Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist and inventor, perhaps best known for the extremely complicated contraptions he devised for performing the simplest tasks. Each year, a national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is held, challenging competitors to devise bizarre contrivances that can shine a shoe or zip a zipper. One day while watching a group of children marvel at such a machine in a museum, a thought occurred to one of us: As healthcare becomes more complex, the interactions between patients, physicians, hospitals, payers, and communities increasingly resemble a Rube Goldberg machine.
Consider a recent case. Ms. Jones was a 50-something year old African American woman with type I diabetes, high blood pressure and end-stage kidney disease requiring peritoneal dialysis, a form of dialysis performed nightly at home. She was recently admitted to the hospital because of an apartment fire that destroyed everything she owned, including her home dialysis equipment and medications. Once she was hospitalized, the medical team restarted her dialysis, restored her blood chemistries to normal, corrected her blood sugar, and began to make plans for her discharge. There was just one problem. They had no place to send her.
Ms. Jones could not return to her apartment, which had essentially burnt to the ground. She did not qualify for admission to a nursing home. And she couldn’t afford to rent a new apartment, at a cost of about $1,500 per month. She had paid for insurance on the apartment for years, but had recently let the insurance lapse to help finance the purchase of an $8,000 living room suite. The medical team had heard that social service agencies would provide one month’s rent, but it turned out that she could get only one-time distributions of $100 from the Red Cross and $200 from the Salvation Army – not nearly enough.
As the days rolled by, the medical team caring for Ms. Jones began feeling escalating pressure from hospital administration to discharge her. Her medical problems had been taken care of, and there was no medical need for her to remain in a hospital bed at a cost of $1,500 per day. The team arranged to get her dialysis supplies delivered to her sister’s house, hoping that she could stay there until she found a place of her own. But it turned out that too many people were already living there. Attempts to find temporary housing through friends and her church dead-ended. Hotels she contacted were all too expensive. Going to a homeless shelter was not a viable option; it would give her a place to sleep, but she couldn’t perform her dialysis there. She volunteered that she could live out of her car, for which she reportedly used some of the $300 to buy gas, but it later turned out that she did not have one.
As pressure to discharge Ms. Jones mounted, team members became increasingly frustrated. Each new hope was thwarted by an opposing reality. The team had provided their patient with the best available medical care, marshaling the impressive resources of a major academic medical center to solve her acute medical problems as effectively and efficiently as possible. But now they had run up against a barrier for which they lacked the necessary training and resources – not a medical problem so much as a social one. Treating acute illness was doable, but looking out for their patient as a whole person with a real life outside the hospital was proving quite another matter.
