Category: Uncategorized

Hospital Acquired Infections: How Do We Reach Zero?

Mar 30, 2014• 4

By PETER PRONOVOST, MD

This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued two reports that are simultaneously scary and encouraging.

First, the scary news: A national survey conducted in 2011 found that one in every 25 U.S. hospital patients experienced a healthcare-associated infection. That’s 648,000 patients with a combined 722,000 infections.

About 75,000 of those patients died during their hospitalizations, although it’s unknown how many of those deaths resulted from the infections, the CDC researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

On the bright side, those numbers are less than half the number of hospital-acquired infections that a national survey estimated in 2007. And a second report issued this week found significant decreases in several infection types that have seen the most focused prevention efforts on a national scale.

Noteworthy was a 44 percent decrease in central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) between 2008 and 2012, as well as a 20 percent reduction in infections related to 10 surgical procedures over the same time period.

These infections were once thought to be inevitable, resulting from patients who were too old, too sick or just plain unlucky. We now know that we can put a significant dent in these events, and even achieve zero infections among the most vulnerable patients.

At Johns Hopkins, we created a program that combated CLABSI in intensive care units through a multi-pronged approach—implementing a simple checklist of evidence-based measures while changing culture and caregivers’ attitudes through an approach called the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP). The success was replicated on a larger scale across 103 Michigan ICUs and then later across most U.S. states, withimpressive results.

These and similar successes have changed caregivers’ beliefs about what is possible, and inspired more efforts to reach zero infections.

What will it take to attain this goal—or at least get much closer?

Numbers We’d Rather Be Talking About

Mar 29, 2014• 11

By JOHN IRVINE

You’ll be hearing a lot about the number six point five million over the next few days.

Six point five million — or whatever the exact number turns out to be at the end of the day — being the number of people that the administration say signed up for Obamacare through the exchanges when open enrollment ends March 31st.

How meaningful the official numbers are will be open to debate. The bloviation factor will be in full effect. The critics will be downplaying the administration’s number, ACA supporters defending it. Data geeks-turned-media stars will explain what it all means.

Here’s a guide to some of the other numbers we should be talking about as we try to make sense of what’s really going on and what really happened during the Obamacare rollout.

FUDs: The number of people who are innocently living their lives thinking they have bought health insurance, but who, for one reason or another, be it technical glitch, bureaucratic incompetence or technicality – are going to wake up one morning not long from now and discover that they do not have health insurance.

And who one day soon will discover that they do not have health insurance. This is the group that causes people in Washington to lie awake at night; because they are going to complain – and complain loudly. While the talk from the administration to this point has been all tough, it seems logical to assume it will build an appeal mechanism that will allow FUDs back into the system. The early signs are that this is the case.

404s : The number of people / applications lost in the system, either as a result of the Healthcare.gov fiasco or because their application is sitting forgotten on somebody’s desk somewhere or on a laptop. Anybody who tried to log into Healthcare.gov at the height of the meltdown or who has gone back and forth with their insurance company over a bill gets it.

It is safe to assume that this is another number that keeps planners up at night. Let’s just say it is safe to assume that there are a lot of 404s.

CANCELS: The number of people who had their insurance plans cancelled by insurers on the grounds that they did not meet the standards set by the Affordable Care Act. In a way, being a cancel can be considered a badge of honor in the gamification of the healthcare system that is Obamacare.

UNCANCELS: The number of people who had their plans cancelled by the health insurers only to have them declared “uncancelled” by the Obama administration or their state. Nobody really knows how many uncancels there are. Don’t ask. Yes, it will take a really long time to sort out the uncancels from the cancels and the QHPs.

And you will probably want to shoot the person explaining it to you. In the gamification of the healthcare system, level ups go to people who have been cancelled, uncancelled and bumped.

BUMPS: The number of people who have been “bumped” out of network and are being forced to change doctors. What’s going on? In gamification terms, bumps make things more exciting. In real life, they suck. Getting bumped off a flight is annoying, getting bumped in the health care system is potentially life-threatening.

LIVES SAVED: As we speak Nate Silver or a smart person who looks and sounds a lot like Nate Silver is sitting at a computer in a darkened room somewhere trying to come up with a reliable quantification of the number of lives the Affordable Care Act has saved and will save by shielding people from the barbaric US healthcare system.

How would you go about coming up with that number? Would you look at people turned away from emergency rooms? Would you look at the number of preventable deaths under the old system? Would you total the number of deaths from cancer, heart attack and stroke? Compare mortality rates over the decade from 2004-2014 with those from 2014-2024? It will be long time before we have the data we need to really understand how well we’ve done.

You can forget the nonsense we’ve been hearing about Obamacare costing the lives of thousands of Americans by taking their health coverage away from them. There is a difference between losing your coverage temporarily because the system is in transition and losing it and knowing that you’ll never be able to get it back. Ever.

Calculated over decades to come the number of lives saved is likely to total in the thousands, if not the millions. And that will be the true test of the Affordable Care Act as a historical accomplishment for Barak Obama and his administration.

Is Medicine a Big Data Problem?

Mar 29, 2014• 4

By Ted Driscoll

Human beings are big data. We aren’t just 175 pounds of meat and bone. We aren’t just piles of hydrogen and carbon and oxygen. What makes us all different is how it’s all organized and that is information.

We can no longer treat people based on simple numbers like weight, pulse, blood pressure, and temperature. What makes us different is much more complicated than that.

We’ve known for decades that we are all slightly different genetically, but now we can increasingly see those differences. The Hippocratic oath will require doctors to take this genetic variability into account.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for hands-on medicine, empathy, psychology and moral support. But the personalized handling of each patient is becoming much more complicated. The more data we can gather, the more each individual is different from others.

In our genome, we have approximately 3 billion base pairs in each of our trillions of cells. We have more than 25,000 genes in that genome, sometimes called the exome. Each gene contains instructions on how to make a useful protein. And then there are long stretches of our genomes that regulate those protein-manufacturing genes.

In the early days, some researchers called this “junk DNA” because they didn’t know what it did. But this was foolish because why would evolution conserve these DNA sequences between genes if they did nothing? Now we know they too do things that make us unique.

For Hospitals and Health Systems: Strategies for Doing More with Less

Mar 28, 2014• 20

By Joe Flower

The conversation has changed.

The old conversation: “You cost too much.”

“But we have these sunk costs, patients who can’t pay … ”

“OK, how about a little less then?”

The new conversation: “You cost too much. We will pay half, or a third, of what you are asking. Or we will take our business elsewhere. Starting now.”

“But … but … how?”

Exactly: How will you survive on a lot less money? What are the strategies that turn “impossible” to “not impossible”?

New Strategies
The old conversation arises from the classic U.S. health care model: a fully insured fee-for-service system with zero price transparency, where the true costs of any particular service are unknown even to the provider. The overwhelmingly massive congeries of disjointed pieces that we absurdly call our health care “system” rides on only the loosest general relationship between costs and reimbursements.

It’s a messy system littered with black boxes labeled “Something Happens Here,” full of little hand waves and “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”

With bundling, medical tourism, mandated transparency, consumer price shopping, and reference pricing by employers and health plans, we increasingly are being forced to name a price and compete on it. Suddenly, we must be orders of magnitude more precise about where our money comes from and where it goes: revenues and costs.

We must find ways to discover how each part of the strategy affects others. And we need some ability to forecast how outside forces (new competition, new payment strategies by employers and health plans, new customer handling technologies) will affect our strategy.

Key Strategy Questions
For decades, whenever some path to profit in health care has arisen (in vitro fertilization, urgent care, retail, wellness and the others) most hospitals have said as if by ritual, “That is not the business we are in.” As long as we got paid for waste, few health care organizations got serious about rooting it out.

And most have seemed content with business structures that put many costs and many sources of revenue beyond their control.

In the Next Health Care, the key strategy questions become:

Why are you not capturing as many revenue streams as possible?

How PCORI’s Research Will Answer the Real World Questions Patients Are Asking

Mar 27, 2014• 8

By Joe Selby, MD

As a physician, I know the challenge of helping patients determine which health care options might work best for them given their personal situation and preferences.

Too often they — and their clinicians — must make choices about preventing, diagnosing and treating diseases and health conditions without adequate information. The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) was created to help solve this problem — to help patients and those who care for them make better-informed health decisions.

Established by Congress through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as an independent research institute, PCORI is designed to answer real-world questions about what works best for patients based on their particular circumstances and concerns. We do this primarily by funding comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER), studies that compare multiple care options.

But more research by itself won’t improve clinical decision-making. Patients and those who care for them must be able to easily find relevant evidence they can trust. That’s why our mandate is not just to fund high-quality CER and evidence synthesis but to share the results in ways that are meaningful to patients, clinicians and others.

We’re also charged with improving the methods used in conducting those studies and enhancing our nation’s capacity to do such research.

We will be evaluated ultimately on whether the research we fund can change clinical practice and help reduce the variations and disparities that stand between patients and better outcomes. We’re confident that the work we’re funding brings us and the audiences we serve closer to that goal.

Recently, some questions have been raised in health policy circles about our holistic approach to PCORI’s work. That view holds that direct comparisons of health care options — especially those involving high-priced interventions — should be the dominant if not sole focus of PCORI’s research funding approach as a path to limiting the use of expensive, less-effective options.

We agree that discovering new knowledge on how therapies compare with one another is a critical mandate of PCORI and is essential to improving the quality and effectiveness of care. However, ensuring that patients and those who care for them have timely access to and can use this knowledge, so that they can effectively apply it to improve their decisions, is also very important.

Here’s How We Can Fix Obamacare if We Act Now and Stop Pretending the Problems Don’t Exist

Mar 26, 2014• 30

By Robert Laszewski

To properly price the exchange health insurance business going forward the carriers have to sharply increase the rates.

A senior executive for Wellpoint, which sells plans in 14 Obamacare exchanges, is quoted in a Reuters article telling Wall Street analysts there will be big rate increases in 2015, “Looking at the rate increases on a year-over-year basis on our exchanges, and it will vary by carrier, but all of them will probably be double digits.”

If the health plans do issue double digit rate increases for 2015, Obamacare is finished.

There are a ton of things that need to be fixed in Obamacare. But, I will suggest there is one thing that could save it.

The health insurance companies have to submit their new health insurance plans and rates between May 27 and June 27 for the 2015 Obamacare open-enrollment period beginning on November 15th. Any major modifications to the current Obamacare regulations need to be issued in the next month to give the carriers time to adjust and develop new products.

If the administration goes into the next open enrollment with the same unattractive plan offerings costing a lot more than they do today, they will not be able to reboot Obamacare.

Simply, health insurance plans that cost middle-class individuals and families 10% of their after-tax income and have average Silver Plan deductibles of more than $2,500 a month are not attractive and people won’t buy them any more enthusiastically next fall than they already have. See: Obamacare: The Uninsured Are Not Signing Up Because the Dogs Don’t Like It

Doubling the fines for not buying in 2015 will only give the Democrats more political problems––and it doesn’t look to me like they are going to enforce the fines anyway.

Health insurance plan executives are now faced with a daunting decision. How do they price the 2015 Obamacare exchange plans?

Even if the administration announces they have signed-up about 6 million people by March 31, the number of people enrolling would be well below expectations––only about 25% of those subsidy eligible will have signed up by the deadline. An enrollment that small guarantees the risk pool is sicker and more expensive than it needs to be in order to be sustainable.

But dramatically increasing the rates will only assure even fewer healthy people will sign up for 2015 and some of those who signed up for 2014 will back out over the higher rates. This is what a “death spiral” looks like.

Google Flu Trends Shows Good Data > Big Data

Mar 26, 2014• 3

By Kaiser Fung

In their best-selling 2013 book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier selected Google Flu Trends (GFT) as the lede of chapter one.

They explained how Google’s algorithm mined five years of web logs, containing hundreds of billions of searches, and created a predictive model utilizing 45 search terms that “proved to be a more useful and timely indicator [of flu] than government statistics with their natural reporting lags.”

Unfortunately, no. The first sign of trouble emerged in 2009, shortly after GFT launched, when it completely missed the swine flu pandemic. Last year, Nature reported that Flu Trends overestimated by 50% the peak Christmas season flu of 2012. Last week came the most damning evaluation yet.

In Science, a team of Harvard-affiliated researchers published their findings that GFT has over-estimated the prevalence of flu for 100 out of the last 108 weeks; it’s been wrong since August 2011.

The Science article further points out that a simplistic forecasting model—a model as basic as one that predicts the temperature by looking at recent-past temperatures—would have forecasted flu better than GFT.

In short, you wouldn’t have needed big data at all to do better than Google Flu Trends. Ouch.

In fact, GFT’s poor track record is hardly a secret to big data and GFT followers like me, and it points to a little bit of a big problem in the big data business that many of us have been discussing: Data validity is being consistently overstated.

As the Harvard researchers warn: “The core challenge is that most big data that have received popular attention are not the output of instruments designed to produce valid and reliable data amenable for scientific analysis.”

The amount of data still tends to dominate discussion of big data’s value. But more data in itself does not lead to better analysis, as amply demonstrated with Flu Trends. Large datasets don’t guarantee valid datasets. That’s a bad assumption, but one that’s used all the time to justify the use of and results from big data projects.

Commentology: The Creative Destruction of Healthcare

Mar 26, 2014• 3

By THCBist

THCB reader and occasional contributor Dave Chase had this to say about Bill Crounse, MD’s recent post “Why the Creative Destruction of Healthcare May Not Be a Good Idea.”

“There is no doubt there are some obnoxious people throwing around arrogant/naive ideas. However, the “creative destruction” and “disruptive innovation” that has been most impactful has come from physician-entrepreneurs. Often, they are the most provocative and hard-hitting in their language.

It seems loosely similar to how the most virulent anti-smokers are former smokers. They want others who they can relate to experience the liberation they’ve experienced.

I wouldn’t assume ill-intent from these MD-entrepreneurs using direct language. They simply were fed up with what they experienced as “broken” and stepped up with approaches that have out-performed.

I’m thinking about the MD-entrepreneurs and innovators who have led CareMore, Nuka Model of Care, Qliance, Iora Health, MedLion, Healthcare Partners, etc. Sometimes to catalyze change, one must use stark, hard-hitting language.

That doesn’t seem like a foreign concept to the many excellent MDs I’ve known over the years. I have enormous respect for any entrepreneur, especially one coming from tradition-bound professions who are willing to stick their neck out and endure enormous personal financial risk.

Bob Margolis shared how his colleagues referred to him as a “communist” and his team-based model as “communism” yet Bob’s org achieved far better outcomes. He had the last laugh when that “communist” sold his business for $4.4B last year.

The comments from these MD-entrepreneurs is they feel they aren’t doing their MD friends any favors by candy-coating what is widely recognized as a system that isn’t close to reaching its full potential.

In contrast, the orgs those MD-entrepreneurs are running are the reigning “Triple Aim Champs” that we should celebrate — colorful language or not. Often the most impactful entrepreneurs aren’t particularly “polite” in their language — Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison et al called it like they saw it.

What’s wrong with that?”

Will eClinicalWorks Win the Race to “Engage” the Patient?

Mar 26, 2014• 4

By Kim Krueger

Patient engagement, for better or worse, is one of those buzzwords that won’t be leaving us anytime soon.

A whole slew of companies use it to describe their products, platforms, and services, but we’re still knee deep in marketing jargon trying to figure out exactly what these tools do and how “effective” they really are.

We got a closer look at one such tool last month at HIMSS from a company that also finds itself knee deep in patient engagement.

eClinicalWorks debuted in 1999 as the Southwest Airlines of electronic health records (EHR). They offered a relatively low cost combined EHR/practice management system, which quickly made them significant players in the small practice market, adding more than 3,000 doctors in just three years.

It wasn’t until 2007 though that eClinicalWorks really broke through when then Assistant New York City Health Commissioner and future National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Dr. Farzad Mostashari selected them for installation with more than 1,300 New York City physicians as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s Primary Care Information Project (PCIP).

Now, eClinicalWorks counts more than 100,000 physician users in over 50,000 facilities in addition to another 14 million users on their patient engagement tool, Healow.

Actually, It’s a Great Time to Be a Doctor

Mar 26, 2014• 8

By Jeffrey Weisz, MD

Is this a good time to be a physician? Absolutely! In fact, I believe there has never been a better time to practice medicine. I hold this belief despite the barrage of negative comments and predictions from doomsayers remarking on the sorry state of health care in its current state.

Before I tell you why I’m so optimistic, I’d like to acknowledge one fact: practicing medicine is more complex and difficult than ever, however, this fact doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm. There is no doubt that over the past two decades a great many changes in the health care environment have consumed doctors’ time, distracted us from our core task of providing care, and impacted our incomes.

Meanwhile, patients’ expectations of the health care industry and of their physicians are changing. An increasing number of people want more involvement in their own health care and want to partner with their physician. So it is not hard to understand how practicing medicine can feel more challenging than ever.

For example: results from a national survey reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2012 indicated that US physicians suffer from more burnout than other American workers.

Burnout, in this report, was defined by “loss of enthusiasm for work, feelings of cynicism, and a low sense of personal accomplishment”; 45.8% of responding physicians had at least 1 of these symptoms.

So why am I so optimistic?

Because when I read these survey results, and others like them, bureaucracy and complexity are often cited as the reasons why physicians are unhappy. Not patient care.

While these factors (bureaucracy and complexity) can momentarily take physicians away from their passion of practicing medicine, it is the passion of a physician, precisely, that fuels my optimism for the state of health care today.