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Why Three Hospitals Didn’t Hurt My Wife

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By Michael L. Millenson

My wife was lying in the back of an ambulance, dazed and bloody, while I sat in the front, distraught and distracted. We had been bicycling in a quiet neighborhood in southern Maine when she hit the handbrakes too hard and catapulted over the handlebars, turning our first day of vacation into a race to the nearest hospital.

The anxiety when a loved one is injured is compounded when you know just how risky making things better can get. As a long-time advocate for patient safety, my interest in the topic has always been passionate, but never personal. Now, as Susan was being rushed into the emergency room, I wanted to keep it that way. “Wife of patient safety expert is victim” was a headline I deeply hoped to avoid.

In the weeks after the accident, we spent time at a 50-bed hospital in Maine; a Boston teaching hospital where Susan was transferred with a small vertebra fracture at the base of her neck and broken bones in her left elbow and hand; and a large community hospital near our suburban Chicago home. There were plenty of opportunities for bad things to happen – but nothing did. As far as I could tell, we didn’t even experience any near misses.

What went right? After all, though our health care system knows how to prevent errors that kill 44,000 to 98,000 people in hospitals each year, that death toll has remained stubbornly constant. Based on personal and professional observations, I’d simplify the formula that kept Susan safe into three variables: consciousness, culture and cash.

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The Promise of Electronic Healthcare Records

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By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

Last week, Don Berwick completed his 17 month tenure as administrator of Medicare and Medicaid.   The nation should be grateful that such a visionary was at the helm.  The nation should frustrated that he was never confirmed.

In his parting interview with the press,  he noted that 20 percent to 30 percent of health spending is “waste” that yields no benefit to patients.

Berwick listed five reasons for the enormous waste in health spending:
*Patients are overtreated
*There is not enough coordination of care
*US health care is burdened with an excessively complex administrative system
*The enormous burden of rules
*Fraud

Certainly regulatory reform is needed, but electronic health records can go far to addressing each of these issues.

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Farm Bill Needs a Major Overhaul

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By Marion Nestle

Q: What’s going on with the farm bill? Any chance for improving it?

A: I wish your question had an easier answer. The farm bill has to be American special-interest politics at its worst.

As Stacy Finz has been reporting in the main news and Business sections of The Chronicle, the failure of the recent super-deficit reduction plan also brought an end to a secret committee process for writing a new farm bill. Now Congress must follow its usual legislative procedures. The farm bill is again open for debate.

Advocacy is much in order. The farm bill is so enormous, covers so many programs, costs so much money and is so deeply irrational that no one brain – certainly not mine – can make sense of the whole thing.

It is all trees, no forest. The current bill, passed in 2008, is 663 pages of mind-numbing details about programs – hundreds of them – each with its own constituency and lobbyists.

The farm bill was designed originally to protect farmers against weather and other risks. But it grew piecemeal to include programs dealing with matters such as conservation, forestry, biofuels, organic production and international food aid.

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Medical Injustice – Contracts That Suppress Patient Comments About Their Doctors or Dentists

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By Paul Alan Levy


Last week we filed a class action complaint on behalf of the patients of a New York dentist, Stacy Makhnevich, over a form agreement that she imposes on all new patients to try to suppress any online comments on her work that she finds disagreeable.  In the form, Makhnevich promises not to evade HIPAA’s patient privacy protection in return for patients’ commitment not to disparage her, not to post any comments about her publicly; if the patient writes anything about the dentist, the patient assigns the copyright in those comments to Makhnevich.   Relying on the form, Makhnevich sent one of her patients invoices purporting to bill him a daily hundred-dollar fine for having posted comments about her on Internet review web sites.

The copyright assignment aspect of the agreement is especially dastardly.  It is intended to enable the dentist to send a DMCA takedown notice to the host of any web site where the criticism is posted.  Because the DMCA protects site hosts from liability for copyright infringement, but only if they act expeditiously to remove infringing material once they receive notice of its presence on their servers, hosts generally respond like Pavlov’s dog to such notices.  In theory, copyright could be asserted regardless of whether a comment is true or false, and regardless of whether it is an opinion that is constitutionally protected from libel claims; copyright can also be used as a basis for seeking awards of statutory damages even if there are no real damages.

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Should Doctors Make House Calls?

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By Sanjay Basu, MD

In the olden days, doctors would travel from house to house when community members fell ill. Now, we usually expect patients to come to our office-based clinics. The modern model of care is certainly more efficient for us as physicians. But it’s also a barrier for patients to receive medicine; the highest-risk people usually make it to our clinics after being discharged from their first or second hospitalization, well after high blood pressure or diabetes has already taken its toll on their bodies. Our latest research suggests that we can statistically predict which people are most likely to end up having chronic diseases five or ten years from now. We can pinpoint these people right down to which house they live in. Such predictive models present a new opportunity to prevent disease before it becomes costly or deadly. In this week’s post, we look at a new idea for community-based disease prevention in medicine: the geographical mapping of chronic disease risks, and preemptive visits of healthcare workers to households where people are likely to become ill in the future.

The physician Jeffrey Brenner became famous for piloting a model of healthcare that would attempt to simultaneously improve services while reducing healthcare costs in his city of Camden, New Jersey. His model, recently profiled in Atul Gawande’s popular New Yorker article “The Hot Spotters”, was based on a simple observation: that sick people with poorly-treated diseases tend to be clustered in certain parts of the city.

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The Last Six Months of Life

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By David M Sack, MD

This discussion was inspired by the two women I owe my life to: my mother and my wife.

I cannot identify the citation for this factoid, but the assertion has become engrained in the lore of medical urban myth: “50% of healthcare costs are incurred in the last 6 months of life.” (or some similar figure) There are other less arresting but more concrete statistics to be found. For example, according to Health Affairs, July 2001 vol. 20 no. 4 188-195, one quarter of Medicare outlays are for the last year of life. Another more recent discussion concerned the various factors that influence that spending in the last 6 months. An article in the Annals of Internal Medicine for February 15, 2011 vol. 154 no. 4 235-242 describes determinants of healthcare spending and points out that regional variation in medical care does not account for as much variation as is sometimes pretended.

A concise summary of that article by one consulting firm states “Individual characteristics such as black or hispanic race, severe functional impairment, having Medicare Supplement coverage, suffering from certain chronic diseases or from four or more, were associated with higher spending. Others, such as having a relative live nearby or having dementia, are associated with lower spending. And some, such as having an advance directive, sex, marital status, education, net worth, or religiosity, appeared to have no relationship. Altogether, patient characteristics account for 10% of the variation in spending in the last 6 months of life.” (Quoted from Kevin Roche at vitaadvisors.com) Yet even with all this taken into account, patient and regional factors accounted for only 15% of the variation.There seems to be a major subtext to all of this discussion about the last six months of life, whether the topic is cost, ethical issues, quality of life, or whatever. The unstated message is “WE ARE WASTING MONEY ON FUTILE CARE!”. The implication seems to be, “couldn’t we devote these scarce medical resources to more beneficial use?” and “Why are we prolonging suffering and poor quality of life at such great expense to so little gain?” I ask myself these same questions whenever I walk down the corridor of the ICU to see a consult, past room after room of people on ventilators, bloated, mittened and tubed beyond our ability to recognize them as the same individuals seen in the photos I sometimes see pasted to the wall opposite the bed. “Don’t we know”, I ask, ”when to cease and decist?

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2011 EHR Adoption Rates

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By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

On Wednesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the results of its yearly survey on Electronic Health Records (EHR) adoption for office-based physicians. No surprises. Generally speaking, the majority of physicians in ambulatory practice are now using an EHR, and over half of surveyed doctors say that they intend to seek Meaningful Use incentives. The report is also presenting results broken down by state, so you can learn what folks are doing in your immediate vicinity. The more instructive exercise is to compare last year’s survey results [Fig. 1] to this year’s estimated EHR adoption numbers [Fig. 2].

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Do We Really Spend More and Get Less?

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By John Goodman

The conventional wisdom in health policy is that the United States spends far more than any other country and enjoys mediocre health outcomes. This judgment is repeated so often and so forcefully that you will almost never see it questioned. And yet it may not be true.

Indeed, the reverse may be true. We may be spending less and getting more.

The case for the critics was bolstered last week by a new OECD report that concluded:

The United States spends two-and-a-half times more than the OECD average health expenditure per person … It even spends twice as much as France, for example, a country which is generally accepted as having very good health services. At 17.4% of GDP in 2009, U.S. health spending is half as much again as any other country, and nearly twice the average.

Similar claims were made recently in The New York Times by former White House health advisor, Zeke Emanuel, who added that we are not getting better health care as a result. The same charge was aired at the Health Affairs blog the other day by Obama Social Security Advisory Board appointee Henry Aaron and health economist Paul Ginsburg. It is standard fare at Ezra Klein’s blog, at The Incidental Economist and at the Commonwealth Fund. It is also unquestioned dogma for New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman.

What are all these people missing? On the spending side, they are overlooking one of the most basic concepts in all of economics.

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Will Health Insurance Reform Reach Those Who Really Need It?

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By Preeti Vissa

Issues that affect our lives don’t happen in a vacuum. Everything affects everything else, and there’s no area where that’s truer than health and access to care. So I’m going to take a slight detour from the financial and economic issues I write about most of the time to say a bit about the Affordable Care Act, which marks a historic expansion of access to health care.

Thanks to the law, an estimated 32 million previously uninsured Americans will be able to purchase health insurance in 2014. But right now there are real questions about whether this historic expansion of coverage will reach those Americans who need it most.

My colleagues on The Greenlining Institute‘s health team have been looking into this, and just published their findings in the form of a new report. They focused on the new Health Benefit Exchanges, which will allow consumers to compare the price, quality, and benefits of competing health insurance plans. Maybe most important, Americans will be able to purchase coverage through their state’s Exchange with federal subsidies that will help low and middle-income families cover the cost.

The bottom line is that getting the word out about these new options may be more complicated than it seems, and state Exchanges should get communities involved in the process sooner rather than later.

Current plans call for Web portals to serve as the main route through which consumers will access the Exchanges, but these websites won’t be able to do the job by themselves. States will need to pursue a variety of outreach and enrollment strategies, strategies that must be based on the populations they must reach.

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Hey East Coast Entrepreneurs: We Fail Better.

By David Shaywitz


Apparently, the secret to Silicon Valley’s success isn’t just the good weather and smart people – turns out, the secret to our region’s entrepreneurial preeminence just may be the way we embrace failure.

According to KPCB life-science (devices) partner Dana Mead – who notes he hails from the northeast — there’s a world of difference between Palo Alto and Cambridge (MA).

In Cambridge, he contends in a recent (and, as always, informative) lecture/podcast at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, if you tell people your last three businesses failed, “they’ll look at you sideways” and shake their heads, presumably with a mixture of sadness and pity.  In Palo Alto, by contrast, the reaction will be “that’s awesome!  I’m sure your next company will be a world-beater.”

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