By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

A few days ago, cardiologist and master blogger John Mandrola wrote a piece that caught my attention. More precisely, it was the title of his blog post that grabbed me: “To Believe in Science Is To Believe in Data Sharing.”

Mandrola wrote about a proposal drafted by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) that would require authors of clinical research manuscripts to share patient-level data as a condition for publication. The data would be made available to other researchers who could then perform their own analyses, publish their own papers, etc.

The ICMJE proposal is obviously controversial, raising thorny questions about whether “data” are the kinds of things that can be subject to ownership and, if so, whether there are sufficient ethical or utilitarian grounds to demand that data be “forked over,” so to speak, for others to review and analyze.

Now all of that is of great interest, but I’d like to focus attention on the idea that conditions Mandrola’s endorsement of data sharing. And the question I have is this: Should we believe in science?

Mandrola’s belief in science must assume that medical science can reveal durable answers, truths upon which we can base our clinical decisions confidently. He comments:

I often find myself looking at a positive trial and thinking: “That’s a good result, but can I believe it?”…Are the authors, the keepers of the data sets, telling the whole story?

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By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

My last post was prompted by a reader’s comment where Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal were juxtaposed.  Since receiving that message, I have had occasion to notice that others also associate these two books.

For example, both are mentioned positively in this moving article by Dr. Clare Luz about a friend’s suicide, and in these tweets from Dr. Paddy Barrett’s podcast program:

Friends and patients of mine have likewise mentioned these two works to me, expressing praise and testifying to the deep impact the books have had on them.

I suspect that many readers of this blog will at least be familiar with these two books.  If not, summaries are here (Frankl) and here (Gawande).

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By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

Frank Knight, risk and uncertainty

In this article, I wish to introduce the reader to the theory of entrepreneurship advanced by Frank Knight (1885-1972), and show that the common, everyday work of the physician could be considered a form of entrepreneurial activity in the Knightian sense.

Knight was an influential American economist. He is best known for his book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit in which he proposed to distinguish risk and uncertainty as follows:

Risk pertains to situations where outcomes occur with a frequency that is quantifiable according to probability distributions.

Risk may be mathematical and a priori knowable, meaning that the probability function that governs the outcome is known with certainty, as in the case of a coin toss (assuming the coin to be well balanced).

Risk may also be statistical, where the outcome can be estimated according to an empirically discoverable probability function. This is the case in situations where we know the set of possible outcomes and can make observations under controlled conditions to determine the probability of occurrence of each outcome.

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By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

Dear medical student,

I am honored by the opportunity to offer some advice on how to safeguard your professional career in a treacherous healthcare system.

I will not elaborate on why I think the healthcare system is “treacherous.”  I will assume—and even hope—that you have at least some inkling that things are not so rosy in the world of medicine.

I am also not going to give any actual advice.  I’m a fan of Socrates, so I believe that it is more constructive to challenge you with pointed questions.  The real advice will come to you naturally as you proceed to answer these questions for yourself.  I will, however, direct you to some resources to aid you in your reflections.

I have grouped the questions into three categories of knowledge which I am sure are not covered or barely covered in your curriculum: economics, ethics, and philosophy of medicine.

I have found that reflecting on these questions has been essential to give me a sense of control over my career.  I hope that you, in turn, will find them intriguing and worth investigating.

One more thing before we proceed.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the depth of the questions posed and don’t attempt to answer them today, in a week, or in a year.  In many ways, these are questions for a lifetime of professional growth.  On the other hand, I believe that the mere task of entertaining these questions in your mind will be helpful to you.

So here we go:

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By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, authors Erin Sullivan and Andy Ellner take a stand against the “outcomes theory of value,” advanced by such economists as Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan who believe that in order to “properly manage value, both outcomes and cost must be measured at the patient level.”

In contrast, Sullivan and Ellner point out that medical care is first of all a matter of relationships:

With over 50% of primary care providers believing that efforts to measure quality-related outcomes actually make quality worse, it seems there may be something missing from the equation. Relationships may be the key…Kurt Stange, an expert in family medicine and health systems, calls relationships “the antidote to an increasingly fragmented and depersonalized health care system.”

In their article, Sullivan and Ellner describe three success stories of practice models where an emphasis on relationships led to better care.

But in describing these successes, do the authors undermine their own argument?  For in order to identify the quality of the care provided, they point to improvements in patient satisfaction surveys in one case, decreased rates of readmission in another, and fewer ER visits and hospitalizations in the third.  In other words…outcomes! 

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By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

In our healthcare system, the “middleman” is not who you think

During my recent podcast interview with Jeff Deist, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, I remarked that third-party payers are not, in fact, intermediaries between doctors and patients. In reality, it is the physician who has become a “middleman” in the healthcare transaction or, as I argued, a subcontractor to the insurer.

Important as it is, this reality is not well recognized—not even by physicians—because when doctors took on this “role” in the late 1980’s, the process by which healthcare business was conducted did not seem to change in any visible way.

When health insurance was first introduced on a large scale in the 1940’s and 1950’s, a patient would see a doctor and pay the bill directly. The doctor would issue a receipt and the patient would submit the receipt to the insurance company for reimbursement. The insurance company was, in that sense, a financial intermediary since it would enable the patient to afford the care and see the doctor.

Overtime, as the cost of medical care began to rise rapidly, a practice evolved whereby physicians would take it upon themselves to submit the claim to the insurance company and would not require patients to pay upfront.

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By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

I had the great fortune and pleasure of studying under the late Kanu Chatterjee during my cardiology fellowship at the University of California San Francisco.

In the early 1970’s, Dr. Chatterjee was among the first to understand the benefits of “afterload reduction” for the treatment of congestive heart failure:

Prior to that time, giving medications that could lower the blood pressure was often seen as heretical.  In fact, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, the treatment of heart failure sometimes consisted in applying measures to raise the blood pressure and increase the work of the heart.

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