Tag: Providers

Health Care’s Endless Loops

Oct 25, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

Last week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued its final “click-to-cancel” rule, making it easier for consumers to cancel various kinds of subscriptions, such as gym memberships or streaming services. It will require enrollments to be as easy to cancel as they were to enroll.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” said Commission Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

Oh, boy, Chairperson Khan: if you want to talk about jumping through endless loops, let’s talk about health care.

The FTC rule was part of its effort to modernize its 1973 Negative Option Rule. It had issued a preliminary rule in March 2023, which drew some 16,000 comments. Laura Brett, vice president of the National Advertising Division of BBB National Programs, explained the need for the rule to CNN: “(Consumers) had to jump through hoops online to find out where to cancel. Other times they might’ve been able to sign up online, but in order to cancel they had to call and talk to a representative. Other kinds of memberships required them to actually show up in person to cancel their subscription,”

The new rule is also part of a broader Biden Administration Time Is Money initiative, “a new governmentwide effort to crack down on all the ways that corporations—through excessive paperwork, hold times, and general aggravation—add unnecessary headaches and hassles to people’s days and degrade their quality of life.”

Predictably, not everyone agrees. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce called the whole Time is Money initiative a heavy-handed effort to micromanage business practices and pricing, and warned it would lead to “fewer choices, higher prices, and more headaches.”

But of course they do; I mean, if you asked an AI to create a Chamber of Commerce response to virtually any regulation, it would probably sound much like that.

Critics see politics behind the rule. In her dissent, Melissa Holyoak, one of the FTC’s two Republican commissioners, wrote: “Why the rush? There is a simple explanation. Less than a month from election day, the Chair is hurrying to finish a rule that follows through on a campaign pledge made by the Chair’s favored presidential candidate.” The same could be said of the Biden Administration’s new proposed rules to make over-the-counter birth control to be covered by insurers at no cost to patients.

Be that as it may, we all have more subscriptions than we probably really want, the gym membership scam has been going on so long that there was a Friends episode about it almost 30 years ago, and who among us hasn’t gotten caught in endless loops with supposed customer service representatives – if you can ever reach a live person – about some problem with a company?

Which leads me to health care.

Providing health care has always been complex, as physicians like to remind us, but just trying to receive health care has grown more and more complex over the past several decades (while growing drastically more expensive). Time is Money, the Biden Administration tells us, but in health care, the only people whose time is valued are the people billing us. We are, after all, patients, so we are supposed to be patient.

The FTC, and the Biden Administration more generally, has this right: Time is Money, and that’s our time and our money. The initiative specifically included healthcare – “…the unnecessary complications of dealing with health insurance companies…” – but I don’t think that goes far enough, fast enough.

I like the precept that things should be as easy to get out of as they were to get into, although I want to use that more as a parameter than a restriction in expanding the discussion to healthcare.

The Opportunity in Disruption, Part 5: Five Strategies of Cooperation

Oct 8, 2019• 2

By JOE FLOWER

The system is unstable. We are already seeing the precursor waves of massive and multiple disturbances to come. Disruption at key leverage points, new entrants, shifting public awareness and serious political competition cast omens and signs of a highly changed future.

So what’s the frequency? What are the smart bets for a strategic chief financial officer at a payer or provider facing such a bumpy ride? They are radically different from today’s dominant consensus strategies. In this five-part series, Joe Flower lays out the argument, the nature of the instability, and the best-bet strategies.

There are five ways that both healthcare providers and payers can cooperate while they compete to bring the highest value forward to the customer.

Align incentives in the contracts: Healthcare providers must be able to provide performance guarantees that give at least some of the bottom-line risk to them. Work with third-party companies that can actually audit organizations’ abilities to give performance guarantees consistently over time.
Eschew embiggening: Size per se is not a safe harbor from risk. There are few economies of scale in healthcare. Concentration within a given market can be essential to success in offering a true range of services, well supported, at a lower price, customized to the regional population, the provider mix, the state laws, and the local economy. But local concentration is not the same thing as size per se.

And size does not help the customer. There just are no examples in the history of healthcare in which size alone has returned greater value to the patient, the consumer, or the buyer, whether lower cost, greater reliability, or higher quality.
Expand the definition: Widen the “medical services” that you fund and offer to include services such as functional medicine, chiropractic, acupuncture, and various other modalities that have been shown to be highly effective at far lower cost. There absolutely are ways to do this within licensing requirements.
Integrate behavioral health: Find ways to fund behavioral health and addiction treatment. Integrate behavioral health directly into the patient experience, triaging at the door to the Emergency Department and in every primary encounter. Find local innovators that can help pre-empt costly crises. Partner with community health, housing, and nutrition advocates. Helping people change their habits, manage their lives, and get beyond their addictions is far less expensive than fixing them over and over.
Retrain clinicians: Physicians and other clinicians are heavily trained to create and document reimbursable events. If you change the economics so that the system finds ROI in promoting health, preventing disease, managing population health, producing cures and reducing suffering as efficiently as possible, those very same clinicians will need to be retrained. Most of them will be deeply grateful, because they, like you, genuinely want to bring real value to the customer. In fact, if you do this you could end the physician shortage and the nurse shortage. People will flock back to do what they became a doctor or a nurse to do: Help people.

Dump the Business Model

Jan 22, 2015• 52

By JOE FLOWER

There are no winners in the fee-for-service game.

It’s time to toss the whole business-as-usual model — for your own good and the good of your customers.

The emerging Default Model of health care — the “consumer-directed” insured fee-for-service model in which health plans compete to lower premiums by bargaining providers into narrow networks — not only does not work for health care’s customers, it cannot work. This is not because we are doing it wrong or being sloppy. By its very nature the Default Model must continually fail to bring our customers what they want and desperately need. Ultimately it cannot bring you, the providers, what you want and need.

Take a dive with me into the real-world game-theory mechanics of the health care economy, and you will see why. It’s time to rebuild the fundamental business models of health care.

Fatal Error

Apr 7, 2014• 7

By Rob Lamberts, MD

The janitor approached my office manager with a very worried expression. “Uh, Brenda…” he said, hesitantly.

“Yes?” she replied, wondering what janitorial emergency was looming in her near future.

“Uh…well…I was cleaning Dr. Lamberts’ office yesterday and I noticed on his computer….” He cleared his throat nervously, “Uh…his computer had something on it.”

“Something on his computer? You mean on top of the computer, or on the screen?” she asked, growing more curious.

“On the screen. It said something about an ‘illegal operation.’ I was worried that he had done something illegal and thought you should know,” he finished rapidly, seeming grateful that this huge weight lifted.

Relieved, Brenda laughed out loud, reassuring him that this “illegal operation” was not the kind of thing that would warrant police intervention.

Unfortunately for me, these “illegal operation” errors weren’t without consequence. It turned out that our system had something wrong at its core, eventually causing our entire computer network to crash, giving us no access to patient records for several days.

The reality of computer errors is that the deeper the error is — the closer it is to the core of the operating system — the wider the consequences when it causes trouble. That’s when the “blue screen of death” or (on a mac) the “beach ball of death” show up on our screens. That’s when the “illegal operation” progresses to a “fatal error.”

The Fatal Error in Health Care

Yeah, this makes me nervous too.

We have such an error in our health care system. It’s absolutely central to nearly all care that is given, at the very heart of the operating system. It’s a problem that increased access to care won’t fix, that repealing the SGR, or forestalling ICD-10 won’t help.

It’s a problem with something that is starts at the very beginning of health care itself.

The health care system is not about health.

Congratulations, Doctor, On Your Federally-Subsidized “Hardship”

Mar 13, 2014• 32

By Dan Haley

At HIMSS 2014, the health information technology’s (HIT) largest annual confab, the bestest-best news we heard from a policy perspective, and maybe even an industry perspective, was the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) dual announcement that there will be no further delays for either Meaningful Use Stage 2 (MU-2) or ICD-10.

Perhaps we should have immediately directed our gaze skyward in search of the second shoe preparing to drop.

As it turns out, CMS de facto back-doored an MU-2 delay by issuing broad “hardship” exemptions from scheduled MU-2 penalties. To wit: any provider whose health IT vendor is unprepared to meet MU-2 deadlines, established lo these many months ago, is eligible for a “hardship” exemption.

Few would disagree with the notion that it’s unproductive to criticize policy without offering constructive ideas to fix the underlying problems.

Here, the underlying problem is easy to define: it is in point of irrefutable fact fundamentally unfair to penalize care providers for their vendors’ failings—especially when the very government proposing to penalize them put its seal of approval on the vendors’ foreheads to begin with.

CMS’s move to exempt providers from those penalties is correctly motivated, but it seeks to ease the provider pain without addressing its cause.

Instead of issuing a blanket exemption for use of unprepared vendors, CMS should:

Waive penalties only for those providers who take steps to replace their inferior technologies with systems that can meet the demands of the 21^st century’s information economy;
Publish lists of health IT vendors whose systems are the basis for a hardship exemption, along with an accounting of how many of those 21 billion dollars have been paid to subsidize those vendors’ products; and
Immediately initiate a reevaluation of the MU certification of any vendor whose products form the basis for a hardship exemption.

This proposal might seem bold, but if we’re truly looking to advance health care through the application and use of EHR, then what I’ve outlined above simply represents necessary and sound public policy. Current practice rewards vendors whose products are falling short by perpetuating subsidies for those products.

The federal government should stop paying doctors to implement health IT that cannot meet the standards of the program under which the payments are issued. That’s just a no-brainer.

An EHR should not be a federally-subsidized “hardship.”

The Dangers Of Quality Improvement Overload

Mar 9, 2014• 9

By Brooks, Gorbenko, van de Ruit & Bosk

Quality improvement (QI) and patient safety initiatives are created with the laudable goal of saving lives and reducing “preventable harms” to patients.

As the number of QI interventions continues to rise, and as hospitals become increasingly subject to financial pressures and penalties for hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), we believe it is important to consider the impact of the pressure to improve everything at once on hospitals and their staff.

We argue that a strategy that capitalizes on “small wins” is most effective. This approach allows for the creation of steady momentum by first convincing workers they can improve, and then picking some easily obtainable objectives to provide evidence of improvement.

National Quality Improvement Initiatives

Our qualitative team is participating in two large ongoing national quality improvement initiatives, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Each initiative targets a single HAC and its reduction in participating hospitals.

We have visited hospital sites across six states in order to understand why QI initiatives achieve their goals in some settings but not others.

To date, we have conducted over 150 interviews with hospital workers ranging from frontline staff in operating rooms and intensive care units to hospital administrators and executive leadership. In interviews for this ethnographic research, one of our interviewees warned us about unrealistic expectations for change: “You cannot go from imperfect to perfect. It’s a slow process.”

While there is much to learn about how to achieve sustainable QI in the environment of patient care, one thing is certain from the growing wisdom of ethnographic studies of QI: buy-in from frontline providers is essential for creating meaningful change.

Frontline providers often bristle at expectations from those they believe have little understanding of the demands of their daily work.

Should We Sacrifice Medicine’s Sacred COW?

Oct 14, 2013• 2

By Richard Gunderman, MD

Chicago Cubs fans of a certain vintage will never forget broadcaster Harry Carey’s signature line, “Holy cow!” Some have speculated that the exclamation may have originated in Hinduism, one of the world’s major religions, whose adherents worldwide number approximately one billion. Hindus regard cows as maternal, caring figures, symbols of selfless giving in the form of milk, curds, butter, and other important products.

One of the most important figures in the faith, Krishna, is said to have been a cowherd, and one of his names, Govinda, means protector of cows. In short, cows are sacred to Hindus, and their slaughter is banned in virtually all Indian states.

Medicine, too, has its sacred cows, which are well known to physicians, nurses, and patients visited by medical teams on their hospital rounds. In this case, the cow is not an animal but a machine. In particular, it is the computer on wheels, or COW, a contraption that usually consists of a laptop computer mounted on a height-adjustable pole with a rolling base. It is used to enter, store and retrieve medical information, including patients’ diagnoses, vital signs, medications, and laboratory results, as well as to record new orders.

As the team moves from room to room and floor to floor, the COW is pushed right along. The COW is often treated with a degree of deference seemingly bordering on reverence. For one thing, people in hallways and patients’ rooms are constantly making way for the COW. As an expensive and essential piece of equipment, it is handled gingerly. Often only the senior member of the medical team or his or her lieutenant touches the COW.

Others know that they have said something important when they see the chief keyboarding the information into the COW. Sometimes it plays an almost oracular role. When questions arise to which no one knows the answer, such as the date of a patient’s admission or the time course of a fever, they often consult the COW. Just as cows wandering the streets of Indian cities often obstruct traffic, so healthcare’s COWS can and often do get in the way of good medicine. Continue reading…

Most Online Patient Reviews Rate Doctors Highly. Really.

Mar 7, 2013• 16

By Jerry Lin

In a world increasingly dominated by social media, doctors are becoming more concerned about managing their online reputations. Some doctors have even resorted to making their patients sign a gag order before treatment. Despite all the controversy, medical professionals need not fear online reviews: sites like Yahoo! Local and Insider Pages show that the majority of patients rate their doctors 5 out of 5.

At DocSpot, we help patients search across hundreds of different websites to find a doctor who meets their individual needs (for example if they need a primary care doctor who specializes in managing diabetes, or an experienced psychiatrist who accepts Aetna).

AQC to ACO: As Goes Massachusetts, So Goes the Nation?

Feb 14, 2011

By DAVID HARLOW

About four years ago here in Beantown, survivors of the last big ill-conceived or poorly-executed (depends who you ask) wave of health care management and finance innovation were kicking around for a new approach to aligning payor and provider incentives, focusing on quality and cost containment. To hear Andrew Dreyfus, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, tell the story, the Blues wanted to address both quality and cost, and therefore (after looking in vain for a model elsewhere that could be transplanted to Massachusetts) developed the Alternative Quality Contract, or AQC, which features a global payment model hybridized with substantial performance incentives, plus design features intended to lower the cost of care over time.

Many of the features put in place under the AQC will allow participating provider networks in Massachsuetts to make the leap to ACO (once the beast is defined by the federales), despite the difference in payment methodology (global cap for AQC vs. FFS for ACO).

I was invited to hear Andrew present the AQC story this week together with Gene Lindsey, CEO of Atrius Health, a Massachusetts multispecialty physician network of some 700 physicians that participates in the AQC. (Atrius’ largest group is Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, whose docs used to be employed by Harvard Community Health Plan, the pioneering staff model HMO ’round these parts.)Continue reading…

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