Categories

Tag: Quality

Washington, Please Don’t Bail Out the Health Care Industry

A health care Marshall Plan — $50 Billion stimulus to get electronic health records (EHRs) in every doctor’s hands or $50,000 to each physician -– what an incredible marketing job.

Detroit, are you listening? Stop whining to Congress that you need a bailout. Tell them you want to be the new alternative energy Manhattan Project, get the money, and then keep building SUVs and flying around in corporate jets.

To Congress, Daschle, and Obama, please don’t do this. Our industry, health care, combines the worst of the Big Three automakers with the worst of the hubris, dishonesty, and failure of the public trust of Wall Street. Please do not bail us out.

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Low tech ways to improve patient care: sleep and manners

A few recent reports point to ways for improving the quality of physician delivered care that has little to do with technology or complex interventions.  The first involves how physicians interact with patients, and the second examines the work hours for physicians in training.

Etiquette in Medicine
The first article, by Dr. Michael Kahn in the New York Times, describes six recommended actions for physician to create a good rapport with hospitalized patients. Dr. Kahn collectively calls these actions “etiquette-based medicine”:

  1. Ask permission to enter the room; wait for an answer
  2. Introduce yourself; show your ID badge
  3. Shake hands
  4. Sit down. Smile if appropriate
  5. Explain your role on the health care team
  6. Ask how the patient feels about being in the hospital

Clearly these actions are all directed towards creating a stronger person-to-person connection between the physician and the patient as a step toward improved communications – which is the foundation for developing and effectively delivering a treatment plan to and for the patient.

Physicians Getting Rest
Another challenge physicians have in this process is being awake and aware enough to actually engage in those 6 steps. (Having enough energy also would effect their ability to engage patients empathetically – something I’ve written about before.)  [Also see the previous posting about napping being better than caffeine for improving verbal and physical memory and learning.]

How much sleep physicians need to act appropriately – and avoid making errors – is the subject of a recent Institute of Medicine report, (“Resident Duty Hours: Enhancing Sleep, Supervision and Safety”), that makes new recommendations for limits to the work hours for physicians in training:

  • Duty hours should not exceed 16 hours per shift; For 30 hour shifts there should be an uninterrupted five hour break for sleep
  • Residents should have variable off-duty periods between shifts based on the timing and duration of shifts to increase residents’ opportunities for sleep each day, as well as regular days off that enable residents to recover from chronic sleep deprivation.
  • Medical moonlighting, (additional paid healthcare work), should be restricted
    [A chart comparing the current and new recommendations is available here.]

While all these changes would certainly make for more aware and awake residents, the IOM also estimates that recruiting and paying professional staff to substitute for the work hours the residents would have been (over)working, would cost about $1.7 billion.

Besides figuring out how to pay for these new staff hours, one policy question for implementing these recommendations is how to find the clinicians to actually work these hours considering there is such a shortage of non-physician clinicians.

Anther policy question these recommendations raise, is why they should they only apply to physicians in training?  Why shouldn’t they also apply to physicians who’ve finished their training and are supervising, teaching, and mentoring residents and medical students – and of course are directly responsible for patients?  While it might be argued that most physicians don’t work these long hours, for some that may not be the case – particularly in hospitals without many residents.

Considering that many quality improvements for medicine have been taken from the airline industry – such as the pre-flight/pre-surgery checklist – then why shouldn’t the limits on pilot shifts and hours also be applied to fully licensed physicians?  [I suspect that this will not make me popular with some physicians, but I wonder how they will defend their right to treat patients round-the-clock without sleep?]

Conclusions
Perhaps work hours and etiquette should be other aspects of quality improvement and patient safety that are considered as part of health reform discussions at the Federal and State levels. Certainly well-rested, empathetic physicians trained to interact with their patients with etiquette should improve the quality of healthcare by reducing errors and making physician-patient communications more effective.

How to integrate all these “innovations” into physician training and practice will be a significant challenge, because teaching such skills and promoting their use is not very exciting or technological, and it will be hard for such behaviors to be tied to economic incentives – which are often the carrot or stick for quality improvement initiatives.  Hopefully, as health reform ideas move forward and become crafted into comprehensive packages and plans, they will expand beyond direct economic incentives for improving clinical processes, to include non-economic inducements to promote quality enhancing actions and attitudes for clinicians as well as patients.

Dr. Michael Miller started HealthPolCom Consulting in 2000 after 12 years in health policy positions in Washington, DC.  He works with an extensive network of policy and communications consultants. He blogs regularly at Health Policy & Communications, where this post first appeared.

Dispatches from IHI’s quality forum

Don Berwick is one of the leading lights of the health care quality world; an
oft-quoted and published visionary who founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to spread the gospel of transformation and improvement around the world. Sometimes, however, he can come across as messianic, especially when preaching to the choir in a setting like the IHI Forum, which took place last week in Nashville.

Some criticize Berwick and IHI for a lack of measurable outcomes for the interventions they preach. The most recent complaint like this concerns IHI’s 5 Million Lives campaign, which recommended that hospitals adopt a series of interventions to improve patient safety, promising that if they did so, 5 million patients would be saved. 

The campaign officially ended at this week’s conference, and no one at IHI can show data on the number of lives saved. It’s true that Berwick has a powerful voice and a broad platform, and he could use it to structure the work that needs to be done, rather than sticking to a combination of inspirational cheerleading and emotional appeal. But back when no one was thinking about quality, Berwick was championing it; and for some community hospital quality leaders who feel like they are the lone voice in the wilderness, his words keep them going all throughout the year.

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Transforming medicine and saving lives

This week, Don Berwick will announce the results of the 5 Million Lives Campaign
before thousands of people in Nashville attending the National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care.

Twenty years ago, it was almost heretical to question the quality of American health care. The common refrain being that it was unarguably the best in the world.

Decades of work by Berwick and others, however, have dispelled that myth, and the underlying belief that medical errors and hospital acquired infections are simply an artifact of the business. These quality champions deem it unacceptable that as many as 98,000 Americans die annually from preventable medical errors, and that most Americans receive the recommended care only half the time. They’ve spent years building their case, and in turn created a social movement around their cause.

In the book, "The Best Practice," Charles Kenney chronicles this long march toward a culture within American health care that demands continuous quality improvement.

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Resident Duty Hours and Patient Safety: Did The IOM Get It Right?

The Institute of Medicine just released its long-awaited report on trainee duty hours. It is well researched and balanced, and its recommendations appropriately reflect what we know vs. what we believe. Now the fun begins.

Let’s start with a little background, some of it drawn from my book Understanding Patient Safety:

Let’s be honest. Traditional resident schedules – on call every third night, staying up for 48 hours in a row, and working 120 hours per week – were both inhumane and immoral.

The “Days of the Giants” view that such training was needed to “turn boys into men” (before women became the majority of medical students) was machismo garbage. This was a hazing ritual formed when people believed that one should sacrifice one’s life on the Altar of Medicine, perpetuated because all of our egos are such that we said, “Well, that was brutal, but just look how great I turned out – so that must have been a good system!”

And, because housestaff labor is easily the cheapest in the building (what intern hasn’t done this math – my own 1983 internship salary of $17,600 translated into about $4.50/hour, less than I made caddying), what began as a rite of passage quickly morphed into an economic imperative. Having fallen asleep at the wheel once or twice driving home during my internship, I have little sympathy for those who wistfully long for the Days of Yore.

Beginning with the famous Libby Zion case at New York Hospital in 1984, the public and media have pressured “the system” to fix the problem of long trainee hours. A 1989 New York State regulation limiting duty hours to 80 per week was largely ignored, and no other state followed suit for over a decade. But the overarching pressure to improve patient safety, which began with the IOM’s 1999 report, To Err is Human, was enough to give the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) the courage to gore this particular sacred cow, and to withstand the subsequent mooing.

In 2003, the ACGME, which accredits the nation’s 7,800 training programs, decreed that residents’ hours would be limited to 80 a week, with no shifts longer than 30 hours. Both numbers were completely arbitrary – there is no research that helps tell us the “right” number of hours per week or per shift. In fact, the research on sleep deprivation as it pertains to resident performance is surprisingly mixed. While it is well appreciated that 24 hours of sustained wakefulness results in performance equivalent to that of a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.1% – legally drunk in every state – studies have shown that tired radiology residents made no more mistakes reading x-rays than well-rested ones, and sleepy ER residents performed physical examinations and recorded patient histories with equal reliability in both tired and rested conditions.

That said, most folks find this to be one of those issues in which common sense trumps evidence-based medicine – pointing to the tongue-in-cheek BMJ piece challenging EBM zealots to participate in a randomized trial of jumping out of an airplane with and without parachutes (since the value of parachutes has never been subjected to evidence-based scrutiny). On this one, I agree: given the substantial evidence of the harms of sleep deprivation, the burden of proof should be on those defending the old schedules, not on those proposing more humane variations.

Several studies have examined the impact of the 2003 ACGME regs. It is fair to say that the jury remains out. The studies generally show no real effect on clinical outcomes or patient safety, and significant concerns have been voiced by both faculty and residents regarding unintended consequences. But the pressure to do more from a wary public remains, and there have been studies that have convincingly demonstrated that shorter shifts in the ICU environment lead to fewer errors.

When the ACGME regulations first came out, programs did what they always do with regulations they don’t like – they tried to skirt them. The ACGME did something clever in response – it fired two shots over the academic bow, placing two of the most prestigious programs in the country (Yale Surgery and Hopkins Medicine) on probation. The message was clear: we’re not screwing around. That said, this week’s IOM report was critical of what it deemed lax enforcement of the existing standards, calling for unannounced surveys, periodic audits, and stronger protections for whistleblowers. I think they were right to do so.

Programs responded to the 2003 duty hours regulations in a number of ways. When the rules hit, I was virtually certain that our residency at UCSF would go to a Night Float-on-Steroids system, sending the on-call team home at 10pm, having the nights covered by a fresh crew, and handing those patients back to a new team in the morning. But that’s not how it turned out.

One of the great things about UCSF is that our residents rotate through three separate hospitals, so we tried three different strategies to see what worked best. And the Night Float/Send The Primary Team Home idea proved to be a disaster – we couldn’t get housestaff to leave the hospital soon after admitting a desperately ill patient (that damn professionalism), so they were getting home in the wee hours of the morning, leaving them well over the hours limits and exhausted the next afternoon.

Surprisingly, the favored system was a robust Day Float system. In it, our teams continue to stay overnight, admitting all patients till about 2 am, after which a night float takes new non-ICU admissions. When I arrive for attending rounds in the morning, my team is there along with a freshly scrubbed day float resident. We hear about all the patients together, and then the team rushes for the doors, the goal being to be out by noon. The day float resident and the attending then spend the post-call afternoon finishing up the plan, notes, etc. It works pretty well.

With that background, let’s turn to this week’s IOM report. Although there was considerable trepidation that the IOM would recommend severe additional limits in duty hours (most other industrialized countries limit resident hours to 50-60 per week), the report recommends relatively mild modifications to the existing regulations (they’re summarized here). The biggest one is a requirement for a minimum sleep period of 5 hours in any 24-hour work period, with a maximum shift length of 16 hours. If we keep the scaffolding of our present UCSF system, this will mandate that the on-call team takes no new admissions and doesn’t cross-cover its own patients overnight; instead they’ll have to have a complete hand-off and a beeper-less interlude from about 2am-7am. That seems pretty do-able, especially considering the fact that we were girding for much more radical restrictions on hours.

What may prove to be a bigger deal is the new requirement that housestaff have “immediate access to an in-house supervising physician” – which I interpret to mean 24-hour in-house attending coverage, most likely by hospitalists. Although we have some moonlighters in the house overnight, we don’t yet have faculty hospitalists. But the tea leaves are clear: It is time to start planning for around-the-clock hospitalist coverage at teaching hospitals.

Efforts to cut duty hours raise a number of questions and concerns, which I’ll separate into five buckets: 1) handoffs, 2) costs, 3) do people really sleep when they’re off?, 4) practice makes perfect, and 5) the culture of medicine. Let’s tackle them each briefly.

First, handoffs. Until 2003, our handoffs were haphazard, on the fly, and completely unsystematized. Early on, we recognized that the 80-hour workweek was markedly increasing the number of handoffs – our own Arpana Vidyarthi found that resident handoffs increased by 40% after the 2003 regulations. Like so many other aspects of the safety field, we essentially had a squeezing balloon phenomenon: one fix (better rested residents) was traded for a new safety hazard (more handoffs).

In my own judgment, patient safety worsened in the first couple of years after the 2003 rules because the handoff hazards trumped the advantages of rested trainees. It was only after we developed standardized sign-out systems that the balance became more favorable, and the new IOM report calls for even more attention to such systems. That said, there are few days when I don’t hear our nurses complain about paging the resident and hearing, “I really don’t know that patient very well. I’m just covering.” (That’s assuming that they can figure out which resident is covering at that particular moment, an immense challenge unto itself.)

The second issue is cost. The new IOM report estimates that the cost of implementing the new standards will be $1.7 billion nationally – including the hiring of about 6000 mid-level providers (NPs, PAs) and 5000 hospitalists. I don’t doubt it. The 2003 regs were the Hospitalist Full Employment Act. At UCSF, while early efforts to deal with duty hour reductions focused on residents covering for themselves coming off non-call electives (didn’t work and was wildly unpopular), they soon shifted to using NPs and PAs (worked sometimes, but some patients were simply too complex and some providers were too expensive and inefficient) and ultimately to using hospitalists.

Of our 42 faculty hospitalists, I’d estimate that about 12 FTEs are here because of the need to replace resident bandwidth on a variety of services. The new restrictions are likely to increase the need for additional coverage, and thus the costs. The reason that the IOM blinked when it came to cutting the hours down to 60 must have been partly due to these cost considerations, especially in an era in which many teaching hospitals are struggling to break even.

The third concern is whether housestaff really sleep when they’re off. Remember, these are young people with significant others, hobbies, laundry, and debts. Not surprisingly, there is some evidence that they don’t use the time out of the hospital to sleep, and the IOM weighed this in choosing to keep the weekly hours at 80. As John Iglehart observes in his excellent editorial in this week’s NEJM, “Although some might propose further reductions in total duty hours, the report notes, ‘evidence suggests it is an indirect and inefficient approach given the moderate correlation that exists between resident duty hours and sleep time.’”

The fourth is Practice Makes Perfect. Particularly in surgery and other procedural specialties, there is real concern that trainees may not be handling enough cases to become fully competent. There are few data to support this concern, and one has to believe that some of the work that residents put in during hours 80-110 in the old days were not highly educational (not to mention safe). But I’ve met many surgical program directors who are quite convinced that their graduating trainees are not prepared to operate independently – both because trainees are doing fewer cases and because of the enhanced supervision that is chipping away at the trainee autonomy necessary to develop clinical instincts and judgment.

Which brings us to the final concern (and my greatest worry): the culture of training. When the 2003 ACGME regulations came out, New England Journal editor Jeff Drazen and Harvard policy maven Arnie Epstein wrote that that traditional residency schedules,

. . . have come with a cost, but they have allowed trainees to learn how the disease process modifies patients’ lives and how they cope with illness. Long hours have also taught a central professional lesson about personal responsibility to one’s patients, above and beyond work schedules and personal plans. Whether this method arose by design or was the fortuitous byproduct of an arduous training program designed primarily for economic reasons is not the point. Limits on hours on call will disrupt one of the ways we’ve taught young physicians these critical values . . . We risk exchanging our sleep-deprived healers for a cadre of wide-awake technicians.

Therein lies the tension: legitimate concerns that medical professionalism might be degraded by “shift work” and that excellence requires lots of practice and the ability to follow many patients from clinical presentation through work-up to denouement, balanced against concerns about the effects of fatigue on performance and morale. Getting this balance right will be the central challenge of medical education over the next decade.

In my view, the IOM is to be commended for thoughtfully reviewing the issues and developing a set of recommendations (likely to be embraced by the ACGME) that seem quite sensible and balanced.

So let us old fogies cast aside the warm afterglow of our residency experiences and admit that we’ve blocked out the memories of the bone-crushing fatigue, the errors caused by the immoral mantra of “see one, do one, teach one”, and the all-consuming fear that we would crash and burn, with nary a safety net in sight. Once we get over romanticizing the past, we can start figuring out how to work within these sensible limits on hours and supervision requirements to create a more perfect system for both our trainees and our patients.

Robert Wachter is widely regarded as a leading figure in the modern patient safety movement. Together with Dr. Lee Goldman, he coined the term “hospitalist” in an influential 1996 essay in The New England Journal of Medicine. His most recent book, Understanding Patient Safety, (McGraw-Hill, 2008) examines the factors that have contributed to what is often described as “an epidemic” facing American hospitals. His posts appear semi-regularly on THCB and on his own blog “Wachter’s World.”

Nudging the value glacier

In just two years, seniors will spend a quarter of their monthly Social Security checks on Medicare out-of-pocket expenses, including premiums, co-payments and deductibles.Meanwhile, Medicare bookkeepers predict total health spending in the U.S. to increase from 2.2 trillion today to 4.3 trillion in 2017.

At that rate of growth, it won’t be long before the entire Social Security check goes toward medical care. So what’s the solution?

Barry Straube, CMS chief medical officer, said the solution is transforming Medicare into an active purchaser that seeks to get more bang — in terms of high quality care and improved health — for its buck.

In health care lingo, that’s called value-based purchasing – the topic of a two-day conference put on by the ECRI Institute that Straube,and other health care bigwigs attended this week in Washington D.C.

“Medicare should be paying for care that promotes health, prevents complications, optimizes quality and efficiency, and keeps health care costs down,” Straube said. “… We have a system that arguably is based on resource consumption and volume irrespective to the value associated with that care.”

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There’s waste in the medical system–Duh!

As we begin the health care reform discussion in earnest, many are pointing out all of
the waste in the system and the need to research what works best, provide the incentives to do it, manage the big spenders’ chronic care better, make better use of heath information technology, and encourage wellness and prevention.

One of the disadvantages of being at this for more than 20 years is that I feel like I’ve seen this movie a few times before. You may recall the picture "Groundhog Day" where the guy kept living through the same thing time after time.

I am particularly taken by those that cite the statistics regarding health care waste and efficiency as if this was a new discovery they made in the last few days.

For example, the excellent groundbreaking research from Dartmouth is often cited pointing to the conclusion that as much as 30% of all medical spending does nothing to improve care.

I can’t disagree with many of these conclusions having argued much the same myself.

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Addressing an epidemic of overtreatment

Health care costs in the U.S. are approaching 17 percent of the GDP and may be as high as 20 percent in the next few years.

What is causing the US to have the highest cost and lowest value for the healthcare dollar?  Simple – it’s overtreatment.

Overtreatment
takes many forms – from over ordering expensive diagnostic tests to the
prescribing of expensive and sometimes unneeded therapeutics.

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Embracing palliative care as mainstream medicine

Robert_wachter

I’m on clinical service now and my patients are dying left and right. And I’ve never been prouder of my own care, and that delivered by my colleagues and hospital.

When I was in training, a patient’s death was invariably considered a medical failure, and thus an occasion for shame and silence or “the outcome that must not be named.”

We treated it coldly. We might dissect a death case in an M&M conference (“Why didn’t you start heparin at this point?”), but I can’t remember ever seeing an attending role model an end-of-life discussion with a patient or family, talk about palliative care on rounds, or work with a multidisciplinary team to ensure that a patient’s last days or weeks were pain free and dignified. The dying patient was the Elephant In Our Room, but we stayed huddled in the other corner, where medicine was clinical, safe, and emotionless.

A profound change in this sad state of affairs has been gaining momentum over a generation. The hospice movement began in England in the 1960s under the tutelage of Dame Cicely Saunders, and ultimately was embraced in the US, spurred on by Kubler-Ross’s landmark book, On Death and Dying. The first mention of palliative care in the English language medical literature came in 1956, with hospice first described 7 years later. But these movements remained far outside the American mainstream well into the 1980s.

In the hospital, recognition of the absurdity of the Full Court Press in patients with poor prognoses led to a major focus on Do Not Resuscitate orders in the 1980s. This was my first research interest – as a UCSF resident in the mid-80s, I cared for scores of AIDS patients with pneumocystis pneumonia who died terrible deaths in the ICU. Working with my wonderful faculty mentors Bernie Lo, Phil Hopewell, and John Luce, I began investigating their mortality rates and how we could make better and more informed decisions regarding CPR and mechanical ventilation [for example, see here and here].

But in the hospital world, these twin trends – hospice on the one hand, and decision-making regarding CPR and mechanical ventilation on the other – remained strangely dissociated. The movement promoting compassionate care for dying patients was largely community-based and tended to focus on patients dying slow and painful deaths – mostly those with terminal cancer. Meanwhile, in the hospital we were exploring the senselessness of “doing everything” for (or, more to the point, to) patients with poor prognoses, troubled by seeing lives end so violently, stripped of all dignity. But we spent virtually no time thinking about how to bring hospice-like sensibilities and resources into the hospital. Frankly, as I think back, many of us saw that work as being a bit too touchy-feely for our tastes. We were doctors, after all, not social workers.

This was a profound failure of both imagination and conscience, and it led to the emergence of a thriving underground economy in death. In a 1998 study, Tom Prendergast and John Luce demonstrated that most of the patients who died in American ICUs had some portion of their care withdrawn or withheld. This was a shocking finding, particularly since few caregivers talked about this common practice openly, fearful of being sucked into the public broo-ha-ha surrounding euthanasia and Right to Life. But the silence came with a terrible price: Nobody was ever taught how to do this well, and the medical literature simply airbrushed out the practice.

But the larger tragedy of our failure to embrace palliative care as a legitimate discipline was that by continuing to view death as a failure, we failed to gain the expertise and garner the resources to promote affirmative conversations with patients about alternatives to aggressive care. Sure, we might close the curtains, bump the morphine, and allow the patient whose care was near hopeless to pass peacefully, but we virtually never spoke openly with patients or families about how a focus on comfort might be a better way to complete one’s life.

This has been the magic of the palliative care movement. By naming and legitimizing the field, defining its competencies, promoting research, and training experts, we have made clear that this part of medicine is a crucial part of being a great doctor. (I can’t go on without paying tribute to several foundations, particularly Robert Wood Johnson under the leadership of my colleague Steve Schroeder, and Soros, for seeing this need and supporting it with real money).

The results have been spectacular. Today, when a patient is admitted to UCSF Medical Center with a potentially terminal illness, we spend less time on a narrow and largely irrelevant discussion about “would you want us to shock you if your heart stops” than on a much broader dialogue about two different philosophies of care: doing everything to keep you alive longer, with all of its attendant burdens (not to mention costs, but that’ll be a subject for another day), versus focusing on keeping you, and your loved ones, as comfortable as possible during your final days. We have that discussion now because a) we’re all much more at ease with the concept; b) we are now relatively well schooled in how to conduct these conversations; and c) we can bring to bear resources and experts to help us out – both in having these discussions and in implementing the plan when patients and families choose comfort over cure.

Which brings me to our Palliative Care Service (PCS), which I’m proud to have live within my Division of Hospital Medicine at UCSF. (Parenthetically, since most American patients die in hospitals  – Oregon is the only state in which they don’t – the marriage of the fields of hospital medicine and palliative care is one literally made in heaven; that so many hospitalists are interested in palliative care, and visa versa, is a source of great strength for both fields.) Launched a decade ago by “the Two Steves” – Pantilat and McPhee – our Palliative Care Service has utterly transformed the way we practice medicine. In fact, I could no more imagine how a modern hospital could function without a robust palliative care service than I could without a strong cardiology service.

Whenever I call the PCS to help care for one of my patients – as I’ve done several times this month – I am always awed by my colleagues’ skill and compassion, and the practical help they, the PCS-trained nurses, and PCS social worker Jane Hawgood, bring to bear at times of great need. And every time they are involved in a case, my medical students and residents, and the ones rotating on the PCS (which – as one small measure of the transformation – has become one of the most popular electives at UCSF) broaden their definition as to what it means to be a great doctor.

Back to my team this month – in the past two weeks, we’ve had 5 patients die out of about 25 admissions, a 20% mortality rate. And I couldn’t be prouder of the way we managed the patients’ care, our communication with the patients and their families, and the tears that we’ve all shed along the way. At one point or another in virtually every case, family members hugged me, members of my team, or members of the PCS and thanked us for our wonderful care – this at the most horrible time in their lives. It is uniquely sobering and gratifying.

We are entering a world in which case-mix adjusted mortality rates will be reported on the Web – and what other “quality” data could possibly resonate more deeply with the public? But I always recall the amusing story that arose from New York’s early experience with mortality reporting. About 15 years ago, goes the tale (probably part apocryphal), the state began publishing hospital mortality rates, and one local newspaper decided to republish the results. Of course, someone must be the worst – in this case, it was an upstate institution with a mortality rate near 75%! The paparazzi flocked like locusts to this small institution and set up their sea of boom microphones and klieg lights on its front lawn. Shoulders slumped, the hapless director trudged out to the mikes to answer questions about these shocking data. “We’re a hospice,” he said simply.

Sure, in some cases a high mortality rate will be a marker of poor doctoring or dysfunctional systems. But sometimes it will demonstrate that a caregiver sat down with a patient and her family, honestly discussed the alternative ways of providing care, listened carefully to both facts and emotions, offered resources to orchestrate a “good death,” and shed a tear with the family when the terrible time came. We’d better be awfully careful about creating a set of incentives that stands in the way of that kind of medicine.

So on this Day of Thanksgiving, this is what I’m giving thanks for – to be practicing in an institution, in a specialty, and in an era in which this kind of care is recognized and celebrated for what it is: medicine at its finest.

Rethinking compassion in medicine

Two recent events made me think about how traditional medical care and medical education address the issue of compassion.

The first was at the annual dinner for the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center when they gave out their annual Compassionate Caregiver Award, and reviewed the accomplishments of  previous awardees.  These individuals have all made remarkable differences in the lives of patients and families through their empathy and personal connections.

The second event was reading about the passing of Florence Wald, the former Dean of Nursing at Yale who organized the first hospice in the United States in 1974 because of her interest in compassionate care at the end of life.

While there has been much discussion about:

  • Shortages of primary care clinicians
  • How medical school graduates are increasingly going into specialties
  • Medical schools are thinking of replacing the requirement that applicants have taken organic chemistry with requirements for more biochemistry or genetics
  • A survey of physicians finding that over the next three years 49% plan to reduce the number of patients they see or stop practicing entirely, and 60% would not recommend medicine as a career

All these relate to the structure and content of physician education and training.  And I have two proposals:

First, while  medical school education has progressively shifted from teaching in hospitals to more out-patient and community care, I think doing more to show medical students and residents the rewards of community primary care would be a good step for increasing the number and prestige of primary care clinicians.

And second, while medical schools require students to go through rotations in pediatrics, Ob/Gyn, medicine, surgery and psychiatry, I don’t know of any that require students to go through a hospice rotation.  This may be because medicine and society try to discount death as a failure, but a hospice rotation would be a great opportunity for teaching students about empathy and compassion, and shifting the discussion of death within the context of medical education so that it is viewed more as part of the continuum of life.  In addition, having medical students in a rotation where they are not reporting to (and trying to impress) senior physicians, but rather working with nurses and social workers, also might provide them with a better perspective on teamwork in healthcare delivery – as well as a dose of humility.

The value of hospice (or palliative care) rotations for students does seem to be growing.  An article from 2006 reported that the University of Arizona was thinking about requiring a hospice rotation.  And the American Association of Medical College’s web-site has an article from 2004 about how Mt. Sinai has integrated palliative care into their curriculum.

Does anyone know of any medical schools that require hospice rotations for medical students or have integrated these types of programs into their core curriculum?  (BTW – A major focus for the Schwartz Center is grand rounds and other educational programs about compassionate care and patient-caregiver communications for both established clinicians and students.)

And lastly, it should also be recognized that expanding young physicians communications and empathy skills should help them work better with their patients, (and patients’ families), which could help reduce unnecessary and costly care.

Dr. Michael Miller started HealthPolCom Consulting in 2000 after 12 years in health policy positions in Washington, DC.  He works with an extensive network of policy and communications consultants. He blogs regularly at Health Policy & Communications, where this post first appeared.

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