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Integrating in Health Care: 6 Tools for Working Across Boundaries

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By REBECCA FOGG Rebecca Fogg present 6 Tools for Working Across Boundaries

Today’s health care providers face the formidable challenge of delivering better, more affordable and more convenient care in the face of spiraling care costs and an epidemic of chronic disease. But the most innovative among them are making encouraging progress by “integrating”—which in this context means working across traditional boundaries between patients and clinicians, health care specialties, care sites and sectors.

The impulse to do so is shrewd, according to our innovation research in sectors from computer manufacturing to education. We’ve found that when a product isn’t yet good enough to address the needs of a particular customer segment, a company must control the entire product design and production process in order to improve it. This is necessary because in a “not-good-enough” product, unpredictable and complex interdependencies exist between components, so each component’s design depends on that of all the others.

Given this, managers responsible for the individual components must collaborate—or integrate—in order to align components’ design and assembly toward optimal performance. IBM employed an integrated strategy to improve performance of its early mainframe computers, and this enabled the firm to dominate the early computer industry when mainframes weren’t yet meeting customers’ needs.

In health care delivery, such integration is analogous to, but something more than, coordinated care. It means assembling and aligning resources and processes to deliver the right care, in the right place, at the right time. This type of integration is a core aspiration of innovative providers leading hot-spotting and aging-in-place programs, capitated primary care practices, initiatives addressing health-related social needs, and other care models that depart from America’s traditional, episodic, acute-care model. How are they tackling it? They’re leveraging very specific tools to facilitate work across boundaries. Here are six of the most common we uncovered in our research:

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AI Doesn’t Ask Why — But Physicians And Drug Developers Want To Know

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By DAVID SHAYWITZ MD

At long last, we seem to be on the threshold of departing the earliest phases of AI, defined by the always tedious “will AI replace doctors/drug developers/occupation X?” discussion, and are poised to enter the more considered conversation of “Where will AI be useful?” and “What are the key barriers to implementation?”

As I’ve watched this evolution in both drug discovery and medicine, I’ve come to appreciate that in addition to the many technical barriers often considered, there’s a critical conceptual barrier as well – the threat some AI-based approaches can pose to our “explanatory models” (a construct developed by physician-anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, and nicely explained by Dr. Namratha Kandula here): our need to ground so much of our thinking in models that mechanistically connect tangible observation and outcome. In contrast, AI relates often imperceptible observations to outcome in a fashion that’s unapologetically oblivious to mechanism, which challenges physicians and drug developers by explicitly severing utility from foundational scientific understanding.

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Mrs. Verma Goes to Washington

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By ANISH KOKA MD 

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who runs Medicare, has had an active week. The problem facing much-beloved Medicare is one that faces every other government-funded healthcare extravaganza: it’s always projected to be running out of money. Medicare makes up 15% of the total federal budget. That’s almost $600 billion dollars out of a total federal outlay of $4 Trillion dollars. The only problem here is that revenues are around $3.6 trillion. We are spending money we don’t have, and thus there there is constant pressure to reduce federal outlays.

This is a feat that appears to be legislatively impossible.  The country barely is able to defund bridges to nowhere let alone try to reduce health care spending because, as everyone knows, any reduction in health care spending will spawn a death toll that would shame the black plague. The prior administration’s health policy wonk certified approach was to change the equation in health care from paying for volume to paying for value. This, we were assured, would allow us to get better healthcare for cheaper! And so we got MACRA, The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, that introduced penalties for doctors unable to provide ‘good’ care. Never mind that in some years good care means you treat everyone with a statin, and in others it means treat no one with a statin. When in Rome, live like the Romans. In 2018 parlance, that roughly translates to “check every box you can and everything will be all right.”Continue reading…

A Conversation About the Dangers of Overhydration with Professor Timothy Noakes

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By SAURABH JHA MD

Professor Timothy Noakes, a South African exercise scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town who has run over 70 ultramarathons, speaks to me about the dangers of overhydration in endurance sports.

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

2018 Midterms: The Year of the Female Physician

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By NIRAN AL-AGBA MD 

While women make up more than half of the U.S. population, an imbalance remains between who we are as a nation and who represents us in Congress. The gender disparity is no different for physicians: more than one third of doctors in the U.S. are women, yet 100 percent of physicians in Congress are men. To date, there have only been two female physicians elected to Congress.

However, in the coming midterm election, there are six races with a chance at making history. It’s these battles which could make 2018 “The Year of the Female Physician.”

I remember being a first-time voter in 1992, labeled at the time “The Year of the Woman.” I was a sophomore at Michigan State University and turned 18 just three days before the election. Following the contentious Supreme Court hearings involving Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, an unprecedented number of female candidates were vying for office that election year.

President George H. W. Bush was vilified for an appalling answer to the question of when his party might nominate a woman for President. “This is supposed to be the year of the women in the Senate,” he quipped. “Let’s see how they do. I hope a lot of them lose.” Frustrated about the state of gender inequality in politics, a little-known “mom in tennis shoes,” Patty Murray, decided to run for the U.S. Senate to represent Washington. She won, paving the way for an unprecedented number of women to enter national politics over the next 30 years. Still, very few of them have come with a background in medicine.

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Hospitals Can and Should Support Employees Who Are Victims of Domestic Violence: Here’s How

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By PATRICK HORINE

Every October we recognize Domestic Violence Awareness Month, an important opportunity to discuss this widespread social and public health problem and to take stock of what we can do better to protect victims of domestic abuse.

Unfortunately, the data shows us that health care is often a dangerous profession that is also rife with domestic abuse. Earlier this month a new poll of ER physicians revealed nearly half report having been physically assaulted at work (largely by patients and/or visitors in the ER). However, other data shows us that individuals in the health care professions – especially women—may be at greater risk of domestic abuse from a spouse or partner, while on the job as well. Data on domestic violence nationwide shows us one in four women are in a dangerous domestic situation, and one in four victims are harassed at work by perpetrators.  Women make up 80 percent of the healthcare workforce and an even greater percentage in most hospitals. When we do the math, this means one in 20 female healthcare workers are likely to be harassed or even assaulted on the job.

Furthermore, given that hospitals and most healthcare organizations are “open” facilities where anyone can walk onto the premises this further heightens the risk of a violent incident happening in the workplace. Over half of the homicides committed by intimate partners occur in parking lots and public buildings. News stories like the ones about a California healthcare worked stabbed in the hospital parking lot by her estranged husband while her co-workers looked on are all too tragic and common.

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The Futility of Patient Matching

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

The original sin of health records interoperability was the loss of consent in HIPAA. In 2000, when HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) first became law, the Internet was hardly a thing in healthcare. The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) was not a thing until 2004. 2009 brought us the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use and 2016 brought the 21st Century Cures Act with “information blocking” as clear evidence of bipartisan frustration. Cures,  in 2018, begat TEFCA, the draft Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement. The next update to the draft TEFCA is expected before 2019 which is also the year that Meaningful Use Stage 3 goes into effect.

Over nearly two decades of intense computing growth, the one thing that has remained constant in healthcare interoperability is a strategy built on keeping patient consent out of the solution space. The 2018 TEFCA draft is still designed around HIPAA and ongoing legislative activity in Washington seeks further erosion of patient consent through the elimination of the 42CFR Part 2 protections that currently apply to sensitive health data like behavioral health.

The futility of patient matching without consent parallels the futility of large-scale interoperability without consent. The lack of progress in patient matching was most recently chronicled by Pew through a survey and a Pew-funded RAND report. The Pew survey was extensive and the references cite the significant prior efforts including a 100-expert review by ONC in 2014 and the $1 million CHIME challenge in 2017 that was suspended – clear evidence of futility.

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Obesity Training and Reimbursement Should be a Higher Priority

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By HANNAH MARTIN; JENNY BOGARD; WILLIAM DIETZ, MD; ANNE VALIK; NICHOLE JANNAH; CHRISTINE GALLAGHER; ANAND PAREKH, MD; DON BRADLEY MD

Hannah Martin

Jenny Bogard

Dr. William Dietz

Anne Valik

 

 

 

 

Nichole Jannah

Christine Gallager

Dr. Anand Parekh

Dr. Don Bradley

 

 

 

 

The United States has been facing a mounting obesity epidemic for over a generation, but our health care system has struggled to keep up. Given the complexity of obesity and the pace of curricular change, obesity education for our health-provider workforce is still lacking. There are wide disparities in quantity and quality among programs and disciplines. Similarly, public and private payers have taken vastly different approaches towards coverage for obesity treatment and prevention, which even leaves the most educated providers unsure of what services each patient can access. Because coverage decisions are based partly on what providers are prepared to provide and curricula are based partly on what services are typically covered, these problems reinforce one another. Despite these challenges, several important steps have been taken recently to tackle both sides of the problem. The steps include the development of new Provider Competencies for the Prevention and Management of Obesity and the launch of the My Healthy Weight pledge to standardize coverage for obesity counseling services.

Why We Must Act

In the US, more than one-third of the adult population and nearly one-fifth of the children have obesity. Adult obesity prevalence is projected to reach nearly 50 percent by 2030. Adult diabetes prevalence currently hovers around ten percent and is further projected to affect one-third of the adult population by 2050. Estimates for the total annual medical cost of obesity in the U.S. range from $147 billion to $210 billion, with billions more lost in productivity due to absenteeism and presenteeism. Obesity is also a national security issue. As of 2010, 27 percent of young adults were disqualified for military service due to obesity.

Improving Obesity Education for Health Care Providers

Despite these shocking rates of obesity, fewer than one in four physicians feel that they received adequate training in counseling patients on diet or physical activity. Obesity concepts are underrepresented on medical licensing examinations and substantial gaps in provider knowledge related to obesity care have been recently documented. This is not surprising considering that less than 30 percent of medical schools meet the minimum recommended number of nutrition-related content hours.

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Dr. Patti Brennan – #SPM2018 speaker preview “Supporting the Care Between the Care: The Role of the National Library of Medicine”

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By ePATIENT DAVE deBRONKART

I’m a supporter of the Society for Participatory Medicine’s second annual conference on Oct. 17 in Boston. This article taken from the SPM “ePatients” blog tells you about just  one of the great speakers who’ll be there. Please come join us  Register here.–Matthew Holt

Dr. Patti Brennan – #SPM2018 speaker preview “Supporting the Care Between the Care: The Role of the National Library of Medicine”

Here’s the latest in our series of posts by and about the outstanding speakers we’ve lined up for the Society for Participatory Medicine’s second annual conference on Oct. 17 in Boston, attached to the prestigious Connected Health conference. Register here. (Our #SPM2018 blog series has more about the speakers and activities.)

Since my earliest days in this work – even before our Society was formed – Dr. Patricia Flatley Brennan RN, PhD, FAAN, FACMI (or “Patti,” as she’s known to her many friends and fans) has been one of the most optimistic voices. She’s always been a dedicated, enlightened researcher, academic (at the University of Wisconsin, Madison) and voice of patient participation. On top of that, she was the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s terrific Project HealthDesign: Rethinking the Power and Potential of Personal Health Records, which ran from 2006-2014, an absolutely pivotal period in the onset of personal health data. Patti knows that knowledge is power, and that patient power is naturally optimized when patient knowledge is optimized.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when, in 2016, she was appointed the next Director of America’s National Library of Medicine (NLM). In addition to being extremely participatory, perhaps it’s no coincidence that she’s the first woman nurse and the first nurse in the post.

In a moment I’ll say more about the history of this position, and its significance in the timeline that led to SPM. For now, consider this about her topic at our conference, “the care between the care,” particularly the NLM’s role.Continue reading…

Part 2: Bypassing Prior Authorizations

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By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

A few weeks ago, I saw a young patient who was suffering from an ear infection. It was his fourth visit in eight weeks, as the infection had proven resistant to an escalating series of antibiotics prescribed so far. It was time to bring out a heavier hitter. I prescribed Ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic rarely used in pediatrics, yet effective for some drug-resistant pediatric infections.

The patient was on the state Medicaid insurance and required a so-called prior authorization, or PA, for Ciprofloxacin. Consisting of additional paperwork that physicians are required to fill out before pharmacists can fill prescriptions for certain drugs, PAs boil down to yet another cost-cutting measure implemented by insurers to stand between patients and certain costly drugs.

The PA process usually takes from 48-72 hours, and it’s not infrequent for requests to be denied, even when the physician has demonstrated an undeniable medical need for the drug in question.

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