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A Libertarian’s Case Against Free Markets in Health Care

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By ROMAN ZAMISHKA

In the final act of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the eponymous villain king arrives on the battlefield to fight against Richmond, who will soon become Henry VII. During the battle, Richard is dismounted as his horse is killed and in a mad frenzy wades through the battlefield screaming “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Richard shows us how market value can change drastically depending on the circumstances, or your mental state, and even the most absurd exchange rate can become reasonable in a moment of crisis.

This presumably arbitrary nature of prices should be the first thing about the US healthcare market that catches the attention of any student of economics. Prices for the same procedure vary greatly between hospitals on opposite sides of the street and even then appear to have no basis in reality. Further investigation reveals many other features of the healthcare market that economics teaches us will increase transaction costs and the misallocation of resources. The prices we discussed are generally not paid by the patient, but by a third party insurer. Often the patient isn’t even able to select the insurer but is assigned one by his or her employer. What the patient thinks of the insurer’s ability as a steward of his or her premiums is irrelevant. Further, contracts between providers or pharmacies and the insurer completely hide the true price from the patient’s view. In addition, anti-competitive certificate of need laws limit competition between providers and expensive regulations compel providers to merge to compete in a nuclear arms race with the insurers, although the real victim is the patient’s wallet over which the providers and insurers fight their proxy wars. The best way to explain the US healthcare system is if you took every economic best practice and then did the opposite. How does one get out of this mess?

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A Doctor Thanks His Mentor – Steve Jobs

By DAVIS LIU, MD

I’ve been reading A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring written by famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.  Wooden spends half of his book thanking the people who had a powerful influence on his life, coaching, philosophy, and outlook on life.  Important people included his father, coaches, President Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Theresa.

Yes, President Abraham Lincoln and Mother Theresa.

Though clearly he could have never met the former and didn’t have the opportunity to meet the latter, Wooden correctly points out that as individuals we can be mentored by the writings, words, and thoughts of people we have never and will likely never meet.

Which seems like the most opportune time to thank one of my mentors, founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs.

Now, I have never met nor will I ever meet Steve Jobs.  Lest you think I’m a devoted Apple fan, I never bought anything from Apple until the spring of 2010.  Their products though beautifully designed were always too expensive.  I’m just a little too frugal.  I know technology well enough that people mistaken me for actually knowing what to do when a computer freezes or crashes.  Yet, the value proposition was never compelling enough until the release of the first generation iPad.  Then the iPhone 4.  Finally the Macbook Air last Christmas.

No, thanking Steve Jobs isn’t about the amazing magical products that have changed my life as well as millions of others.  It’s more than that.  What he has mentored me on is vision, perspective, persistence, and leadership.

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Shielding My Daughter’s Heart

By LYGEIA RICCIARDI

A couple of years ago, I gave birth to a baby girl, Ada. She looked perfect, but the doctors told me she had a significant heart murmur. When I held her in my arms at night I could hear blood rushing through a hole in her heart that shouldn’t have been there.

My husband and I took Ada to a pediatric cardiologist, who said she would probably need surgery to close that hole. For an entire year of tests and hospital visits, we lived in fear that open heart surgery was just around the corner. And then one day it was. “It’s time,” the cardiologist declared, “That hole is dangerously impeding her growth.”

Was Open-Heart Surgery Necessary?

I am grateful to live in a time and place in which surgery—even surgery on a heart the size of a golf ball—is an option. This kind of procedure has undoubtedly saved many lives. But it’s not without risks. More than 100,000 people die in this country every year from preventable medical errors. And hospital infections are a serious problem, too. We didn’t like the idea of subjecting a life so new, so tenuous, to a procedure of such magnitude unless there was a clear case for it. I’m not going to sugar coat this: We were talking about sawing open my baby’s ribs and stopping her heart and lungs.

How Much Are We Paying For a Choice of Insurers?

By Patricia Salber, MD

A number of years ago, a family doc friend of mine took me on a tour of his small group practice.   He proudly showed me the exam rooms, his medical equipment, and other parts of the facility that related to patient care.  Then we came to a large room with a bunch of desks piled high with paper.  He explained, bitterly, that this part of his office was for the people he had to keep on the payroll to do nothing but deal with insurers.  This administrative expense was cutting his margins to the bone and did not help him take better care of his patients.  He eventually left practice, to pursue a second career as a physician executive – a job that was, for him, more remunerative and more satisfying.

Part of the problem is that physicians in the US have to deal with multiple health plans – each with its own set of managed care rules, formularies (or list of approved drugs), requirements for prior authorization, rules for billing, submission of claims, and adjudication.  Until recently, almost all of this administrative work was done by phone or fax.  Picture this:  rooms full of practice-based nurses talking to insurance company nurses about the details of a case that may or may not lead to payment for medical care.

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Physician, Feed Thyself …

By Margaret Polaneczky, MD

This post first appeared on The Blog That Ate Manhattan.

All this medical food blogging has gotten me to thinking about the similarities between chefs and doctors.

What is the same

1. They’ve got the whites and the chef’s hat, we’ve got the greens and the caps and masks.

2. Both require intensive training with a clear hierarchy of ascent.

3. The chef and the surgeon are captains of their respective ships – the kitchen and the OR.

4. Skill with sharp instruments is necessary for both professions.

5. We both work long hours, including nights and weekends.

6. If we both do our jobs right, our clients walk out feeling better than when they walk in.

7. We have JCAHO, they have Frank Bruni.

8. A knowledge of organic and biochemistry is essential in both cooking and medicine.

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The Evolving Role and Stature of Health Information Management (HIM)

By SETH KNELLER



Several companies with roots in the Health Information Management (HIM) sector have emerged in recent years to address the gaps and limitations associated with most EHR deployments.  Although some of these companies have been around for years, and are sometimes incorrectly “boxed” as providing commoditized services in the areas of transcription and release of information services, several have developed exceptional new technology in the fields of clinical language comprehension and analytics that is highly relevant for the business objectives of the most progressive health systems.

The unique ability of certain firms to impact the evolution of the clinical documentation and analytics landscape stems from:

  • The much broader scope of data they can access and analyze due to their ability to source and organize both structured and unstructured clinical data.
  • Their position at the middle of the RCM value chain where clinical data capture and analysis intercept with complex regulatory and financial concepts that are designed to align reimbursement with the appropriateness of care being delivered.
  • Their potential to rationalize “siloed” functions in health systems related to case management, care coordination, utilization review, and compliance at a time when providers are responding to new reimbursement and risk-shift models that require them to operate more like payers.

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By RACHEL KATZ

Healthcare’s Silicon Valley problem: can startups really work with healthcare organizations?

Startups and healthcare organizations: fundamental foes or perfect partners?

When opposites attract: how startups and healthcare organizations can improve care together

Silicon Valley wants to love healthcare. The industry is enormous and full of inefficiency, which is to say, perfect for technology investment. So it comes as no surprise that venture money in healthcare technology startups has quadrupled since 2011 to $4.5BN in 2015. Moreover, the government wants to invite Silicon Valley-style innovation in healthcare. In January, CMS leaders stated that the next wave of EHR policy will focus on promoting startup innovation in healthcare by incentivizing open APIs and interoperability. Everyone agrees—so let’s just get going, right?

Here’s an important truth to recognize on the eve of what some like to call the “disruption of healthcare”: Silicon Valley and healthcare are fundamentally at odds. In technology we fail fast, launch and iterate, proudly make mistakes and learn from them. In medicine, the first principle is “do no harm.” Entrepreneurs are obsessed with growth–exponential growth, hypergrowth, 10X growth–and the faster the better. Conversely, in healthcare organizations, progress is measured in months and years. My company is currently in Y Combinator, a three-month accelerator program. I have had phone calls with healthcare organizations that took longer than that to schedule.

The philosophies and operations of the two world are at odds in many ways. Too many well-intentioned startups have come up against these tensions and lost steam.

Despite this, healthcare organizations and startups can make perfect partners. I believe more startups should try to serve healthcare organizations, and more healthcare decision-makers should choose to work with startups. Here are some lesser-discussed advantages for both sides.

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Decentralization and home health kits: Thoughts from Health 2.0

By Joe Flower

Take a look at this video from the Worrell design firm, who took part in the recent Health 2.0 confab in San Francisco. They took some insights from following ER folks around and charting their workflow into designing a better way for people to interact with the health system from their homes. At about the 4-minute mark, they start discussing what kind of home health kit/device would work, and then there is a demo of a mother consulting about her child’s flu, and getting actual testing, care, and monitoring from a live nurse remotely, all from this kit. According to the member of the design team whom I spoke with, the kit shown is a real prototype, and all the technology used is currently available.

What this says to me in the frame of my discussion of change in healthcare: If the technology is all there, why don’t we do this already? Because in a fee-for-service system there is no billing code for remote care. But: We are going to see many more healthcare organizations move into ACO-like risk contracting relationships with customers. If the healthcare organization is at risk for the costs of the care for the family in the demo, treating them in the home through such a device (one device per family) could be far cheaper, faster, and more effective than getting them to come into an urgent care clinic — cheap enough that the healthcare organization would simply buy the devices and give them to the covered families.

So as major provider organizations move into risk-contracted relationships, actual medical care that would now be taking place in the built clinical environment would be taking place in the home, supported by a live nurse monitor in a dedicated environment at the clinic. The home becomes an extension of the clinic, not only for the chronically ill and frail elderly whom we now might tend with home care, but for the well family in primary care.

Why Developers Should Enter Health IT Contests

By Fred Trotter

Patient safety is a movement within healthcare to reduce medical errors. Medical errors are a substantial problem in the healthcare industry, with a size and scope similar to car accidents: approximately the same number of deaths per year, about the same number of serious injuries. Personally I think working in patient safety is the simplest way for a geek to make a meaningful difference.

With that in mind I would like to promote a new developer contest sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), Partnership for Patients and hosted by Health 2.0: Ensuring Safe Transitions from Hospital to Home Challenge. As the name suggests, the contest is focused on the process of handing a patient over from an in-patient environment (in the hospital) to an out-patient environment (all the care that is not in a hospital).

I will be one of the judges for this contest and there are already enough “star players” submitting as teams in the contest that I know judging is going to be hard. The first prize is $25,000. That kind of money starts looking like seed-round funding rather than just a pat on the head. That is intentional on the part of both Health 2.0 and ONC. These contests are a way for ONC to find really amazing health IT ideas and help them transition into more substantial projects, with no strings attached. If you can prove to the judges that you have the best new idea and you can flesh it out well enough to make it clear that it has a chance of working, then you can walk away with enough cash to launch that idea. But don’t take my word for it.

Of course, even just submitting in the contest is a good way to get the attention of various investors.

Generally, the coordination of care in the United States is one of the greatest weaknesses in the system. Doctors here in the U.S. are generally well educated and held to high standards. As long as a doctor has a good understanding of your situation and has taken responsibility for your care, the U.S. healthcare system provides excellent care, on par with any other national system. The problem comes when a healthcare transition occurs, where a different doctor takes responsibility without necessarily getting all the needed information and sometimes without knowing that they are “on the hook” for care. Healthcare in the United States is coordinated via fax machines, and coordination for payment, which is sometimes associated with transitions of care, frequently uses ancient EDI standards. When this coordination fails things turn into a kind of communication comedy, which really would be quite funny except that there are sometimes tragic consequences. It actually helps to have a somewhat morbid sense of humor working in healthcare, since laughter, even inappropriate and macabre laughter, can help to manage the stress and pressure inherent in this high-stakes environment.

There are new standards and technologies available for the coordination of care during transitions that ONC is specifically encouraging in this contest, including the Direct Project, which is of course a favorite of mine (I am a sometimes-developer on the project).

These new technologies allow you rethink the basic assumptions in healthcare coordination, (i.e. Direct is basically “email that doctors can use without breaking the rules”) and should enable teams without extensive health IT experience to do something truly innovative.

More importantly, Partnership for Patients and ONC are providing specific guidance about content. Partnership for Patients is an HHS program that “partners” with hospitals and clinics that have committed to proactively reduce patient error and complications. The Partnership has very specific goals: “To reduce preventable injuries in hospitals by 40 percent and cut hospital readmission by 20 percent in the next three years by targeting those return trips to the hospitals that are avoidable.” This contest is only a small part of how they hope to achieve those goals.

CMS has released a patient checklist for hospital discharge, and the contents must be incorporated into winning contest submissions. But I can tell you from previous judging experience, thinking that “incorporate” = “regurgitate” is not a winning strategy. Instead, try to get your head around the complex hospital discharge phenomenon. PubMed is your friend. In my experience doing something amazing with one of the checklist items would be a better strategy then doing something derivative with all of the items. Doing something amazing with all of the items on the checklist would obviously win, but it may be impossible to do that well. (I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this.)

My day job is with the Cautious Patient Foundation (CPF). They hire me to write software to improve the communication between doctors and patients, which is part of their mission to provide software tools that enable patients to help reduce their own medical errors by being fully engaged, educated and aware. If the healthcare system were a highway the Cautious Patient Foundation would be a defensive driving course. CPF has a grant program that they use to fund innovations that impact patient safety. Contest participants are encouraged to submit their ideas to the Cautious Patient Foundation grant process. We are interested in innovative ideas that impact patient safety generally, not just in transitions of care. So if you have a winning patient safety concept that does not fit into this particular contest, we might be interested.

Moreover, there is nothing to stop you from submitting the same technology to one of the other Health 2.0 contests or even to another joint ONC/Health 2.0 contest. Many of these contests could easily be won by an application that does something with a patient safety impact. If you have a great idea for improving healthcare with software, just wait … there will eventually be a contest asking for just the kind of innovation you have.

All of this is to say: There is some real money in these developer contests. Traditional health IT experts who feel trapped can use contests to fund and promote their non-traditional ideas. Developers who are new to the field of health IT can use the contests as a way to break in and get attention for their ideas. Great ideas that improve the healthcare system can get traction, funding and attention. If you can get your great idea working and you submit it to one of these developers contests you can get some feedback.

Maybe your idea actually sucks, but if you knew why, then you could come up with a new idea that really would be great. In any case, it is pretty hard for a developer to just lose by participating in these contests. Worst case scenario is that is ends up being a free education. Who knows? You might be an important part of another developer’s free education.

No matter what, working on software that addresses patient safety issues is one of the few ways that a software developer can impact quality of life rather than convenience of life. These contests, especially the in-person code-a-thons, are fun enough that you might even find yourself forgetting that you are changing the world.

Fred Trotter is a recognized expert in Free and Open Source medical software and security systems. He has spoken on those subjects at the SCALE DOHCS conference, LinuxWorld, DefCon and is the MC for the Open Source Health Conference. This post first appeared at O’Rielly Radar.

He is co-author of Meaningful Use and Beyond. THCB readers can buy the ebook at 50% off until the end of November by mentioning “HITBlog.”

The Value of Moodscope

By Seth Roberts

In 2007, Jon Cousins started tracking his mood to help NHS psychiatrists decide if he was cyclothymic (a mild form of bipolar disorder). After a few months of tracking, he started sharing his scores with a friend, who expressed concern when his score was low. Jon’s mood sharply improved, apparently because of the sharing. This led him to start Moodscope, a website that makes it easy to track your mood and share the results.

I was curious about the generality of what happened to Jon — how does sharing mood ratings affect other people? In January, Jon kindly posted a short survey about this. More than 100 people replied.

Their answers surprised me. First, in a survey about sharing your mood — not about tracking your mood — most respondents did not share their mood. It is as if, in a survey about being tall, most respondents were not tall. Second, although Jon’s mood sharply rose as soon as he started sharing, this was not the usual experience. Sharing helped, some people said, but other people said sharing hurt. For example, one person said her mood was used against her in arguments. Finally, the respondents gave all sorts of persuasive reasons that rating their mood helped them. To me, at least, the value of mood rating isn’t obvious. I can list a dozen hypothetical benefits but whether they actually happen is unclear to me. I rated my mood for years and did it only to learn about the effects of morning faces. MoodPanda, another mood-rating site, gives a few brief vague unenthusiastic reasons to track your mood. And their site is all about mood rating.

In contrast, Moodscope users were clear and enthusiastic about the value of tracking. Here are some reasons they liked mood-tracking:

It is useful to look back sometimes to help you find ways of ‘keeping up’ a positive mood/outlook.

My mood range has definitely narrowed since starting mood stabilizers, so using Moodscope has given me solid evidence that the treatment is working well. I also run statistical analyses of my mood charts against variables like sleep, medication use, and alcohol consumption. The correlations were not particularly meaningful using a 9-point Likert-like scale from a standard mood chart. When I used my Moodscope scores instead, I suddenly found that some of the correlations are (ridiculously!) statistically significant, which also made me feel more certain about what I need to do and change to better manage my mental health.

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