Trust is essential for interoperability. One way to promote trust is to provide transparency and accountability for the proposed national system. People have come to expect email or equivalent notification when a significant transaction is made on our personal data. From a patient’s perspective, all health records transactions involving TEFCA are likely significant. When a significant transaction occurs, we expect contemporaneous notification (not the expectation that you have to ask first), a monthly statement of all transactions, and a clear indication of how an error or dispute can be resolved. We also expect the issuer of the notification to also be accountable for the transaction and to assist in holding other participants accountable if that becomes necessary. Each such notification should identify who accessed the data and how the patient can review the data that was accessed. Each time, the patient should be informed of the procedure to flag errors, report abuse, and opt-out of further participation at either the individual source or at the national level.
Pay for performance, the catchall term for policies that purport to pay doctors and hospitals based on quality and cost measures, has been taking a bashing.
Last November, University of Pittsburgh and Harvard researchers published a major study in Annals of Internal Medicine showing that a Medicare pay-for-performance program did not improve quality or reduce cost and, to make matters worse, it actually penalized doctors for caring for the poorest and sickest patients because their “quality scores” suffered. In December, Ankur Gupta and colleagues reported that a Medicare program that rewards and punishes hospitals based on arbitrary limits on the number of hospital admissions of heart failure patients may have increased death rates. On New Year’s Day, the New York Times reported that penalties for “inappropriate care” concocted by Veterans Affairs induced an Oregon hospital to deny acute medical care to its sickest patients, including an 81-year-old “malnourished and dehydrated” vet with skin ulcers and broken ribs.
And just three weeks ago, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recommended that Congress repeal a Medicare pay-for-performance program, imposed by Congress in 2015, because the program is costly and ineffective.
This bad news comes on top of a decade of less-publicized research indicting policies intended to reward and penalize doctors based on measures — most of them inaccurate — of their cost and quality. That research demonstrates that penalties against doctors:
Cause doctors to game quality measures. For example, a Medicare program that punished hospitals for hospital-acquired infections actually induced some hospitals to characterize infections acquired after admission as “present upon admission” or to simply not report the infection rather than reduce actual infection rates.
Subjecting doctors and hospitals to carrots and sticks hasn’t worked for several reasons. The most fundamental one: Clinician skill is not the only factor that determines the quality of care. Consider one widely used performance measure: the percent of patients diagnosed with high blood pressure whose blood pressure is brought under control. Doctors who treat older, sicker, and poorer patients with high blood pressure will inevitably score worse on this so-called quality measure than doctors who treat healthier and higher-income patients.
When Russian forces stormed the school held hostage by Chechen terrorists, over 300 people died. The Beslan school siege wasn’t the worst terrorist attack arithmetically – the fatalities were only a tenth of September 11th. What made the school siege particularly gruesome was that many who died, and died in the most gruesome manner, were children.
There’s something particularly distressing about kids being massacred, which can’t be quantified mathematically. You either get that point or you don’t. And the famed Chechen rebel, Shamil Basayev, got it. Issuing a statement after the attack Basayev claimed responsibility for the siege but called the deaths a “tragedy.” He did not think that the Russians would storm the school. Basayev expressed regret saying that he was “not delighted by what happened there.” Basayev was not known for contrition but death of children doesn’t look good even for someone whose modus operandi was in killing as many as possible.
There’s a code even amongst terrorists – you don’t slaughter children – it’s ok flying planes into big towers but not ok deliberately killing children. Of course, neither is ok but the point is that even the most immoral of our species have a moral code. Strict utilitarians won’t understand this moral code. Strict utilitarians, or rational amoralists, accord significance by multiplying the number of life years lost by the number died, and whether a death from medical error or of a child burnt in a school siege, the conversion factor is the same. Thus, for rational amoralists sentimentality specifically over children dying, such as in Parkland, Florida, in so far as this sentimentality affects policy, must be justified scientifically.
The debate over gun control is paralyzed by unsentimental utilitarianism but with an ironic twist – it is the conservatives, known to eschew utilitarianism, who seek refuge in it. After every mass killing, I receive three lines of reasoning from conservatives opposed to gun control: a) If you restrict guns there’ll be a net increase in crimes and deaths, b) there’s no evidence restricting access to guns will reduce mass shootings, and c) people will still get guns if they really wish to. This type of reasoning comes from the same people who oppose population health, and who deeply oppose the sacrifice of individuals for the greater good, i.e. oppose utilitarianism.
The recently-announced acquisition of the oncology data company Flatiron Health by Roche for $2.1B represents a robust validation of the much-discussed but infrequently-realized hypothesis that technology entrepreneurs who can turn health data into actionable insights can capture significant value for this accomplishment.
Four questions underlying this deal (a transaction first reported, as usual, by Chrissy Farr) are: (1) What is the Flatiron business model? (2) What makes Flatiron different from other health data companies? (3) Why did Roche pay so much for this asset? (4) What are the lessons other health tech companies might learn?
The Flatiron Business Model
To a first approximation, Flatiron has a model that can be seen as similar to tech platforms like Google and Facebook – delight (or at least offer a useful service to) front-end users, and then sell the data generated to other businesses. For Flatiron, the front-end users are oncologists (mostly community, some academic), and the data customers are pharma companies. In contrast to Google (and also in contrast to the less successful Practice Fusion, recently acquired at a loss), Flatiron doesn’t sell access to front-end users themselves (e.g. through targeted ads), but rather access to de-identified, aggregated clinical information.
Success of this model requires that the Flatiron platform is attractive to oncology practices, who must feel that they’re getting distinct value from it and believe that it helps them fulfill their primary mission of taking care of cancer patients. If this is true, then the Flatiron platform will enjoy continued traction from its current base, and may more easily win over new users (including practices that use a different EMR system, like Epic, but still want access to the Flatiron network and analytics).
Our healthcare system is self-destructing, a fact made more obvious every single day.A few years ago, a number of brave physicians who were fed up with administrative burden, burnout, and obstacles to providing care for patients started a movement –known as Direct Primary Care (DPC.)This is an innovative practice model where the payment arrangement is directly between a patient and their physician, leaving third parties, such as insurance or government agencies, completely out of the equation.
The rapidly growing number of DPC physicians have organized into a group called the DPC Coalition (DPCC); suddenly, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) is paying attention.As of February 2018, there are 770 DPC practices across the United States with new clinics opening each week as brave physicians leave the “system” behind, never looking back. Breaking free from the chains of insurance and government, this group is restoring the practice of medicine to its core, a relationship between a physician and their patient.
CMS understands there is a problem with the way Medicare services are being delivered to tax payers; it turns out their idyllic version of “high quality” care is not as affordable as they predicted.All evidence indicates the DPC model is not only capable of generating significant cost reduction, but also saving the federal government billions if administered on a large-enough scale.As fewer physicians accept Medicare and convert to DPC practices, CMS wants a piece of the pie.
Here’s the second episode of Health in 2 point 00, hosted by Jessica DaMassa. She asks me as many questions as I can answer in two minutes. Hope you enjoy it! And if you have questions please email them to us or leave them in the comments–Matthew Holt
By now, you’ve heard of the Hawaii False Alarm, and about the blowback and blame as people try to sort out how this could have happened. In government circles, however, there have been empathy and knowing cringes. It is the norm, not the exception, that government systems are confusing and hard to use. Horrible mistakes happen when people use clunky government systems — they just usually don’t make the news.
In fact, the last time a government technology failure was so thoroughly plastered across the news was when healthcare.gov failed to launch. At the time, I was working for the Chief Technology Officer of the United States in the White House. It was a difficult, frustrating time — but the media glare and public outrage opened up an opportunity to make some criticalprogress on changes that governmentworkers had been asking for, for years, to prevent it from happening again. Government design is news right now, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on what people working on this problem could do next.
Value-based healthcare is gaining popularity as an approach to increase sustainability in healthcare. It has its critics, possibly because its roots are in a health system where part of the drive for a hospital to improve outcomes is to increase market share by being the best at what you do. This is not really a solution for improving population health and does not translate well to publicly-funded healthcare systems such as the NHS. However, when we put aside dogma about how we would wish to fund healthcare, value-based healthcare provides us with a very useful set of tools with which to tackle some of the fundamental problems of sustainability in delivering high quality care.
What is value?
Defined by Professor Michael Porter at Harvard Business School, value is defined as a function of outcomes and costs. Therefore to achieve high value we must deliver the best possible outcomes in the most efficient way, outcomes which matter from the perspective of the individual receiving healthcare and not provider process measures or targets. Sir Muir Gray expands on the idea of technical value (outcomes/costs) to specifically describe ‘personal value’ and ‘allocative value’, encouraging us to focus also on shared decision making, individual preferences for care and ensuring that resources are allocated for maximum value. This article seeks to demonstrate that the role of data and informatics in supporting value-based care goes much further than the collection and remote analysis of big datasets – in fact, the true benefit sits much closer to the interaction between clinician and patient.
The advent of FHIR and SMART on FHIR has been a huge game changer in recent years. FHIR is radically changing the way we think about integration of innovative applications, making it faster, easier and less disruptive to workflow. It has allowed developers to create medical applications, which can be easily integrated into existing systems. SMART on FHIR is a related utility, which allows web apps to run inside a browser so clinicians can use them without leaving the EMR environment.
More than 35 provider organizations have exposed their FHIR APIs. Allscripts has been leading the charge in API adoption for some years now with their plug and play-like platform that developers can build new technologies and applications on top of. Not to be outdone, Epic opened up their API in 2017, thus signaling a refusal to be made obsolete by the more nimble and comparatively newer players.
“The emergence of blockchain, FHIR and other technologies leads to a bigger question. What happens to health care when there is unfettered data access and the monopoly of the user interface goes away?”, said Health 2.0’s Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya.
Learn about the SMART on FHIR Stack and tools that can be used to deploy world-class applications at Dev4Health on April 30 – May 1, 2018 in Cleveland, Ohio. Join developers, innovative leaders, designers, chief technology officers, chief innovation officers, start-ups, and health tech enthusiasts for two days of strategic networking, idea generation, and innovative workshops – plus live demos some of the newest health tech start-ups. Register today!
For what is now an annual tradition, we are once again attempting to be healthcare soothsayers. We are proud to share with you our 10 healthcare predictions for 2018. In 2017, amaz-ingly, eight of our predictions came true.
For 2018, we are betting on the following:
1. Another Theranos
We think at least one healthcare information technology company with an enterprise value of more than $1 billion (not including Outcome Health, which we could not have predicted tanking so spectacularly quickly) will be exposed as not having product results to support their hype. It will also expose embarrassed investors who did not do careful diligence and founders with poor integrity.
2. Hospital hiring slows
After a decade of sustained hiring every month, hospitals will stop. Many will downsize their administrative staffs as admissions continue to slowdown and reimbursement pressures intensify. We expect multiple months with net healthcare job losses which would be the first time this has occurred since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking the data.
3. Successful HCIT exits
After a long wait, and more than $10 billion of venture capital invested in startups over the past five years, we will begin to see successful IPO and M&A exits. These will reassure growth investors to keep pouring money into companies with traction.
4. Amazon does not disrupt PBMs
Despite daily rumors, we think Amazon will not shake up the PBM sector. Instead, Amazon will limit its healthcare market footprint to its existing consumer products and distributing non- regulated healthcare goods to healthcare providers (adopting a B2B and not B2C strategy).
By now, you’ve heard of the Hawaii False Alarm, and about the 
