Tag: American Medical Association

THCB Spotlight: Jesse Ehrenfeld, AMA

Dec 11, 2018

By ZOYA KHAN

Today, we are featuring Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld from the American Medical Association (AMA) on THCB Spotlight. Matthew Holt interviews Dr. Ehrenfeld, Chair-elect of the AMA Board of Trustees and an anesthesiologist with the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. The AMA has recently released their Digital Health Implementation Playbook, which is a guide to adopting digital health solutions. They also launched a new online platform called the Physician Innovation Network to help connect physicians with entrepreneurs and developers. Watch the interview to find out more about how the AMA is supporting health innovation, as well as why the AMA thinks the CVS-Aetna merger is not a good idea and how the AMA views the role of AI in the future of health care.

Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of THCB as well as an Associate at SMACK.health, a health-tech advisory services for early-stage startups.

AMA to Health Tech: Call a Doctor

Oct 15, 2018• 1

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF Health

“That’s why we’re investing so heavily in the innovation space…we look at physicians and how they’re spending their days. The amount of time they’re spending clicking away on their EHRs, wasting time – we think we can help fix it. It’s been a lot of years of other people not fixing it. We think it’s time for physicians to actually be in the rooms helping to make those solutions.” — Dr. Jack Resneck, Chairman of the Board, AMA

Sounds to me like physicians are a little disappointed in health tech. Don’t get me wrong. This is not another ‘digital health snake oil’ controversy. (Although we do go there…)

Instead, my main takeaway from this conversation with Dr. Jack Resneck, Chairman of the Board for the AMA, is that physicians don’t exactly feel included or engaged in the tech revolution happening in healthcare.

In short, while docs are excited about innovation, it seems they don’t feel heard. So much so that the AMA has created its own Silicon Valley-based ‘business formation and commercialization enterprise’ called Health2047 to prioritize solution development for what physicians have deemed the biggest systemic issues in healthcare. What’s out there is just missing the mark and, in more instances than not, says Dr. Resneck, the practicing physician’s perspective on what problems need to be solved in the first place.

I open this interview by asking what digital health entrepreneurs and health tech startups can do to work more effectively with physicians. The answer, it seems, might be as simple as ‘just ask your doctor.’

Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.

On Moving the Physician Movement Forward

Sep 1, 2015

By RICHARD L. REECE, MD

There are always two parties, the party of the Past, and the party of the Future. The Establishment and the Movement.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1903-1882), Notes on Life and Letters of New England

On July 20-26, 2015, a new physician organization, the United Physicians and Surgeons (UPSA), held a conference, dubbed the Summit at the Summit, in Keystone, Colorado.

The conference featured over 40 speakers. Speakers represented many physicians and physician organizations, both bearing workable innovative ideas. The conference was designed to restore physician autonomy, protect the patient-physician relationship, and reset relationships between overreaching government and corporate entities.

Conference attendees were enthusiastic about this physician Movement to restore the voice of medicine.

But inevitable questions arose: Where do physicians go from here? How do we sustain the movement? Where will funding come from? What form will the Movement take? How will physicians inform hundreds of thousands of fellow physicians and millions of their patients about grievances of physicians, their ideas for the future, and what can be done to improve quality and convenience and confidentially of care?

Should Medical Ethics Be Modernized?

Jul 7, 2014• 6

By RICHARD GUNDERMAN, MD

Last month the American Medical Association wrapped up its annual meeting in Chicago, where it has reached the final stages of modernizing its 167-year-old Code of Medical Ethics, last updated more than 50 years ago. The central role of ethics in medicine is reflected in the fact that, at the AMA’s first meeting in 1847, it treated the establishment of a code of ethics as one of its two principal orders of business. Much in medicine has changed since 1847, but this founding document, which most physicians and patients have never seen, still offers important insights that deserve to be reaffirmed.

Spanning 15 pages, the 1847 Code of Ethics addressed just three fundamental concerns: the duties physicians and patients owe each other, physicians’ duties to each other and the profession at large, and the reciprocal duties of the profession and the public. This structure, focused on moral duties, evinces an important feature of the authors’ view of medicine. Namely, medicine is essentially a moral enterprise, grounded in mutual responsibilities, in which patients, physicians, and the public unite to serve the interests of the suffering.

In fact, the preamble to the 1847 Code of Ethics states explicitly that medical ethics “must rest on the basis of religion and morality.” Ethics is not merely a matter of consensus, and the boundaries of professional ethics are not outlined by what a particular patient or physician might happen to agree to. The fact that an employment contract or informed consent form has been signed is insufficient. Professional ethics requires loyalty to ideals that transcend any particular person or group of people. Like taking an oath, it rests on the presumption that professionals serve something higher than themselves.

The preamble to the 1847 Code also acknowledges that, in framing their code of ethics, the authors have “the inestimable advantage of deducing its rules from the conduct of many eminent physicians who have adorned the profession by their learning and piety.” It explicitly holds up the example of the “Father of Medicine,” Hippocrates, by whose conduct and writing the duties of a physician “have never been more beautifully exemplified.” The Code’s authors emphasize that these ideals are not only aspirational but achievable, having been exemplified by “many.”

The first chapter stresses the physician’s duty to answer the call of the sick, which is all the more deep and enduring “because there is no tribunal other than the physician’s own conscience to adjudge penalties for neglect.” In other words, the Code entrusts the ethics of medical practice not to lawmakers, the courts, or hospital executives, but to the conscience of each physician. We can detect and punish violators, the Code’s authors are saying, but it is impossible to legislate goodness, whose flame must ultimately burn nowhere else but in the hearts of professionals themselves.

The first chapter also states explicitly that physicians should never abandon a patient because a case is deemed incurable. In an era obsessed with improving measurable outcomes such as length of stay and cost of care, many of today’s healthcare leaders need a reminder that a physician’s contribution cannot be fully assayed in terms of cures. Incurable does not mean hopeless, and it is always possible to care well even for those who are dying. The authors state that physicians should strive to be “ministers of hope and comfort to the sick.”

Why the SGR Fix Won’t Work and Could Actually Make Things Worse

Feb 7, 2014• 57

By Jeff Goldsmith

Partisan gridlock in Washington regarding health policy has been so pervasive and bitter that any bipartisan co-operation on any important health issue should be applauded by a frustrated public.

That is why the emerging bipartisan compromise regarding the fifteen-year long policy embarrassment known as the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) problem needs to be taken seriously.

Remarkably similar solutions — a new hybrid physician “value-based” payment methodology — have emerged from three of the four key committees in Congress, and seemingly the only stumbling block is finding the $115-120 billion to pay for it.

Moreover, key physician interest groups, including the American Medical Association, appear to have signed off on this approach.

This makes it all the more troubling that the approach taken is unsound health policy that will damage practicing physicians in diverse settings: private practice, medical school practice plans, and hospital employment.

This is because the proposed legislation casts in concrete an almost laughably complex and expensive clinical record-keeping regime, while preserving the very volume-enhancing features of fee-for-service payment that caused the SGR problem in the first place. The cure is actually worse, and potentially more expensive, that the disease we have now.

The SGR fix would basically freeze or severely limit future physician fee updates for Medicare Part B (a serious problem for primary care), while permitting physicians to earn modest “value-based” bonuses if they can document quality measure attainment, cost reductions, participation in alternative payment schemes, practice enhancement activities, or meaningful use of EHRs.

Physicians who meet all these standards could expect to supplement their existing Part B fee by about 4 percent in 2016, going to 10 percent in 2020, with the aggregate bonuses subtracted from the pool of total Part B physician payments to preserve budget neutrality. Non-compliant physicians would see corresponding reductions in their updates.

There are sensible opt-outs for physicians who can report in groups, virtual or real, as well as for physicians who participate in as yet unspecified “advanced payment models” (APMs).
Continue reading…

What the Death of American Medical News Says About the Future of American Medicine

Aug 20, 2013• 11

By Michael L. Millenson

If you wanted to know what doctors thought about money and medical practice, including plumber envy, you’d read American Medical News(AMN). That’s the biweekly newspaper the American Medical Association just announced it’s shutting down.

Unlike JAMA, in which doctors appear as white-coated scientists, AMN focused on practical and political issues, not least of which was the bottom line. For outsiders, that’s provided a fascinating window into the House of Medicine.

Take, for instance, the sensitive topic of plumber envy. A 1955 AMA report I discovered during research on a book I wrote some years ago lamented physicians’ “consistent preoccupation with their economic insecurity,” including envious comparisons to “what plumbers make for house calls.”

Flash forward to 1967. Thanks to most patients now enjoying private or public health insurance, doctors’ incomes have improved substantially. The pages of AMN include advertisements for Cadillacs and convention hotels (Miami Beach is “Vacationland USA”). However, one man’s income is another man’s expenses, and complaints about rising medical costs have surged. When AFL-CIO president George Meany joins the chorus of carping, an AMN headline asks, “How about plumbing?”

If today’s doctors have finally piped down about plumbers – an electronic search of AMN archives back to 2004 produced no plumbing references – it may be because the average plumber earned about $51,830 in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the average general internist earned $183,170. Meanwhile, the AMN ads for cars were long ago replaced by ads for drugs, where influencing a doctor’s choice can drive millions or billions in revenue.

Unsurprisingly, the issue of rising medical costs and its causes has been a persistent theme in AMN since its launch in 1958. (For my book research, I pored through its indexes and old issues.) While AMN ran articles with titles like, “Medicine Called ‘Best Bargain Ever,’” the AMA leadership knew health cost unhappiness was not a psychosomatic disorder.

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