Tag: Ashish Jha

Readmissions, Observation, and Improving Hospital Care

Feb 26, 2016• 4

By ASHISH JHA, MD

Reducing Hospital Use

Because hospitals are expensive and often cause harm, there has been a big focus on reducing hospital use. This focus has been the underpinning for numerous policy interventions, most notable of which is the Affordable Care Act’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), which penalizes hospitals for higher than expected readmission rates. The motivation behind HRRP is simple: the readmission rate, the proportion of discharged patients who return to the hospital within 30 days, had been more or less flat for years and reducing this rate would save money and potentially improve care. So it was big news when, as the HRRP penalties kicked in, government officials started reporting that the national readmission rate for Medicare patients was declining.

Rising Use of Observation Status

But during this time, another phenomenon was coming into focus: increasing use of observation status. When a patient needs hospital services, there are two options: that patient can be admitted for inpatient care or can be “admitted to observation”. When patients are “admitted to observation” they essentially still get inpatient care, but technically, they are outpatients. For a variety of reasons, we’ve seen a decline in patients admitted to “inpatient” status and a rise in those going to observation status. These two phenomena – a drop in readmissions and an increase in observation – seemed related.

Misunderstanding ProPublica

Oct 8, 2015• 20

By ASHISH JHA, MD

In July the investigative journalists at ProPublica released an analysis of 17,000 surgeons and their complication rates. Known as the “Surgeon Scorecard,” it set off a firestorm. In the months following, the primary objections to the scorecard have become clearer and were best distilled in a terrific piece by Lisa Rosenbaum. As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I am a big fan of Lisa –she reliably takes on health policy group think and incisively reveals that it’s often driven by simplistic answers to complex problems.

So when Lisa wrote a piece eviscerating the ProPublica effort, I wondered – what am I missing? Why am I such a fan of the effort when so many people I admire– from Rosenbaum to Peter Pronovost and, most recently, other authors of a RAND report – are highly critical? When it comes to views on the surgeon scorecard, reasonable people see it differently because they begin with a differing set of perspectives. Here’s my effort to distill mine.

Changing My Mind on SES Risk Adjustment

Sep 29, 2014• 15

ASHISH JHA, MD

I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to blog in a while – I took a new job as the Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and it has completely consumed my life. I’ve decided it’s time to stop whining and start writing again, and I’m leading off with a piece about adjusting for socioeconomic status. It’s pretty controversial – and a topic where I have changed my mind. I used to be against it – but having spent some more time thinking about it, it’s the right thing to do under specific circumstances. This blog is about how I came to change my mind – and the data that got me there.

Changing my mind on SES Risk Adjustment

We recently had a readmission – a straightforward case, really. Mr. Jones, a 64 year-old homeless veteran, intermittently took his diabetes medications and would often run out. He had recently been discharged from our hospital (a VA hospital) after admission for hyperglycemia. The discharging team had been meticulous in their care. At the time of discharge, they had simplified his medication regimen, called him at his shelter to check in a few days later, and set up a primary care appointment. They had done basically everything, short of finding Mr. Jones an apartment.

Ten days later, Mr. Jones was back — readmitted with a blood glucose of 600, severely dehydrated and in kidney failure. His medications had been stolen at the shelter, he reported, and he’d never made it to his primary care appointment. And then it was too late, and he was back in the hospital.

The following afternoon, I spoke with one of the best statisticians at Harvard, Alan Zaslavsky, about the case. This is why we need to adjust quality measures for socioeconomic status (SES), he said. I’m worried, I said. Hospitals shouldn’t get credit for providing bad care to poor patients. Mr. Jones had a real readmission – and the hospital should own up to it. Adjusting for SES, I worried, might create a lower standard of care for poor patients and thus, create the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that perpetuates disparities. But Alan made me wonder: would it really?

To adjust or not to adjust?

Because of Alan’s prompting, I re-examined my assumptions about adjustment for SES. As he walked me through the data, I concluded that the issue of adjustment was far more nuanced than I had appreciated.

Harvard MOOC: Patient Safety and Quality with Ashish Jha

May 15, 2014• 22

By Ashish Jha, MD

Last year, about 43 million people around the globe were injured from the hospital care that was intended to help them; as a result, many died and millions suffered long-term disability. These seem like dramatic numbers – could they possibly be true?

If anything, they are almost surely an underestimate. These findings come from a paper we published last year funded and done in collaboration with the World Health Organization. We focused on a select group of “adverse events” and used conservative assumptions to model not only how often they occur, but also with what consequence to patients around the world.

Our WHO-funded study doesn’t stand alone; others have estimated that harm from unsafe medical care is far greater than previously thought. A paper published last year in the Journal of Patient Safety estimated that medical errors might be the third leading cause of deaths among Americans, after heart disease and cancer.

While I find that number hard to believe, what is undoubtedly true is this: adverse events – injuries that happen due to medical care – are a major cause of morbidity and mortality, and these problems are global. In every country where people have looked (U.S., Canada, Australia, England, nations of the Middle East, Latin America, etc.), the story is the same.

Patient safety is a big problem – a major source of suffering, disability, and death for the world’s population.The problem of inadequate health care, the global nature of this challenging problem, and the common set of causes that underlie it, motivated us to put together PH555X.

It’s a HarvardX online MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) with a simple focus: health care quality and safety with a global perspective.

Introducing PH555X: Improving Global Health: Focusing on Quality and Safety

May 15, 2014• 6

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00wx9NaGA8g[/youtube]

What Makes a Good Doctor? And Can We Measure It?

Mar 22, 2014• 40

By Ashish Jha, MD

I recently spoke to a quality measures development organization and it got me thinking — what makes a good doctor, and how do we measure it?

In thinking about this, I reflected on how far we have come on quality measurement. A decade or so ago, many physicians didn’t think the quality of their care could be measured and any attempt to do so was “bean counting” folly at best or destructive and dangerous at worse. Yet, in the last decade, we have seen a sea change.

We have developed hundreds of quality measures and physicians are grumblingly accepting that quality measurement is here to stay. But the unease with quality measurement has not gone away and here’s why. If you ask “quality experts” what good care looks like for a patient with diabetes, they might apply the following criteria: good hemoglobin A1C control, regular checking of cholesterol, effective LDL control, smoking cessation counseling, and use of an ACE Inhibitor or ARB in subsets of patients with diabetes.

Yet, when I think about great clinicians that I know – do I ask myself who achieves the best hemoglobin A1C control? No. Those measures – all evidence-based, all closely tied to better patient outcomes –don’t really feel like they measure the quality of the physician.

So where’s the disconnect? What does make a good doctor? Unsure, I asked Twitter:

Over 200 answers came rolling in.
Continue reading…

What the Work of the Inspector General Tells Us about Patient Safety…

Mar 9, 2014• 12

By ASHISH JHA, MD

March 2nd through the 8th were National Patient Safety Awareness Week – I don’t really know what that means either. We seem to have a lot of these kinds of days and weeks – my daughters pointed out that March 4 was National Pancake Day – with resultant implications for our family meals.

But back to patient safety and National Patient Safety Awareness Week. In recognition, I thought it would be useful to talk about one organization that is doing so much to raise our awareness of the issues of patient safety. Which organization is this? Who seems to be leading the charge, reminding us of the urgent, unfinished agenda around patient safety?

It’s an unlikely one: The Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services. Yes, the OIG. This oversight agency strikes fear into the hearts of bureaucrats: OIG usually goes after improper behavior of federal employees, investigates fraud, and makes sure your tax dollars are being used for the purposes Congress intended.

In 2006, Congress asked the OIG to examine how often “never events” occur and whether the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) adequately denies payments for them. The OIG took this Congressional request to heart and has, at least in my mind, used it for far greater good: to begin to look at issues of patient safety far more broadly.

Taken from one lens, the OIG’s approach makes sense: the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on healthcare for older and disabled Americans and Congress obviously never intended those dollars pay for harmful care. So, the OIG thinks patient safety is part of its role in oversight, and thank goodness it does.

Because in a world where patient safety gets a lot of discussion but much less action, the OIG keeps the issue on the front burner, reminding us of the human toll of inaction.

The People’s Hospital

Jan 15, 2014• 4

By Ashish Jha, MD

I was just recently in Guiyang, the capital of the Guizhou province in China and had a chance to visit the Huaxi District People’s Hospital (HDPH), one of the largest “secondary” hospitals in the province.

Like the rest of China, it has been gripped by the construction boom, recently opening a new surgery center and revamped medical facilities. They had a terrific EHR from a local vendor — probably more sophisticated than a majority of U.S. hospitals.

Despite being in one of the poorest regions of China, the hospital has more money than it knows what to do with (so says its leadership) and is planning further expansion. The source of its wealth? A growing middle class that wants more healthcare services and has the ability to pay for it.

Background on hospitals in China

There are approximately 2853 counties in China across 33 provinces. Each county has a county hospital, a government owned facility that serves the people of that community. When the patient is too complicated to be managed there, he or she is transferred usually to a secondary hospital. Patients who need an even higher level of care are sent to the regional tertiary care hospital. The gatekeeping system is weak – one need not start at the county hospital – and in fact, a majority of the inpatients at GPH came there directly.

A few years ago, China launched a major health reform with the goal of getting to universal coverage. They got close and nearly every citizen now has health insurance that covers at least part of the costs of their care. The insurance has substantial co-pays and doesn’t cover more expensive drugs and tests. What does this mean for a hospital like HDPH? About 40% of their revenues came from insurance.

And, despite being a government hospital, only about 5% of revenues came from the government. The rest? From the patients themselves. This revenue mix is supposedly pretty typical of county and secondary hospitals across the nation. Out of pocket spending remains substantial, despite universal health insurance. In fact, in absolute dollar terms, patients are paying about as much out of pocket now as they were before social insurance kicked in.

Huaxi District People’s Hospital

Outpatient clinics, where a typical appointment might last 2-3 minutes, are by far the biggest source of admissions to the hospital. But the hospital also has an ER. Actually, two: a Medicine ER and a Surgery ER. The patient gets to choose. Unsure about which you need? There is an “Enquiry” nurse who can help. I peppered the one on duty with various clinical scenarios and was impressed with the speed and confidence with which she made decisions.

The flow is simple: you choose your ER, you register, pay the fee in cash, and go inside to wait.

Finding the Value in Value-Based Purchasing

Nov 20, 2013• 7

By Ashish Jha, MD

The most commonly heard comment in healthcare these days is that we have to move from paying for volume to paying for value. While it may sound trite, it also turns out to be pretty true. Right now, most healthcare services are paid for on a fee-for-service basis – with little regard for the quality of that service. We clearly need to move towards value-based payments (sometimes referred to as pay-for-performance or P4P).

Although a few folks remain skeptical about whether VBP/P4P can work (as though our pay for volume strategy is working out so well), asking whether we should pay for volume versus pay for quality no longer seems like a particularly interesting question.

The far more compelling and difficult question is how best to pay-for-performance? As I have written before, we need bold experiments with new payment models that employ three key principles: putting real money on the table, focusing on outcomes, and keeping the reward system simple (i.e. the better you do, the more you should get).

One such new payment model is the value-based purchasing (VBP) program from CMS, the largest payer of hospital care in America. It’s a modest program but an immensely important one. It is modeled after the Premier Hospital Quality Incentives Demonstration (HQID), which ran for 6 years and had modest effects on hospital performance on process measures and no effect on patient outcomes.

Despite these disappointing findings, the U.S. Congress, in crafting the Affordable Care Act, modeled VBP closely on HQID. The incentives in the program are small (currently at 1.25% of total Medicare payments) and still more heavily weighted towards process measures than outcomes.

The key question for VBP is whether it will work – whether patients will be better off because of it. We don’t know and realistically, we won’t for another year or so.

But what we do know is that two years into the program, certain hospitals seem to be doing well and others, not so much. Yes, the incentives are small and my guess is that any impact will be very modest as well. But, it’s still worth taking a look at how different types of hospitals are faring under VBP.

So we ran some numbers.

Hospital Exec Pay: If P4P is Good Enough for Doctors, Why Not the CEO?

Nov 8, 2013• 28

By Ashish Jha, MD

In my previous blog, I made the argument that whatever strategy we use to improve care in hospitals will not be implemented and executed well without proper focus by hospital leadership. So, it is in this context, that we recently published some pretty disappointing findings that are worth reflecting on.

We examined the pay of CEOs across U.S. hospitals and found that some CEOs got paid a lot more than others. This was not surprising. CEOs of larger, urban, teaching hospitals get paid a lot more than CEOs of small, rural, non-teaching institutions. But the disappointment was around quality: we found no relationship between a hospital’s quality performance and the pay of the CEO. Holding size, teaching, and other factors constant, what was the pay of CEOs of hospitals with high mortality rates?

About the same as CEOs of hospitals with low mortality rates. What about other quality measures? Most of them didn’t really seem to matter, with the exception of patient experience, which correlated nicely with CEO compensation. It seems that when setting CEO compensation, patient outcomes are not a big part of the discussion. How could this be, and why does it matter?

How you set incentives for senior managers says a lot about your priorities. Boards generally set the salary for their CEOs and they clearly reward patient satisfaction scores. That’s good. They also seem to reward the things that build hospital reputations: having the latest technology such as a PET scanner or academic status. But are boards rewarding CEOs based on mortality rates or adherence to basic quality metrics? Not so much. Why not? I’ve spoken to a lot of board chairpersons over the years and the answer is not that they don’t care. Most boards want to reward quality and believe that they do.

The problem is that most board members lack sufficient expertise on quality metrics and can’t decipher, from the large number of quality metrics, which ones are important (like mortality rates) and which ones are not. Hamstrung, they focus on satisfaction but also end up rewarding things that feel like proxies for quality, such as having the latest technology. And here’s the part that’s frustrating – our national efforts on quality measurement and improvement are not helping. We seem to have done very little to prioritize what’s really important, and shine a light on them.

So what do we do to move forward? Some states have started requiring that boards undergo training in quality. Medicare, as a condition of participation, could certainly require that boards (or at least some members thereof) show a degree of expertise with quality. I like these ideas but worry that training programs would themselves be of variable quality, and for some boards it would become an onerous requirement without achieving real gains in expertise.

Of course, if we really want to help boards be more effective and engage healthcare leaders, the biggest thing that we could do is actually reward hospitals, in a meaningful way, based on quality. Yes, we have the value-based purchasing program, and it is well-intentioned. But, as I’ve written before, it has several big problems. First and foremost: the incentives are very weak and there is little reason to believe it will have a meaningful impact on patient outcomes. Second, the measures are diffuse – we have too many of them, some of which matter (mortality) and many which don’t in the absence of the appropriate clinical context (checking the ejection fraction on a heart failure patient). It’s hard for hospital boards to really get a clear signal on what matters if they aren’t seeing it clearly and consistently from national leaders on quality.