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Category: Health Policy

As Shared Decision-Making Ails, AI May Save This Human Interaction

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

Shared decision-making between doctors and patients may be “the pinnacle of patient-centered care,” but three new medical journal articles suggest it’s encountering more problems than peaks. Yet counterintuitively, it may be artificial intelligence that rescues this intimately human interaction.

“Shared decision-making is at a crossroads,” declares a Perspective in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, “Saving Shared Decision-Making.” Unfortunately, its more-research-and-education recommendations for “advancing the science of SDM implementation,” seem more crossing guard than crisis management.

Even a cursory historical perspective shows that SDM is suffering from a failure to flourish. Back in 1982, a report by a presidential commission on ethics in medicine declared SDM “the appropriate ideal for patient-professional relationships” and called on doctors “to respect and enhance their patients’ capacities for wise exercise of their autonomy.”

Yet 43 years later, the Perspective authors – 18 members of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Shared Decision-Making Learning Community – acknowledged that while some doctors respectfully ask patients, “What do you think you would like to do, given these options?” many others still believe that, “Let’s do this option, sound OK?” is a shared decision process.

That attitude reminded me of a tongue-in-cheek comment by comedian Stephen Colbert. “See what we can accomplish when we work together by you doing what I say?” he told a 2015 Colbert Nation audience. “It’s called a partnership.”

Cancer Communication Curtailed

In cancer, where patient-doctor interactions have the highest stakes, shared decision-making was named one of the central components of quality care in a 1999 report, Ensuring Quality Cancer Care, by the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine). Nonetheless, a review of SDM among cancer patients in the journal Psycho-Oncology found that for physicians, “making decisions and taking responsibility for the decisions remain an important part of the physicians’ professional identity.” The fear of losing this identity, the authors wrote, “tends to hinder the patient involvement and implementation of SDM.”

Not surprisingly, cancer patients who want to speak up feel as if they won’t be listened to or can’t really refuse whatever their oncologist considers clinically “optimal.” And, it turns out, oncologists are actually less open to SDM if a patient does speak up and resists the recommendations they feel are in the patient’s best interest.

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Are the MA(HT)GA crowd going to be proud of themselves?

By MATTHEW HOLT

I have been trying hard to suppress this line of thought but when I woke up in the middle of the night with this piece basically fully formed in my head I couldn’t not write it. Yes I might lose some friends, but someone in health tech has to say this.

Last week a bunch of health tech companies, providers, plans and others went to the White House to an event remarkably called “Make American Health Technology Great Again”. The main organizer Amy Gleason is someone I consider an industry friend. No one can doubt her credentials in wanting to help patients, especially given her daughter Morgan’s medical condition and her awful experience in the health system. The initiatives spelled out–while they are voluntary and based on actions and regulations that are already on the books–will be net net good for American health care, and good for patients. 

Now, almost everything proposed is happening anyway. Anyone in health tech knows that it’s much easier to get health data and to run AI on it than it was in 2020, and it was way easier to get health data in 2020 than it was in 2016. Yes, of course it should be better and easier than it currently is. Yes, it should have happened quicker. Yes, the big provider systems and their main EMR Epic have not exactly bent over backwards to make data access more convenient for patients and innovators. Yes, of course there are too many demands to “send us a fax”. I personally had great fun with a UCSF-affiliated hospital last week, speaking to 5 different people and ending up both emailing and faxing them a referral to get an appointment. I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing the same thing in 2028. 

You can read tons more about the plans, the event and the voluntary agreement from luminaries like Lisa Bari and new dad Brendan Keeler.

But none of that is what is troubling me. What is deeply disturbing is the normalization of the people allegedly in charge of the nation’s health and health tech and the nonchalance and even knee-bending of those who went to the event last week.

Now I wasn’t there, even if several industry friends and clients were. I was at several similar events back in the Obama administration, but what we have seen from this Trump administration is a radical and toxic departure from America’s leadership in health and democracy, and it is not acceptable.

This is encapsulated by the people on the dias, and the actions they have taken.

Trump and his administration have committed so many egregious authoritarian acts that there’s no way to list them all. Just because people voted for him and the Congress and Judiciary is neutered does not obviate the fact that he was – deep breath – convicted of rape and separately found to be lying about mortgages in a civil court; convicted of 34 felonies for essentially tampering with the 2016 election; and impeached twice–once for politicizing America’s foreign policy and once for starting a violent coup. Don’t forget that at the time of the 2024 election he was being–another deep breath–prosecuted for stealing (and presumably selling) state secrets; being prosecuted for vote tampering in Georgia; and being prosecuted for planning the coup on Jan 6. It’s worth pointing out that two countries that have recent experience of dictatorships (Korea and Brazil) have both prosecuted and banned from office the leaders who attempted similar crimes there. (Incidentally I highly recommend you watch I’m Still Here, the Oscar-winning story of one family whose father was “disappeared” under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s).

Since his return to office, Trump has overseen the greatest direct political corruption ever in this country – you can bribe him directly via his memecoin. He has also overseen the transformation of ICE into an American-style Gestapo. Masked unidentified ICE agents are now snatching people, including both citizens and legal immigrants, off the streets and burying them in concentration camps here and abroad. Don’t forget that many immigrants or first generation immigrants are heading up those health tech companies at the meeting last week, not to mention how many poor, and perhaps undocumented, immigrants are working in our health care system. 

I haven’t even mentioned the impending cuts to Medicaid, the program for the poorest Americans, which will be the result of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”. That is sure to have a terrible effect on patients and on much of the health system, including many health tech companies trying to support Medicaid patients.

I didn’t even mention Epstein! And this is the guy America’s health care community wants to go and politely applaud just because he reads a speech about interoperability?

And it doesn’t stop there.

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Emily & Me–Money Remaking Medicine

The super connector and super intelligent Emily Peters, (who has quite her own patient adventure story–tl:dr GO GIVE BLOOD) and has written several books including Artists Remaking Medicine, is working on another one called Money Remaking Medicine. She invited me on a show called the Positive Deviants Detectives which is kind of a book club called the Health Care Reinvention Collaborative all hosted by the very wise Dawn Ellison. We talked and the audience joined in about the history of money, HMOs and more in health care and whether we can re-fangle it to make the money do the right things. Matthew Holt

Have Some Water – While You Can

By KIM BELLARD

We live on a water world (despite its name being “Earth”). We, like all life on earth, are water creatures, basically just sacks of water. We drink it, in its various forms (plain, sparking, carbonated, sweetened, flavored, even transformed by a mammal into milk). We use it to grow our crops, to flush our toilets, to water our lawns, to frack our oil, to name a few uses. Yet 97% of Earth’s water is salt water, which we can’t drink without expensive desalination efforts, and most of the 3% that is freshwater is locked up – in icebergs, glaciers, the ground and the atmosphere, etc. Our civilization survives on that sliver of freshwater that remains available to us.

Unfortunately, we’re rapidly diminishing even that sliver. And that has even worse implications than you probably realize.

A new study, published in Science Advances, utilizes satellite images (NASA GRACE/GRACE-FO) to map what’s been happening to the freshwater in the “terrestrial water storage” or TWS we blithely use. Their critical finding: “the continents have undergone unprecedented TWS loss since 2002.”

Indeed: “Areas experiencing drying increased by twice the size of California annually, creating “mega-drying” regions across the Northern Hemisphere…75% of the population lives in 101 countries that have been losing freshwater water.” The dry parts of the world are getting drier faster than the wet parts are getting wetter.

“It is striking how much nonrenewable water we are losing,” said Hrishikesh A. Chandanpurkar, lead author of the study and a research scientist for Arizona State University. “Glaciers and deep groundwater are sort of ancient trust funds. Instead of using them only in times of need, such as a prolonged drought, we are taking them for granted. Also, we are not trying to replenish the groundwater systems during wet years and thus edging towards an imminent freshwater bankruptcy.”

As much as we worry about shrinking glaciers, the study found that 68% of the loss of TWS came from groundwater, and – this is the part you probably didn’t realize – this loss contributes more to rising sea levels than the melting of glaciers and ice caps.

This is not a blip. This is not a fluke. This is a long-term, accelerating trend. The paper concludes: “Combined, they [the findings] send perhaps the direst message on the impact of climate change to date. The continents are drying, freshwater availability is shrinking, and sea level rise is accelerating.”

Yikes.

“These findings send perhaps the most alarming message yet about the impact of climate change on our water resources,” said Jay Famiglietti, the study’s principal investigator and a professor with the ASU School of Sustainability. 

We’ve known for a long time that we were depleting our aquifers, and either ignored the problem or waved off the problem to future generations. The researchers have grim news: “In many places where groundwater is being depleted, it will not be replenished on human timescales.” Once they’re gone, we won’t see them replenished in our lifetimes, our children’s lifetimes, or our grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Professor Famiglietti is frank: “The consequences of continued groundwater overuse could undermine food and water security for billions of people around the world. This is an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ moment — we need immediate action on global water security.”

If all this still seems abstract to you, I’ll point out that much of Iran is facing severe water shortages, and may be forced to relocate its capital. Kabul is in similar straits. Mexico City almost ran out of water a year ago and remains in crisis. Water scarcity is a problem for as much as a third of the EU, such as in Spain and Greece. And the ongoing drought in America’s Southwest isn’t going any anytime soon.

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Gen Z Should Give Health Care a Stare

By KIM BELLARD

Last I knew, Gen Z showed its disdain for older generations with a dismissive “OK Boomer.” But that was a few years ago, and now, it appears, Gen Z doesn’t even bother with that; instead, there is what has become known as the “Gen Z stare.” You’ve probably seen it, and may have even experienced it. TikTok influence Janaye defines it thusly: “The Gen Z stare is specifically when somebody does not respond or just doesn’t have any reaction in a situation where a response is either required or just reasonable.”

It’s been blowing up on social media and the media over the last few days, so it apparently has tapped into the social zeitgeist. It’s often been attributed to customer service interactions, either as a worker receiving an inane request or as a customer facing an undue burden.

You can already see why I link it to healthcare.

It’s off-putting because, as Michael Poulin, an associate psychology professor at the University at Buffalo, told Vox: “People interpret it as social rejection. There is nothing that, as social beings, humans hate more. There’s nothing that stings more than rejection.”

Many attribute the Gen Z stare to Gen Z’s lack of social experience caused by isolation during the pandemic, exacerbated by too much screen time generally. Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University, would tend to agree, telling NBC News: “I think we are starting to really see the long-term effects of constant digital media use, right?” 

Similarly, Tara Well, a professor at Bernard College, told Vox: “It’s sort of almost as though they’re looking at me as though they’re watching a TV show… We don’t see them as dynamic people who are interacting with us, who are full of thoughts and emotions and living, breathing people. If you see people as just ideas or images, you look at them like you’re paging through an old magazine or scrolling on your phone.”

Millennial Jarrod Benson told The Washington Post: “It’s like they’re always watching a video, and they don’t feel like the need to respond. Small talk is painful. We know this. But we do it because it’s socially acceptable and almost socially required, right? But they won’t do it.” Zoomer (as those of Gen Z are known) Jordan MacIsaac speculated to The New York Times: “It almost feels like a resurgence of stranger danger. Like, people just don’t know how to make small talk or interact with people they don’t know.”

On the other hand, TikTok creator Dametrius “Jet” Latham claims: “I don’t think it’s a lack of social skills. I just think we don’t care,” which might be more to the point.

ABC News cited some customer service examples that deserved a Gen Z stare: “I’ve been asked to make somebody’s iced tea less cold. I’ve been asked to give them a cheeseburger without the cheese, but keep the pepper jack of it all.” As Zoomer Efe Ahworegba put it: “The Gen Z stare is basically us saying the customer is not always right.”

Ms. Ahworegba doesn’t think a Gen Z stare doesn’t reflect Gen Z’s lack of social skills, but rather: “They just didn’t want to communicate with someone who’s not using their own brain cells.” As some Zoomers say, it is “the look they give people who are being stupid while waiting for them to realize they are being stupid.”

Still, as one commenter on TikTok wrote: “I think it’s hilarious that Gen Z thinks they’re the first generation to ever deal with stupidity or difficult customers, and that’s how they justify the fact that they just disassociate and mindlessly stare into space whenever they are confronted with a difficult or confusing situation, instead of immediately engaging in the situation like every other generation has ever done before them lol.”

Or perhaps this is much ado about nothing. Professor Poulin noted: “To some degree, it’s a comforting myth that all of us who are adults — who’ve gotten beyond the teens and 20s — that we tell ourselves that we were surely better than that.” When it comes to displaying socially acceptable behavior, he says: “This isn’t the first generation to fail.”

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Interestingly, Gen Z is already skeptical of our traditional healthcare system, as well they might be.

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Why Multi-morbidity Requires Two Health Systems, not One

By JEREMY SHANE

What’s behind the coming health care reckoning? Most industry leaders have their preferred list of culprits: not us! Left-leaning critics blame large insurers, drug companies, and private equity firms. Take the profit and self-dealing out of health care. Those on the right blame excessive regulation, poorly-designed insurance markets, or limits on individuals’ ability to pick their own coverage. Debates yo-yo between these views in a political stalemate. While the views are diametrically opposed on solutions, they share a belief that financial issues are the root cause of systemic dysfunction. That manipulating how clinicians are paid or insurance is structured can improve health outcomes. 

A half century into efforts to fix health care, it is clear that both views are wrong. Americans’ healthspans are shrinking while costs spiral upwards thanks to chronic disease. Progressively worsening illness throughout adulthood eventually explodes in multimorbidity, driving cancer and dementia, and protracted hospitalizations. Clinicians know this, with their well-worn chorus of “if only” laments. If only we could reward prevention instead of treatment. If only we intervened earlier before advanced pathology takes hold. If only clinical care was not fragmented. If only people had a direct stake in their longer-term health. Yet the debate in Washington DC, even shaken up by the MAHA movement’s focus on chronic issues, regresses into an interminable blame game, and conflicting ideas about how Congress or CMS could end the madness. 

It is time to break the cycle and say clearly what we know to be scientific fact. It’s impossible to use a system built to solve acute issues to also solve multi-decade, highly variable disease threats. Yet this presumption, that one system can do it all, addressing everything from colds to car crashes to cardiovascular issues to cancer, is so deeply ingrained in our thinking as to escape scrutiny. 

It is folly to continue. We need two systems, not one — the first for routine, emergency, and elective treatments and the second to confront long-term, complex challenges. Absent this change it will take far longer than it should, and cost far more, to decipher chronic issues or create economic arrangements that can bring forward the ultimate value of preventing disease.  

Resetting Assumptions

It’s illuminating to focus on the scientific drivers of disease rather than the financial after effects. It becomes clear why Medicare Advantage is imploding, and no, it’s not because CMS changed payment rates. Since 2000, the percent of Americans entering Medicare with multimorbidity has jumped by two-thirds, from a quarter of new entrants to over 40%. Software may be eating the world but multimorbidity is eating Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance, and with it, most Americans’ healthspans. 

Most Americans now live a decade more than their grandparents, only to spend all the additional years, and then some, in poorer health.

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We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

By KIM BELLARD

My friends, we are like explorers of yore standing at the edge of a known continent, looking out at the vast ocean in hopes of finding new, unspoiled, better lands across it. True, we may have despoiled the continent behind us, but certainly things will be better in the new lands.

In the metaphor I’m thinking of, the known continent is our shambles of a healthcare system. For all the protestations about the U.S. having the best health care in the world, that’s manifestly untrue. We don’t live as long, we have more chronic diseases, we kill each other and ourselves at alarming rates, we pay way more, we have too many people that can’t afford care and/or can’t obtain care, we have too much care that is ineffective, inappropriate, or even harmful, and we spend much too much on administration.

We don’t trust the healthcare system, we don’t think its quality of care is good, we have an unfavorable opinion of it, we think it fails us. The vast majority of us think it should be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt. That’s what we want to flee, and it’s no wonder why.

Across that metaphorical ocean, in the distance, over the horizon, lies the 22nd century healthcare system. It will, we hope, be like magic. It will be more equitable, more effective, more efficient, more proactive, less invasive, more affordable. We don’t know exactly what it will look like or how it will work, but we’ve seen what we have, and we know it can be better – much better. We just need to get there.

This leads me to the next part of the metaphor. I recently read a great quote from the late nature writer Barry Lopez, from his posthumous book of essays Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. Mr. Lopez laments: “We are searching for the boats we never built.”

The boats aren’t coming to save us, to transport us to that idealized 22nd century healthcare system. Because we never built them. Because we still don’t have the courage to build them.

We’ve never built a system to ensure universal coverage. We rely on a hodgepodge of coverage mechanisms, each of which is struggling with its own problems and still leaving some 25 million people without insurance – and that’s before the 10-20 million who are predicted to lose coverage due to the “Big, Beautiful Bill” – plus the tens of millions who are “underinsured.

We’ve never built a system that was remotely equitable, just as we never did for housing, education, or employment. Money matters, ethnicity matters, geography matters. Discrepancies in availability of care and in outcomes show up clearly for each of those, and more.

We’ve never built a system that prizes patients above all. We deferred to doctors and hospitals, not calling them out when they gave us substandard care or when they charged us too much. Now health care has gone from a “noble calling” to a jobs and wealth creator. A recent New York Times analysis found (among other things):

  • Health care is the nation’s largest employer;
  • In 1990, health care wasn’t the largest employer in any state; now it is in 38 states;
  • We spend more on health care than on groceries or housing.

Pick your favorite target: private equity firms buying up health care entities, for-profit companies extracting profits from our care (or nominal “non-profits” doing the same), the steady corporatization of health care. Throw in favorite boogeymen like health insurers, PBMs, or Big Pharma. One way or another, it’s about the money, not us.

The adage about Big Tech comes to mind: we’re not the customer, we’re the product (or, as I’ve written before, we’re simply the NPCs.).

We’ve never built the systems to make administration easier. So many codes, so many rules, so many types of insurance, so many silos, so many administrators. By now you’ve no doubt seen the chart of the growth of administrators versus clinicians in our health care system, and are aware that around a quarter of our healthcare dollar goes to administration. It doesn’t have to be this way, it shouldn’t be this way, but administrative bloat is getting worse, not better.  

We’ve never built the systems to properly track our health or risks to it.

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Water, Water, Everywhere . . . but Not a Drop to Drink

By MIKE MAGEE

In the wake of last week’s human tragedy in Texas, it would be easy (and appropriate) to focus on the role played by Trump’s reckless recent dismantling of FEMA and related federal agencies. But to do so would be to accept that the event was an anomaly, or as Trump labeled it on Sunday on his way to a round of golf at Bedminster, “a hundred year catastrophe.”

In reality, tragedies like this are the direct result of global warming, and last week’s suffering and loss are destined to be followed by who knows how many others here and in communities around the world.

In 2009 President Obama joined global leaders in New York City for the Opening Session of the UN. One of the transboundary issues discussed was Global Warming. All agreed that the Kyoto Protocol had failed. It failed because the target to decrease emissions by some 5% was too low. It failed because large transitional nations like India and China were excluded. And it failed because US leadership opted out.

The global community today has a deeper hole out of which it must dig. In doing so we would do well to focus on health and safety as outcome measures, and define strategies to manage the obvious consequences of this ongoing crisis.

Two decades ago, the warnings were clear. Left unattended, we would soon not only need to plan mitigation, but also need to prepare and resource intervention to deal with inevitable human injury and disease fall-out. Of course, back then, we could not have predicted that wise disease interventions in climate ravaged hot spots around the globe, like expansion of USAID funding in the Bush and Obama administrations, would be X’d out under Trump/Musk. Who could have imagined such reckless and ultimately self-destructive moves?

And yet, here we are:

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Microplastics Are Here, There, Everywhere

By KIM BELLARD

Vaccine experts are going rogue in response to RFK Jr’s attacks on vaccine safety. Health insurers promise – honest…this time – to make prior authorizations less burdensome (although not, of course, to eliminate them). ChatGPT and other LLMs may be making us worse at learning. So many things to write about, but I find myself wanting to return to a now-familiar topic: microplastics.

I first wrote about microplastics in 2020, and subsequent findings caused me to write again about their dangers at least once a year since. Now there are, yet again, new findings, and, nope, the news is still not good.

A new study, from researchers at the Food Packaging Forum, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in npj Science of Food reviewed 103 previous studies about the impact food packaging and “food contact articles (FCAs)” can have on micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in our food. They found that even normal use — such as opening a plastic bottle, steeping a plastic tea bag, or chopping on a plastic cutting board – can contaminate foodstuffs.

“This is the first systematic evidence map to investigate the role of the normal and intended use of food contact articles in the contamination of foodstuffs with MNPs,” explains Dr. Lisa Zimmermann, lead author and Scientific Communication Officer at the Food Packaging Forum. “Food contact articles are a relevant source of MNPs in foodstuffs; however, their contribution to human MNP exposure is underappreciated.” 

Their collected data are freely accessible through the FCMiNo dashboard., which allows users to filter included data by the type of FCA, the main food contact material, the medium analyzed, and whether MNPs were detected, and if so, for their size and polymer type.

Removing the plastic from items you purchase at the grocery store may contaminate it with microplastics, as might steeping a tea bag. Simply opening jars or bottles of milk can as well, and repeated opening and closing of either glass or plastic bottles sheds “untold amounts” of micro- and nanoplastics into the beverage, according to Dr. Zimmerman, who further noted: “The research shows the number of microplastics increases with each bottle opening, so therefore we can say it’s the usage of the food contact article which leads to micro- and nanoplastic release,”  

Dr. Zimmerman told The Washington Post: “Plastic is present everywhere. We need to know what we can do.” Examples of what she suggests we can try to do include avoiding storing food in plastic whenever possible and avoiding heating plastic containers. She admitted, though: “We have not really understood all the factors that can lead to the release of micro and nanoplastics.”

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