Tag: Dr. Wes

What Am I Worth?

Aug 24, 2012• 12

By Dr. Wes

Recently I was asked to serve as a consultant on a medical matter. Interestingly, they requested my hourly price for my services. I thought about this and wondered, “What am I worth in per hour in the open market?”

It is an interesting question to ponder.

I have decided to ask the blog-o-sphere. Call it a bit of “free market economics.” For the record, 100% of my hourly wage for my services will be sent to our cardiovascular research fund at our hospital to avoid any conflict of interest. I will not see ANY of the money the blog-o-sphere decides personally, but I really want to know what people think.

So where to begin?

Should I compare my hourly wage to MGMA standards for the annual physician salary of a physician of my subspecialty? If so, do I pick the 50% percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, or 95th percentile? On what basis do I have to assure this is a fair price? Who sets this price? Are these data accurate or based on earlier years’ hospital data and physician surveys? Can I verify that their hourly price is justified? If so, how? Or are their data proprietary?

Why the Electronic Medical Record Needs to be Viewed as a Medical Device

Aug 20, 2012• 20

By WESTBY FISHER, MD

In our rush to establish a national electronic medical record (EMR) system as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, powerful silos of independent EMR systems have sprung up nationwide.

While most systems are being developed responsibly, like the Wild, Wild West, many have been developed without an objective eye toward quality and the potential harm they may be causing our patients.

As most readers of this blog are aware, since 2005 the medical device industry in which I work has had widely publicized instances of patient deaths splashed all over the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets from defibrillator malfunctions that resulted in a just a few patient deaths.

The backlash in response to these deaths was significant: device registries were developed, software improvements to devices created, and billions of dollars in legal fees and damages paid to patients and their families on the path to improvement. In addition, we also learned about the limits of corporate responsibility for these deaths thanks to legal precedent established by the Reigel vs. Medtronic case.

Things Are About to Get Interesting

Jul 31, 2012

By Dr. Wes

It was a chance encounter.

After all it’s not every day you see an internist who still frequents a hospital. We’ve known each other for years and he’s been watching the changes in health care, too.

“Boy, they’re really not happy Over There. Seems they’ve contracted with Big Boy insurance as part of their new ACO model. Everyone’s going to get their piece before the doctors: Over There hospital, their four million administrators, lawyers, grounds crews, parking staff…. Then, after everyone else is paid, the doctors might get a few scraps if there’s some left over. No guarantees. All risk, no certainty of reward. There was no way I could still go there. I joined them, but had to leave when I saw how unworkable that was.”

“Isn’t this our new way forward?” I asked.

“I guess so. Scary. But I’ve got just a few more years. Just have to get the kids through college.”

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How the iPhone Might Disrupt The Medical Device Industry

Jul 27, 2012• 10

By Dr. Wes

Doctors wanting to determine a patient’s atrial fibrillation burden have a myriad of technologies at their disposal: 24-hour Holter monitors, 30-day event monitors that are triggered by an abnormal heart rhythm or by the patient themselves, a 7-14 day patch monitor that records every heart beat and is later processed offlineto quanitate the arrhythmia, or perhaps an surgically-implanted event recorder that automatically stores extremes of heart rate or the surface ECG when symptoms are felt by the patient. The cost of these devices ranges from the hundreds to thousands of dollars to use.

Today in my clinic, a patient brought me her atrial fibrillation burden history on her iPhone and it cost her less than a $10 co-pay. For $1.99 US, she downloaded the iPhone app Cardiograph to her iPhone.

Every time she feels a symptom, she places her index finder over the camera on the phone, waits a bit, and records a make-believe rhythm strip representing each heart rhythm. With it, comes the date and time.

The Destructiveness of Measures

Jul 21, 2012• 11

By Dr. Wes

A little box pops up before him asking if he asked the patient about the exercise. He mumbles something under his breath, clicks a little box beneath the question, then moves on.

This is what medicine has become: a series of computer queries and measures of clicks. It must be measurable, quantifiable, and justifiable or it didn’t happen.

Do they ask if I asked them about if they used cocaine? Of course not: too politically incorrect.

Do they ask if I really listened to their heart? Of course not – this activity is not a paid activity.

Do they ask about the myriad of phone calls and e-mails to arrange for a procedure? Nope.

Do they measure my time with the patient when I go back to see them on the same day? Nope – not paid for.

So what’s the motivation for doctors to be doctors? Are we retraining our doctors from care-givers to data providers? What are we losing in turn?

How Bad Is Azithromycin’s Cardiovascular Risk?

May 21, 2012• 9

By Dr. Wes

The paper from the New England Journal of Medicine that reports azithromycin might cause cardiovascular death is not new to electrophysiologists tasked with deciding antibiotic choices in patients with Long QT syndrome or in those who take other antiarrhythmic drugs. Heck, even the useful Arizona CERT QTDrugs.org website could have told us that.

What was far scarier to me, though, was how the authors of this week’s paper reached their estimates of the magnitude of azithromycin’s cardiovascular risk.

Welcome to the underworld of Big Data Medicine.

Careful review of the Methods section of this paper reveals that “persons enrolled in the Tennessee Medicaid program” were the subjects, and that the data collected were “Computerized Medicaid data, which were linked to death certificates and to a state-wide hospital discharge database” and “Medicaid pharmacy files.” Anyone with azithromycin prescribed from 1992-2006 who had “not had a diagnosis of drug abuse or resided in a nursing home in the preceding year and had not been hospitalized in the prior 30 days.” Also, they had to be “Medicaid enrollees for at least 365 days and have regular use of medical care.”

Hey, no selection bias introduced with those criteria, right? But the authors didn’t stop there.

Z-Packing

May 21, 2012• 2

By Rob Lamberts, MD

It was during my residency that the first indication of heart toxicity of antibiotics affected me personally. The threat was related to the use of the first of the non-drowsy antihistamines – Seldane – in combination with macrolide antibiotics, such as Erythromycin causing a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia. I remember the expressions fear from other residents, as we had used this combination of medications often. Were we killing people when we treated their bronchitis? We had no idea, but we were consoled by the fact that the people who had gotten our arrhythmia-provoking combo were largely anonymous to us (ER patients).

Fast forward to 2012 and the study (published in the holy writings of the New England Journal of Medicine) that Zithromax is associated with more dead people than no Zithromax. Here’s the headline-provoking conclusion:

During 5 days of therapy, patients taking azithromycin, as compared with those who took no antibiotics, had an increased risk of cardiovascular death (hazard ratio, 2.88; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.79 to 4.63; P<0.001) and death from any cause (hazard ratio, 1.85; 95% CI, 1.25 to 2.75; P=0.002). Patients who took amoxicillin had no increase in the risk of death during this period. Relative to amoxicillin, azithromycin was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular death (hazard ratio, 2.49; 95% CI, 1.38 to 4.50; P=0.002) and death from any cause (hazard ratio, 2.02; 95% CI, 1.24 to 3.30; P=0.005), with an estimated 47 additional cardiovascular deaths per 1 million courses; patients in the highest decile of risk for cardiovascular disease had an estimated 245 additional cardiovascular deaths per 1 million courses. (Emphasis Mine).

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