ByROBERT MCNUTT, MD and NORTIN HADLER, MD 

Every conversation with a patient is an exercise in the analysis of “big data.” The patient’s appearance, changes in mood and expression, and eye contact are data points. The illness narrative is rich in semiotics: pacing, timing, nuances of speech, dialect are influenced by context, background, and insight which in turn reflect religion, education, literacy, numeracy, life experiences and peer input. All this is tempered by personal philosophy and personality traits such as recalcitrance, resilience, and tolerance. Taking a history, by itself, generates a wealth of data but that’s just the start.

Add into the mix physical findings of variable reliability, laboratory markers of variable specificity, imaging bits and bytes and you have “big data.” Then you mine this data for the probabilistic variance of the potential causes of a complaint based on which you begin to consider values for numerous options for care. So armed, the physician next needs to factor the benefits and harms of multiple treatments’ derived from populations that never perfectly reflect the situation of the individual in the chair next to us, our patient. This is the information necessary to empower our patient to make rational choices from the menu of options. That is clinical medicine. That is what we do many times a day to the best of our ability and to the limits of our stamina.

Take that Watson. You need a lot more than 90 servers and megawatts of electricity to manage our bedside rounds. You need to contend with the gloriously complicated and idiosyncratic fabric of human existence. Poets might be a match, but Watson is not.

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By KIP SULLIVAN, JD

This is the last of a series of imaginary lectures for President Obama. I am hoping to educate him by criticizing three people who influenced him – Peter Orszag, Atul Gawande, and Elliott Fisher and his colleagues at Dartmouth. In this last installment I focus on Gawande.

Obama was deeply impressed by Gawande’s “The Cost Conundrum,” an article published in the New Yorker in June 2009. By June 2009 Obama had already adopted the managed care diagnosis (overuse) and the latest iteration of the managed care solution (ACOs, “medical homes,” and pay-for-performance, all of which will allegedly be facilitated by electronic medical records). “The Cost Conundrum” did not convert Obama to managed care ideology, but it did strengthen his belief in it.

“The Cost Conundrum” illustrates the good and the bad effects the Dartmouth Atlas has had on American health policy and on intelligent people like Gawande and Obama. The article is about Gawande’s trip to McAllen, Texas to see why per capita Medicare spending in that small town was the highest in the country. [1] Gawande knew it was high because the Dartmouth Atlas said so. Asking why Medicare spending in McAllen was so high was a legitimate question to ask.

But Gawande went way beyond exposing problems with Medicare spending in McAllen. He told his readers that the problems he uncovered in McAllen – overuse of some Medicare services induced by fee-for-service payment – afflicted vast swaths of the medical profession and that “accountable care organizations” were the answer. He specifically singled out the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and an informal cartel in Grand Junction, Colorado as examples of ACOs that had allegedly already proven they could provide high-quality care at very low cost. [2]

But within a few years, research would turn Gawande’s characterization of Mayo and Grand Junction upside down. It would turn out that both the Mayo Clinic and Grand Junction are costly places to be treated when all medical spending, not just Medicare spending, is taken into account. Oops.

But before I elaborate on that mistake, I want to give Gawande credit for the good “Conundrum” did do.

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By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

Whether applied to policymaking for individuals, large populations, or administration of health services nationwide, it is imperative regulatory decisions be anchored to empirical evidence. The official MACRA rule has now been released.  It is 2,000 pages based on the opinion of many non-practicing physicians, Dartmouth economists, and government administrators with input from a few doctors on the front line. In my opinion, what began as a certain death sentence has commuted us to life in prison; MACRA will regulate physicians without representation. 

Let me acknowledge my opinion is limited by my own “small” practice bias. 380 thousand “small” practices (having 15 providers or less) will be exempted if they have less than 100 Medicare patients.  Your definition of small and mine are strikingly different.  Every single independent practice in my hometown of that “quasi-small” size, has sold to the local hospital already.  The “small” practices remaining in my community have 1 or 2 physicians, so I will refer to those as micro-practices for clarity.  My micro-practice serves more than 400 Medicaid patients, with a waitlist of more than 50.  MACRA rules do not seem to have an answer for when there are not enough micro-practices remaining with which to form a “virtual” group. 

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By JOE FLOWER

The final MACRA rules are out. There is plenty of room for debate about them, but one thing is clear: They are a fine example of why we cannot expect the federal government to be the key and most powerful driver of change in healthcare.

This is not a political statement, not an anit-government slogan, not a libertarian assertion. This is a systemic observation.

This is not because the law or the CMS rule-makers are not well-intentioned. To the contrary, MACRA seems like a noble enterprise. Congress is to be congratulated for at least temporarily getting itself unstuck long enough to pass it. CMS is trying their mightiest to push healthcare in the direction of actually offering value for all the money we keep shoveling into it.

But just look at it: Over 2,000 pages, full of complexities, exceptions, subsidiary re-payment clauses, labels and circles and arrow that will keep healthcare lawyers and consultants in fine shape for quite some time to come. As THCB’s Kip Sullivan has pointed out, MACRA is supposed to be rewarding good “volume to value” behavior and punishing its opposite, but it is so complex that few physicians will be able to honestly tell whether they will get rewarded, how much, or for exactly what.

Operant Conditioning

Or when. Have you ever tried to train a dog? If you want them to stop some behavior, like digging in the garden or jumping up on you, you have to catch them in the act and give them a negative response right then. If you want to reward them for something, you have to give them the treat (or the clicker click that signals a reward) the moment they do it, so that they know what the heck you are talking about and how compelling the reward or punishment is. (My lab used to be all, “If it’s not cheese, don’t even bother.”)

People are not that different, especially people trying to run the increasingly complex business of a medical practice out of one hand while trying to actually practice medicine with the other. If you want them to do something that is both different and difficult, give them an impressive reward the instant they do it, a reward that is significant in comparison to all the other influences on their bottom line, and that happens in this billing cycle.

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By KIP SULLIVAN, JD

When I read the original MACRA rule that CMS published last April, I was appalled at its complexity, at CMS’s total disinterest in measuring “performance” accurately, and CMS’s willingness to hype the performance of ACOs and “medical homes” (the main prototypes for the “alternative payment models” [APMs] authorized by MACRA). I entertained the faint hope that CMS would come to its senses after hearing the reaction to its original rule and propose something less complex, or maybe even urge Congress to suspend enforcement of the law until it could be rewritten. Foolish me.

I have read a substantial portion of CMS’s final rule, published last Friday. It is clear to me CMS intends to implement its original rule with only minor changes. I predict the implementation process will be a nightmare.

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