack, GE spinning off its health division, and what Rock Health and Startup Health’s numbers say about health tech investment–Matthew Holt

The Past, Present and Future of Health Care

OK, so it’s a tad of an ambitious title… but it was a talk that I gave in Finland last month. I had fun looking at the development of health and technology and suggesting a structure for the future. Plus I got to tell my Neil Armstrong joke. The talk was part of the Upgraded Life Festival in Helsinki and you can see some of the other speakers videos on their channel—Matthew Holt

Why I Tattooed My Health Data Over My Heart | WTF Health with Casey Quinlan

By JESSICA DAMASSA

WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health. 

How can patients help usher in a better future for healthcare? Start speaking up. LOUDLY.

In this WTF Health interview, meet one of health’s most outspoken patient advocates, Twitter voices (@mightycasey) and podcasters, Casey Quinlan of Mighty Casey Media, who talks about her patient journey as a cancer survivor — and why the awful experience led her to tattoo a QR code linking to her electronic medical record to her chest.

Casey’s ‘physical political protest’ is tied to her passionate views about the lack of data liquidity in healthcare and how patients suffer as a result. She’s launching a new “If-You’re-Selling-My-Health-Data-Cut-Me-In” Movement and weighs in on why more patients aren’t clamoring after their health data to push real change in the healthcare system.

Filmed at Health Datapalooza in Washington DC, April 2018.  

Stay Out of my Wellness

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By VA WEST HAVEN COE CLINIC

On a sunny New England morning at a secluded guest house with a perfectly manicured lawn, medical residents, each with their own brightly colored yoga mat, were getting ready to assume the downward dog position. They were on an annual retreat organized by their residency program to promote wellness. One embraced the opportunity with delight, smiling through every pose.  Another grimaced  as his back spasmed. And yet another wandered off towards a lake to find his own kind of respite.

Physician wellness has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and rightfully so considering that the rates of burnout and suicide within medicine are rising. Individual residency programs have found burnout rates between 55% and 76%. Such burnout erodes well-being over time and may be contributing to suicide, which is now the second leading cause of death among residents nationwide. In 2014, the suicides of two medical interns in New York prompted the American College of Graduate Medical Education to take action. A series of initiatives to combat burnout were rolled out, including the consideration of wellness in its review of residency programs during site visits. In 2017, emergency medicine physicians convened the first Residency Wellness Consensus Summit to devise a module-based curriculum on wellness. Hospital systems have attempted to respond as well, through the hiring of chief wellness officers.

It is unsurprising that the medical community has taken such an analytical approach towards diagnosing burnout, much as we do with other diseases, in search for a cure. But perhaps such a prescriptive approach fails to capture the highly individualized and somewhat abstract concept of wellness. The reasons for resident burnout are personal and vast. Decreased wellness has been attributed to the lack of time for self-care, inadequate sleep, social isolation, negative work environments, excessive paperwork, long work hours, poor relationships with colleagues, and insufficient mentorship, among others in a lengthy list. Any attempt to standardize the definition of wellness should be met with caution.

So how do we as a society go forward in ensuring our resident physicians are well?Continue reading…

Self-Driving Cars are Like Most EMRs

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by HANS DUVEFELT, MD

Drivers are distracted klutzes and computers could obviously do better. Self driving cars will make all of us safer on he road.

Doctors have spotty knowledge and keep illegible records. EMRs with decision support will improve the quality of healthcare.

The parallels are obvious. And so far the outcomes are disappointing on both fronts of our new war against human error.

I remember vividly flunking my first driving test in Sweden. It was early fall in 1972. I was in a baby blue Volvo with a long, wiggly stick shift on the floor. My examiner had a set of pedals on the passenger side of the car. At first I did well, starting the car on a hill and easing up the clutch with my left foot while depressing and then slowly releasing the brake pedal with my right forefoot and at the same time giving the car gas with my right heel.

I stopped appropriately for some pedestrians at a crosswalk and kept a safe distance from the other cars on the road.

A few minutes later, the instructor said “turn left here”. I did. That was the end of the test. He used his pedals. It was a one way street.

Three times this spring, driving in the dark between my two clinics, I have successfully swerved, at 75 miles (121 km) per hour, to avoid hitting a moose standing in the middle of the highway. Would a self driving car have done as well or better? Maybe, maybe not.

Every day I get red pop up warnings that the diabetic medication I am about to prescribe can cause low blood sugars. I would hope it might.

Almost daily I read 7 page emergency room reports that fail to mention the diagnosis or the treatment. Or maybe it’s there and I just don’t have enough time in my 15 minute visit to find it.

For a couple of years one of my clinics kept failing some basic quality measures because our hasty orientation to our EMR (there was a deadline for the incentive monies to purchase EMRs) resulted in us putting critical information in the wrong “results” box. When our scores improved, it had nothing to do with doing better for our patients, only clicking the right box to get credit for what we had been doing for decades before.

Our country has a naive and childish fascination with novelties. We worship disrupting technologies and undervalue continuous quality improvement, which was the mantra of the industrial era. It seems so old fashioned today, when everything seems to evolve at warp speed.

But the disasters of these new technologies should make us slow down and examine our motives. Change for the sake of change is not a virtue.

I know from my everyday painful experiences that EMRs often lack the most basic functionalities doctors want and need. Seeing a lab result without also seeing if the patient is scheduled to come back soon, or their phone number in case they need a call about their results, is plainly speaking a stupid interface design.

I know most EMRs weren’t created by doctors working in 15 minute appointments. I wonder who designed the software for self driving cars…

Hans Duvefelt is a family doctor in Maine. This piece was first published at his blog A Country Doctor Writes

Health in 2 point 00 -Episode 35, Shafi Ahmed takeover edition

Jessica DaMassa’s European tour continues. This week she’s at the #WebIT conference in Sofia, Bulgaria (no, I couldn’t find it on a map either!) and the #HealthIn2Point00 takeovers continue! This time the guest is pioneering British surgeon Shafi Ahmed, who has lots to say about medical education, the future of digital hospitals, what he’s up to in Bolivia and how cool #WebITHealth will be–Matthew Holt