Tag: Hans Duvefelt

All I Want For Christmas: Seven Things I Wish My EMR Could Do

Dec 19, 2015• 7

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD

Dear Santa,

I’ve been a very good doctor all year. I have checked all my boxes and aced all my Meaningful Use requirements. This year, I’m not asking you for anything fancy. I just thought you might be able to instill some kindness and good will into the people who designed the user interface of my EMR. Maybe, with your help, they would come to see how a few minor tweaks could make the practice of medicine safer and more efficient, and my day a lot more enjoyable than it already is:

1) I wish I could see a routine laboratory panel, like a CBC or a CMP, in one view without scrolling inside a miniature window. That would save time and help me not miss abnormal results.

2) I wish the patient’s next appointment date was displayed next to any incoming report I have to review. That would help me decide if I need to contact the patient about the results or if I’m seeing them soon enough that I can talk about the report then.

3) I wish I could split my computer screen so I could see an X-ray or consultation report or a hospital discharge summary at the same time as I type or dictate the narrative of my office note. That would help me quote them correctly.

This Is America: You Don’t Have to Do Anything You Don’t Want To

Dec 13, 2015

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD

“I just want you to know, I won’t have a colonoscopy”, my new patient said with some amount of fervor in his voice. “And I don’t want to take a lot of medications.”

I looked him straight in the eyes and said “This is America, you don’t have to do anything, and I work for you. My job is to help you know your options.”

He seemed to relax. I reflected on the words I had just uttered, yet another time – it is the way I often try to set the tone as a non-authoritarian, patient focused physician.

“You don’t have to do anything”, of course, only applies to the patient.

The doctor has to do a lot of things, like document a treatment or follow-up plan for Medicare patients with a BMI over 30, or provide computer generated patient education to a minimum percentage of patients, and achieve a certain percentage of e-prescriptions. And right about now, we are starting to see financial consequences if too many of our patients, like the man I had just met, don’t want to take the medications that can bring their blood pressures or blood sugars below certain targets.

A Swedish Country Doctor’s Proposal for Health Insurance Reform

May 4, 2014• 7

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD

In the forty years since I started medical school, I have worked in socialized medicine, student health, a cash-only practice and a traditional fee for service small group practice. The bulk of my experience has been in a government-sponsored rural health clinic, working for an underserved, underinsured rural population.

Today, I will pull together the threads from my previous posts in the series “How Should Doctors Get Paid?” I will make a couple of concrete suggestions, borrowing from all the places I have worked and from the latest trends among the doctors who are revolting against the insurance companies by starting Concierge Medicine and Direct Primary Care practices.

Because I am a primary care physician, I will mostly speak of how I think primary care physicians should be paid.

I will expand on these concepts below, but here are the main points:

1) Have the insurance company provide a flat rate in the $500/year range to patients’ freely chosen Primary Care Provider, similar to membership fees in Direct Care Medical Practices.

2) Provide a prepaid card for basic healthcare, free from billing expenses and administration.

3) Unused balances can be rolled over to the following years, letting patients “save” money to cover copays for future elective procedures.

4) Keep prior authorizations for big-ticket items, both testing and procedures, if necessary for the health of the system.

5) Keep specialty care fee-for-service.

6) Have a national debate about where health care ends and life enhancement begins and who should pay for what.

Health insurance needs to be simple to understand and administer. It needs to promote wellness, and it needs to remove barriers from seeking advice or care early in the course of disease. It needs to empower patients to use health care services wisely by aligning patients’ and providers’ incentives.

Health insurance should not be deceptive. It should not promise to pay for screenings (colonoscopies and mammograms) and stop paying if the screening reveals a problem (colon polyps or breast cancer). It should offer patients the right to set their own priorities for their health while demanding concern for our fellow citizens’ right to also receive care.

Who Should Pay Doctors?

May 1, 2014• 29

By Hans Duvefelt, MD

Honest Pay for Honest Work.

Times have changed. And it’s time they change again.

In the past, medical care was more episodic than it is now. People went to see the doctor when they felt unwell. Diabetes affected mostly older patients, who didn’t live long enough with the disease to develop complications.

There were no blockbuster drugs for high cholesterol, Hepatitis C, fibromyalgia or chronic heartburn; we didn’t manage nearly as many patients on multiple medications as we do now.

In those times, a payment scale based on the length and complexity of the visit made sense, and there wasn’t much doctor-patient interaction between visits.

Today, we manage more chronic conditions, use more medications, do more laboratory monitoring, more patient education, and more administrative work on behalf of our patients than before.

Payment scales based only on what we do in the face-to-face visit have become hopelessly antiquated and stand in the way of the new demands of society – physicians providing longitudinal care for chronic conditions in patient-centered medical homes.

Doctors Should Be Paid for Outcomes. But Which Outcomes?

Apr 28, 2014• 7

By Hans Duvefelt, MD

Should we be paid for outcomes?

This is often proposed, but I have trouble understanding it. Real outcomes are not blood pressure or blood sugar numbers; they are deaths, strokes, heart attacks, amputations, hospital-acquired infections and the like.

In today’s medicine-as-manufacturing paradigm, such events are seen as preventable and punishable.

Ironically, the U.S. insurance industry has no trouble recognizing “Acts of God” or “force majeure” as events beyond human control in spheres other than healthcare.

There is too little discussion about patients’ free choice or responsibility. Both in medical malpractice cases and in the healthcare debate, it appears that it is the doctor’s fault if the patient doesn’t get well.

If my diabetic patient doesn’t follow my advice, I must not have tried hard enough, the logic goes, so I should be penalized with a smaller paycheck.

The dark side of such a system is that doctors might cull such patients from their practices in self defense and not accept new ones.

I read about some practices not accepting new patients taking more than three medications. In the example I read, the explanation was not having time for complicated patients, but such a policy would also reduce the number of patients exposing the doctor to the risk of bad outcomes.

A few comparisons illustrate the dilemma of paying for outcomes:

Do firefighters not get paid if the house they’re dousing to the best of their ability still burns down?

Does the detective investigating a homicide not get a paycheck if the crime remains unsolved?

Does the military get less money if we lose a war?

Even if we were to accept and embrace outcomes-based reimbursement in health care, how would we measure outcomes?

Let Doctors Be Doctors

Apr 22, 2014• 7

By Hans Duvefelt, MD

It’s a strange business we are in.

Doctors are spending less time seeing patients, and the nation declares a doctor shortage, best remedied by having more non-physicians delivering patient care while doctors do more and more non-doctor work.

Usually, in cases of limited resources, we start talking about conservation: Make cars more fuel efficient, reduce waste in manufacturing, etc.

Funny, then, that in health care there seems to be so little discussion about how a limited supply of doctors can best serve the needs of their patients.

One ~~hair-brained~~ novel idea making its way through the blogs and journals right now is to have pharmacists treat high blood pressure. That would have to mean sending them back to school to learn physical exam skills and enough physiology and pathology about heart disease and kidney disease, which are often interrelated with hypertension.

Not only would this cause fragmentation of care, but it would probably soon take up enough of our pharmacists’ time that we would end up with a serious shortage of pharmacists.

Within medical offices there are many more staff members who interact with patients about their health issues: case managers, health coaches, accountable care organization nurses, medical assistants and many others are assuming more responsibilities.

We call this “working to the top of their license.”

Doctors, on the other hand, are spending more time on data entry than thirty years ago, as servants of the Big Data funnels that the Government and insurance companies put in our offices to better control where “their” money (which we all paid them) ultimately goes.

In primary care we are also spending more time on public health issues, even though this has shown little success and is quite costly. We are treating patients one at a time for lifestyle-related conditions affecting large subgroups of the population: obesity, prediabetes, prehypertension and smoking, to name a few that would be more suitable for non-physician management than hard-core hypertension.

It is high time we have a serious national debate, not yet about how many doctors we need, but what we need our doctors to do. Only then can we talk numbers.

Hans Duvefelt, MD is a Swedish-born family physician in a small town in rural Maine. He blogs regularly at A Country Doctor Writes where this piece originally appeared.

How Should Doctors Get Paid? Hourly Wage, Piecework or Quality?

Apr 17, 2014• 18

By Hans Duvefelt, MD

A long time ago, when I worked in Sweden’s Socialized health care system, there were no incentives to see more patients.

In the hospital and in the outpatient offices there were scheduled coffee breaks at 10 and at 3 o’clock, lunch was an hour, and everyone left on the dot at five. On-call work was reimbursed as time off. Any extra income would have been taxed at the prevailing marginal income tax rate of somewhere around 80%.

There was, in my view, a culture of giving less than you were able to, a lack of urgency, and a patient-unfriendly set of barriers. One example: most clinics took phone calls only for an hour or two in the morning.

After that, there was no patient access; no additions were made to providers’ schedules, even if some patients didn’t keep their appointments, not that there was a way to call and make a same-day cancellation.

As my father always said: “There must be a reward for working”.

But, high productivity can sometimes mean churning out patient visits without accomplishing much, or it can mean providing unnecessary care just to increase revenue. For example, some of my patients who spend winters in warmer climates come back with tall tales of excessive testing while away.

A recent Wall Street Journal article offers an interactive display of doctors who collect the highest Medicare payments. The difference between providers in the same specialties across the country makes interesting reading. It is hard to imagine that many individual doctors are billing Medicare more than $10,000,000 per year.

So it might make sense to insure against paying for excessive care by also demanding a certain level of quality.

But defining quality is fraught with scientific and ethical problems, since quality targets really aren’t, or shouldn’t be, the same for all of our patients.

How Should Doctors Get Paid?

Apr 6, 2014• 21

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD

It’s a strange business we are in.

I can freeze a couple of warts in less than a minute and send a bill to a patient’s commercial insurance for much more money than for a fifteen minute visit to change their blood pressure medication.

I can see a Medicaid or Medicare patient for five minutes or forty-five, and up until now, because I work for a Federally Qualified Health Center, the payment we actually receive is the same.

I can chat briefly with a patient who comes in for a dressing change done by my nurse, quickly make sure the wound and the dressing look okay and charge for an office visit. But I cannot bill anything for spending a half hour on the phone with a distraught patient who just developed terrible side effects from his new medication and whose X-ray results suggest he needs more testing.

As a primary care physician I get dozens of reports every day, from specialists, emergency rooms, the local Veterans’ clinic and so on, and everybody expects me to go over all these reports with a fine-toothed comb.

A specialist will write “I recommend an angiogram”, and we have to call his office to make sure if that means he ordered it, or that he wants us to order it.

An emergency room doctor orders a CT scan to rule out a blood clot in someone’s lung and gets a verbal reading by the radiologist that there is no clot. But the final CT report, dictated after the emergency room doctor’s shift has ended, suggests a possible small lung cancer.

Did anyone at the ER deal with this, or is it up to me to contact the patient and arrange for followup testing? All of this takes time, but we cannot bill for it.

Most people are aware these days that procedures are reimbursed at a higher rate than “cognitive work”, but many patients are shocked to hear that doctors essentially cannot bill for any work that isn’t done face to face with a patient. This fact, not technophobia, is probably the biggest reason why doctors and patients aren’t emailing, for example.

PCMH Certification and Designing the Perfect Car

Feb 9, 2014• 5

By Hans Duvefelt, MD

Our clinic is now a Certified Patient-Centered Medical Home. The whole process leading up to this reminds me of one of my favorite subjects – buying cars. Specifically, buying cars based on technical specifications in color brochures. It takes real, on-the-road experience to know if a car is right for you.

When I moved to this country in 1981, I bought a 1980 Chevrolet Citation. Back in Sweden I had owned a Volvo wagon, but secretly admired the front-wheel-drive SAAB 900. Once in America, I figured I’d buy American. My wife’s relatives sent me car brochures to help me prepare for my choice of car.

The Citation sounded like America’s answer to the SAAB: a front-wheel-drive car with a powerful engine, quirky interior and a hatchback design. A car magazine at that time ran a comparison test between the Citation, the SAAB 900 and one of the German sports sedans, and the Citation almost won. I pretty much walked onto a used car lot and bought a silver Citation with red vinyl seats.

What does this have to do with PCMH certification?

Well, I bought a Citation based on a checklist of features that on paper made it look comparable to a SAAB. Once I owned it, I noticed the cracks between the door panels, the uneven paint and the awkward positioning of the controls, some of which felt like they could break if I wasn’t careful.

Not long afterward, I found myself hitting the front bumper on the pavement in sharp turns; I heard the rear shock absorbers snoring on dirt roads; I watched the dashboard dry out and crack in the temperate Maine summer weather, and I realized with the first frost that my car did’t have a rear defroster, and it never seemed to warm up in the winter.

The Doctor Who Played With Fire

Dec 24, 2013• 3

By Hans Duvefelt, MD

The corpse, laid out on a gurney and covered with a white sheet, was wheeled onto the stage by two women in long, white lab coats. A middle aged man with a bow tie welcomed us, the incoming class of the spring semester, to Uppsala University and the Biomedicine Center, where we would spend the next two years in “pre-clinicals”, until we knew enough to start our three and a half clinical years at the Academy Hospital.

The Biomedicine Center was almost brand new, a glass and concrete labyrinth with a large sculpture depicting Watson and Crick’s DNA molecule by the front entrance. The vast complex lay near S-1, the Uppsala military regiment. The brick buildings diagonally across the street were very familiar to me as the place where I had met the biggest failure in all my twenty years only months before.

As I sat in the large lecture hall with the corpse on the stage, I glanced over at L., my buddy from the Swedish military’s elite division, the Interpreter School, where we had also sat next to each other on the first day, when the Captain in charge told us:

“Soldiers, you may all have been the smartest kids in your school, but it’s different here. Most of you won’t make it, and will be culled over the next two months. The Interpreter School accepts eighty recruits and graduates twenty to twenty-five. If you don’t have what it takes, don’t waste our time or yours!”

L. and I had both thought that learning Russian would be a neat way to spend our compulsory year and a half in the military, but just barely more than a month after that harsh introduction, we were both on our way back to our respective home towns to figure out what to do until we would be able to start medical school. Our military service was put on hold until we could return as medics.

The man with the bow tie went on to introduce our guest professor, on loan from the University of Bavaria. As we all knew, the Germans have been the greatest anatomists since the last century, and all of us had already been to the University book store to purchase Haeffel’s “Topografishe Anatomie”, which would be our constant companion for the next five months.