The Health Care Blog – Page 285 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Does Donald Trump Have Heart Disease?

Jan 23, 2018• 2

By SAURABH JHA

According to the WHO definition of health, which is “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity,” several million Americans became unhealthy on Tuesday November 8^th, 2016 as Florida folded to Trump. As Hillary’s prospects became bleaker many more millions, particularly those on Twitter, lost their health. The WHO sets a high bar for health. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a person on social media to be in “complete mental and social well-being.”

Whilst WHO has set a high bar for health, modern medicine casts a wide net for disease, and the duo have led to mass over medicalization, overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Yet despite the wide net, Trump has thus far managed to evade the psychiatrists, medicine’s version of the FBI, who have tried imposing upon him a range of psychiatric disorders including “extreme present hedonism”, which sounds like “hyperbolic discounting,” which basically means someone who doesn’t give a rat’s tail about the future. Base jumpers suffer from this condition. I once suffered a milder version – and then I became a father and grew up.

Trump doesn’t look like a base jumper. And you’re going to need more than hyperbolic discounting to nail him on the 25^th Amendment. Some tried diagnosing Trump with “mild cognitive impairment” (MCI) – a condition which heralds the more persuasive cognitive decline of dementia. MCI reminds me of an old medical school friend who went around administering the mini mental test to elderly patients on medical wards. One of the questions was: what are the dates of the 2^nd World War (WW2)? No patient got that question right because my friend thought WW2 started in 1940. It started in 1939.

Pharma’s (Big) Data Problem

Jan 23, 2018• 2

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

C.P. Snow, author of “The Two Cultures”

Despite (some might say, because of) a raft of new biological methods, pharma R&D has struggled with its EROOM problem, the fact that the cost of successfully developing a new drug, including the cost of failures, has been relentlessly increasing, rather than decreasing, over time (EROOM is Moore spelled backwards, as in Moore’s Law, describing the rapid pace of technology improvement over time).

Given the impact of technology in so many other areas, the question many are now asking is whether technology could do its thing in pharma, and make drug development faster, cheaper, and better.

Many major pharmas believe the answer has to be yes, and have invested in some version of a by-now familiar data initiative aimed at aggregating and organizing internal data, supplementing this with available public data, and overlaying this with a set of analytical tools that will help the many data scientists these pharmas are urgently hiring to extract insights and accelerate research.

Mayo Clinic: Transparency, Deception, and Ice Cream

Jan 23, 2018• 11

BY NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

The Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis has held the top spot on the U.S. News and World Report hospital rankings for the past two years. That’s an impressive accomplishment. But one despite the closure of community hospitals that negatively impact rural Minnesota towns.

Citing staff shortages, reduced inpatient censuses and ongoing financial challenges, Mayo decided to move all inpatient services from the hospital in Albert Lea, Minnesota, including labor and delivery, to a town more than 20 miles away. In response to pleas for reconsideration, Mayo Clinic Vice President Bobby Gastout callously remarked that 23 miles is not ideal — but “people are driving 23 miles to get their favorite ice cream.”

A grassroots group, Save Our Hospital, galvanized the community by answering “we like our ice cream and inpatient care in Albert Lea.”

The UPMC-Highmark Brawl Spills Into Philadelphia’s Backyard

Jan 22, 2018• 4

By TORY WOLFF

The UPMC/Highmark rivalry continues to open new fronts in Pennsylvania. Highmark’s response to UPMC is differentiated in two ways: first, Highmark is using a coalition-building strategy and, second, it is controlling its exposure to big in-patient assets; in contrast, UPMC is building an integrated, single-brand system and happily taking over hospitals (and building more) along the way. When UPMC and Highmark make major investments in a region, local systems will be caught in the capex arms and feel the pressure to affiliate. Credibly threatening to respond in kind may defuse the arms race. But unaffiliated systems may struggle to find partners willing to bankroll a battle with both Highmark and UPMC, leaving no option for unaligned systems than to pick sides. Philadelphia systems – so far largely neutral to Highmark vs. UPMC – should be able to stay neutral as the fight develops in their western backyard. If the battle moves into northeastern Pennsylvania or jumps into south Jersey, however, the Philadelphia systems will have to develop a response.

The competitive rivalry between Highmark and UPMC is truly epic. Long ago – when Highmark largely focused on insurance and UPMC largely focused on care delivery — they were good partners in the Pittsburgh market. But as each has become more vertically integrated – with Highmark acquiring the West Penn Allegheny system and UPMC’s health plan buisness growing – they have since become bitter rivals. The competition has expanded out of Western Pennsylvania and into the rest of the state.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President

Jan 20, 2018• 29

BY STEVEN FINDLAY

The resurgent debate about President Trump’s mental health prompts me to update a piece I wrote for THCB last June. That piece drew lively comments and debate.

It’s also the one-year mark of the Trump presidency.

As The New York Times editorial page recently asked, bluntly, on Jan. 11: “Is Mr. Trump Nuts?”

Since last summer, that question has gained more traction and spurred more earnest debate. The results from Trump’s medical and “cognitive” exam on Jan 12 are unlikely to quell concern. (More about those results below.)

Nearly every major newspaper and magazine has run stories. Print media columnists and TV commentators dwell on it constantly. It’s catnip for late night comedians. It’s been a trending topic on social media for months. And, of course, it’s a topic of discussion and banter almost everywhere you go.

Lawmakers have finally joined in, too, after reluctance for the better part of 2017. Some even render an opinion publicly.

Articles have begun to pop up in medical journals, too—most recently Dr. Claire Pouncey’s piece in the New England Journal of Medicine (Dec. 27, 2017).

And then there’s the book, which sparked Dr. Pouncey’s piece as well other articles and reviews since it came out last fall. I’m not talking about Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff—although that book is certainly relevant in this context.

Rather, I’m talking about The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, edited by Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a specialist in law and psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

NEJM Blasts “Crusade,” Omits that Its Former Editor Launched It

Jan 19, 2018• 11

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

A blistering attack by the national editor of the New England Journal of Medicine against the “less is more” movement in medicine omitted that the publication’s former editor-in-chief played a foundational role in popularizing the idea of widespread medical waste.

The commentary in late December by Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum, “The Less-Is-More Crusade – Are We Overmedicalizing or Oversimplifying?” has attracted intense attention. Rosenbaum berates a “missionary zeal” to reduce putative overtreatment that she says is putting dangerous pressure on physicians to abstain from recommending some helpful treatments. She also asserts that the research by Dartmouth investigators and others who claim 30 percent waste in U.S. health care, in which she once fervently believed, is actually based on suspect methodology.

What Rosenbaum fails to mention is that the policy consensus she seeks to puncture – that the sheer magnitude of wasted dollars in U.S. health care offers “the promise of a solution without trade-offs” – originated in the speeches, articles and editorials of the late Dr. Arnold Relman, the New England Journal’s editor from 1977 to 1991.Continue reading…

A Patient Experience-Based View of the TEFCA

Jan 18, 2018• 5

By ADRIAN GROPPER

Let’s give the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) credit for trying. In what’s arguably the first significant piece of policymaking, the newly Republican HHS issued a draft Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) that aims to implement the massively bipartisan 21st Century Cures act mandate to end information blocking. Are they succeeding?

Why should you care? After almost a decade and many tens of $billions spent on health information technology, neither physicians nor patients have access to a longitudinal health record, transparency of quality or cost, access to independent decision support, or even the ability to know what their out-of-pocket cost is going to be. After eight years of regulation, precious little benefit has trickled-down to patients and physicians. This post looks at the TEFCA proposal from the patient experience perspective.

The patient perspective matters because, under HIPAA, patients do not have choice about how our data is accessed or used. This has led to information blocking as hospitals and EHR vendors slow-walk the ability of patients to direct data to information services we choose. Patients lost the “right of consent” in 2002. This puts a regulation-shy administration in a quandary: How do they regulate to implement Cures, when current HIPAA and HITECH-era regulations give all of the power to provider institutions bent on locking-in patients as key to value-based compensation?

The Kentucky Armageddon

Jan 18, 2018• 34

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

The Commonwealth of Kentucky, best known for its weirdly colored grass, fine bourbon and equestrian pageantry, is about to be destroyed by the Trump administration. Many will suffer and perhaps die because Kentucky obtained a Medicaid waiver to impose additional and often insurmountable hardships on poor people receiving their free health care from the State. Since all I need to know, I learned on Twitter, allow me to share with you some illuminating insights from the Twitterati.

The evil Republican Governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, is salivating at the prospect off changing Medicaid as we know it, which obviously means that poor people and especially people of color will be suffering greatly under this plan. You really don’t need to know more, since this should be reason enough to mobilize the worried wealthy, who are tossing and turning in their featherbeds night after night, searching for ways to save the poor. For those who are neither worried nor wealthy enough to really care, here are the ominous provisions of the Kentucky racist, homophobic and xenophobic plan to change Medicaid (it is all these things because it was not only approved, but encouraged by the Trump administration, and we all know what that means).

Mark Ganz — What’s Your Purpose in Health Care?

Jan 18, 2018

Last week at Health 2.0’s Wintertech, held during “health care’s money week” JP Morgan in San Francisco, Cambia CEO Mark Ganz gave a remarkable talk–one you wouldn’t expect from the leader of a big health insurer. He called out pharma for price gouging, he asked what consumers would think about the conversations we are having, but mostly he asked people to think about why they were working in health care. And he did it with a deeply personal set of stories. Everyone there found it very moving and very important, so I wanted to share it with the THCB audience. It’s well worth your time to watch. — Matthew Holt

The Naming of Things

Jan 17, 2018• 2

By JOE FLOWER

It’s happening across many parts of the federal government, in many sectors. Officials of the National Park Service have been reprimanded for tweeting about climate change. Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have been warned away from seven specific words in their budget documents, including “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “transgender.”

It is happening in healthcare as well. In previously secret proceedings, revealed here for the first time, representatives of organizations and companies across healthcare are in negotiations with a cross-agency team at Health and Human Services to restructure the language we use around medicine and healthcare.