By ROSS KOPPEL and STEVE SOUMERAI

The recent Health Affairs Blog piece by Chernew and Barbey (October 17, 2017) provides a helpful theoretical summary of the various ways ACOs might achieve savings—even if modest or still latent. But their analysis of the empirical literature, including the CMS innovations, gives us little confidence that even these small savings are real or will emerge. It is astonishing there is little or no critique of ACO studies’ limitations that generally bias the findings toward the apparent (but miniscule) savings.

Two Critical Methodological Flaws:

1. ACOs generally volunteer to participate based on their pre-existing capacity to “manage” care. These organizations are then compared to non-volunteer organizations that are less likely to game the system and are destined to perform worse than volunteers.
2. These studies fail to incorporate the costs of forming and maintaining ACOs. These creation and maintenance costs alone would alter the calculations and may sink them.

It is no wonder the majority of Pioneer ACOs have dropped out of the program. It seems clear they were not saving money. In fact, the arrangement put Dartmouth Hitchcock—associated with the developer of the ACO concept—at financial risk.

Other, similar studies (such as the Massachusetts’ Blue Cross/Blue Shield reports on alternative payment models), have similar methodological limitations, including volunteer bias and significant shifts in the participant population over time.

Continue reading…

By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

A recent tweet from JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, urged me andother doctors to “include nutrition counseling into the flow of [our] daily practice.”

Along with the tweet came a link to an article that outlines “relatively small” dietary changes, based on the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans, that can “significantly improve health.”

My response to the tweet was swift and knee-jerk.  I will not do it.  I simply will not.  I refuse to follow dietary guidelines or recommend them to my patients.

“What are you saying?!” “Are you the kind of self-interested doctor who only treats disease and cares nothing about prevention?!”  I imagine my outraged critics erupting in a chorus of disapproval.

Is my reaction unwarranted?  After all, the recommendations themselves seem sensible enough:  Eat fast food less often; drink fewer sugary sodas; consume more fruits and vegetables.  What’s not to like?

Unhealthy guidelines

I don’t know.  Perhaps it’s dietary guideline fatigue.

For more than 40 years, the nutrition experts have instructed us with guideline after guideline, food pyramid after food pyramid.  But what have they got to show for?  The obesity epidemic followed the introduction of dietary recommendations, and some doctors even blame those recommendations for causing the epidemic!

The blame may be far-fetched, but there’s something un-natural and perhaps even unhealthy about dietary guidelines.

Take the recommendations in the JAMA article.  Even though the authors claim that only “small steps” need be taken, the whole message occupies 2 pages of fine print.  What’s more, the doctor is supposed to start the process by asking patients to fill out a questionnaire.  Who has the appetite for yet another questionnaire?!

The recommendations themselves come in the usual manner of adding or subtracting “servings:” increase vegetables by one serving per day; decrease sodas by one serving per day; replace one serving of crackers with one handful of nuts, etc…

But why think about meals in terms of discrete servings of food and beverage stuff?  A meal is one thing, one experience.  To break it up into physico-chemical or caloric components makes sense for laboratory animals, and perhaps for patients with serious metabolic disorders.  But does it really work for most human beings in their natural environment?

Continue reading…

By KIP SULLIVAN, JD

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has done it again. At their October 4, 2017 meeting they agreed to repeal the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), an insanely complex and evidence-free pay-for-performance scheme within the larger program known as MACRA. Instead of examining how they made such a serious mistake in the first place (MedPAC has long supported turning fee-for-service Medicare into a giant pay-for-performance scheme), they repeated their original mistake –- they adopted yet another vague, complex, evidence-free proposal to replace MIPS.

MedPAC’s history gives us every reason to believe that when they discuss their “repeal and replace MIPS” proposal at their December 2017 and January 2018 meetings, they will refuse to discuss their “replace” proposal in any detail; they will not ask for evidence indicating their proposal is safe and effective; and in their March 2018 report to Congress they will foist upon CMS the dirty work of figuring out how to make their lead balloon fly. CMS will dutifully write up a gazillion pages of gibberish describing how the new program is supposed to work, it won’t work, MedPAC will return to the scene of the crime years later and, pretending they had no part in creating it, propose yet another evidence-free tweak. And so on.

MedPAC is caught in a trap of their own making. They endorse health policy fads without any evidence and without thinking through the details; then when the fads don’t work, rather than review their defective thought process, they endorse other iterations of the fads, again without evidence and without thinking through the details. The tweaked version of the fad fails, and MedPAC starts the cycle all over again. Two analogies for this trap or vicious cycle occur to me. One is the tar pit where mastodons got stuck and died; struggle only caused the dimwitted creatures to sink faster. The other is the hedge fund that gradually becomes a Ponzi scheme. Investors like Bernie Madoff make bad investments, and when the investments go south, instead of admitting their mistakes, they induce their investors to throw good money after bad.

In this comment I will explain why MedPAC’s MIPS-repeal-and-replace scheme deserves ridicule. In my next comment I will describe the process by which MedPAC built the MACRA tar pit or, if you like, the intellectual Ponzi scheme, that now traps them.

Continue reading…

BY ROSS KOPPEL

Politico’s Arthur Allen has written a useful report on recent findings about EHR-related errors. We must keep in mind, however, that almost all EHR-related errors are unknown, and often unknowable. Why?

1. The most common errors involved with EHRs are medication prescribing errors. But we seldom find those errors because those type of errors seldom manifest themselves because so many hospitalized patients are old and sick, have several co-morbidities and are taking many other medications. Key organs, like the liver, kidney and heart, are compromised. Bad things can happen to these patients even when we do everything right; conversely, good things can happen even when we do much wrong. We usually miss the results of, say, a wrongly prescribed medication. (Note: these types of ‘missed’ medication errors contrast to leaving a pair of hemostats in the gut or to wrong-site surgery—where most errors soon become obvious).
2. As the experts referenced (Dr. Bob Wachter, Dean Sittig and Hardeep Singh) noted, very, very few cases make it to litigation, further reducing the numbers examined in the study discussed.
3. Perhaps worse, few clinicians want to report problems even if they know about them. This is a litigious society and few medical professionals want to spend time in court. Also, as the authors Allen interviewed (all of them my friends and respected colleagues): some of the errors that were known did not result in harm and many were caught by others or by the professional involved in the error before they harmed.

Continue reading…