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Above the Fold

Don’t like CB Insights’ numbers? Just wait…

Feb 3, 2016

By MATTHEW HOLT

Last year I got in a modest Twitter spat with Anand Sanwal the CEO of investor analytics company CB Insights. Anand writes a very amusing newsletter, has built a wildly successful business tracking venture investing (at $20-50K a client) and has recently taken on $10m in VC himself to build out his business which was already profitable. The spat was because in August 2015 (5 months ago) CB insights said that “Digital Health” investments totalled $3.5 billion in 2014. You can go read the article Stephanie Baum concocted from the Tweetstream but my point was that when CB Insights, a generalist analyst company, said that the investment in ~~digital~~ SMAC health was $3.5bn in 2014 they were wrong because 4 specialists (Health 2.0, Mercom, Rock Health and Startup Health) all said it was over $4.5bn.

What’s a billion between friends? Not much, but what I left unsaid until now is that if they’re 25% off the average in one sector, where are they in the other sectors they cover? But other than a few amused readers of MedCity News no one much cared and the world moved on.

Then everyone stared putting out their Q4 2015 numbers. Amusingly, but probably only to me, both Rock Health & Startup Health put out their Q4 numbers 2 weeks before the quarter/year ended, and missed a bunch of late deals! But by the time the revised numbers came in everyone was again in that middle $4 billion range and there was general agreement that funding was about flat in 2015 compared to 2014–albeit at a high level compared to what the Cinderella sector had been recently.
Health 2.0’s numbers in our report were $4.8 billion for the year, as shown on the left. (You can see more on these and some other data in our Q4 report here. In case you don’t know I co-run Health 2.0 as my day job and yes I own THCB). OK. All so far so ho-hum.

Then as the other numbers started coming out I noticed something a little odd. CB insights came out with its numbers for 2015, but something was different.
You’ll recall that I had poo-poohed their 2014 number shown as $3.477 Bn in their blog post here and displayed in the chart below. These are 2014 numbers shown in a post about investment in 2015, published in August 2015. CB Insights chart with 2014 $$ in Aug 15 And that was the number I’d started the original spat about. But when I looked at the post they released in January 2016, not only was the number for 2015 at $5.7 billion (remember Rock Health, Mercom & Health 2.0 all put it in the mid-high $4s) but the 2014 number had somehow climbed from about $3.5 billion to $5.1 billion. CB Insights chart with 2014 $$ in jan 16 Again check the January post and check the chart I’ve lifted from it below. You’d think this was a curious jump and you’d be right. But nowhere in the post does it say why the total for 2014 in August 2015 was so different from the total for 2014 in January 2016.

Of course being the troublemaker I am, I asked about this on Twitter and got a classic no reply from Anand at CB insights. sanwal
So then I sent all this info off to Stephanie Baum at Medcity News thinking that she might like to write more about it.

And a funny thing happened. Instead of writing the article I wanted her to write (i.e. this one!) She found yet another number for 2015 from CB Insights, and wrote about how they were now back in the pack with everyone else.

Should Your Employer Have the Right to Track Your Weight?

Feb 1, 2016• 3

By AL LEWIS and VIK KHANNA

Suppose there were: (1) a widely held but false perception that gays had lower productivity and higher healthcare costs than straights; (2) false literature that companies with gay conversion programs outperformed the stock market; and (3) a mandate that companies disclose to shareholders the percentage of gays they employ.

Obviously, many corporate CEOs would stop hiring gays, de facto require gay conversion among current employees, and fire gays who failed the program, in order to maximize stock price and hence their own net worth.

Preposterous? Of course, but if Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Vitality Group and a few pharmaceutical companies get their way, this exact same scenario will befall overweight employees. Indeed, two-thirds of this dystopian scenario is already in place:

Iowa Is Voting On Health Care Tonight

Feb 1, 2016• 61

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

flying cadeucii In his last State of the Union address, President Obama stated that “anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction”. I agree. The American economy has roared back from the Great Recession with 14 million new jobs, a ridiculously low unemployment rate, a booming stock market and 57 brand new American billionaires in 2015 alone.

The American people on the other hand are in a completely different boat. Almost a third of us are not working. Half of us have practically no savings and a record number is surviving on public assistance. Wages are stagnating and the middle class is shrinking. Student debt is skyrocketing and 20% of our kids live in poverty. Whereas in the immediate past the economy and the welfare of the people used to be one and the same, nowadays these terms have little if anything to do with each other.

The President did acknowledge that “the economy has been changing in profound ways” and therefore “a lot of Americans feel anxious”. To allay our collective anxiety, the President announced an unemployment program that will pay up to $10,000 to those who lose jobs to the economy fixing racket, money that can be used to retrain machinists, welders, builders and such, to flip burgers in the booming job market of the fixed economy. The anxiety reduction program will also ease the transition to a “work-sharing” economy, where lower wages and no benefits, augmented by public assistance, a.k.a. the Walmart and Uber models, are the new normal.

Love and Measurement

Jan 30, 2016• 7

By WESTBY FISHER, MD

Screen Shot 2016-01-31 at 5.25.26 AM

Many of us recall the final scene of Mad Men where Machiavellian dealmaker, philanderer, and ad mogul Dan Draper sits in lotus position finding either true inner peace or the next cynical direction from which to profit. This scene came to mind as I read another apparent conversion experience by Robert M. Wachter, MD in his recent opinion piece in the New York Times on how the metric measurement business fails physicians and teachers.

Remarkably, Dr. Wachter, once the Chairman of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) that is responsible for “continuously” measuring, re-testing, and re-certifying US physicians, seemed to pivot from his former self by quoting a few of Avedis Donabedian’s words on quality assessment suggesting “the secret of quality is love.” Unfortunately, Dr. Wachter conspicuously failed to acknowledge the full context of Donabedian’s words.

“I think that commercialization of care is a big mistake. Health care is a sacred mission. It is a moral enterprise and a scientific enterprise but not fundamentally a commercial one. We are not selling a product. We don’t have a consumer who understands everything and makes rational choices — and I include myself here. Doctors and nurses are stewards of something precious. Their work is a kind of vocation rather than simply a job; commercial values don’t really capture what they do for patients and for society as a whole.

“Systems awareness and systems design are important for health professionals but are not enough. They are enabling mechanisms only. It is the ethical dimension of individuals that is essential to a system’s success. Ultimately, the secret of quality is love. You have to love your patient, you have to love your profession, you have to love your God. If you have love, you can then work backward to monitor and improve the system. Commercialism should not be a principal force in the system. That people should make money by investing in health care without actually being providers of health care seems somewhat perverse, like a kind of racketeering.” – Avedis Donabedian

There Is Nothing Free About the Health Care Free Market

Jan 30, 2016• 13

By NORTIN M HADLER, MD

Nortin Hadler “Universal Health Care”, “Single Payer”, “National Health Insurance”, “Socialized Medicine” are all semiotics symbolizing the subjugation of physician and of patient autonomy to government control for the sake of the common good. This is not sophistry. Max Weber was a Prussian political philosopher who laid the foundation for modern sociology with such books as The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1920, English translation 1947) in which he proclaimed, “Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational.” (p. 339).

However, Weber knew that the goal of a rational bureaucracy was more often elusive than realized, if it is ever realized for long. As Karl Marx observed in a mid-19^th C critique of Hegelian political philosophy, “The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.” That observation is mirrored in a televised speech delivered by Ronald Reagan on October 27, 1964, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!”

The upshot is that society has an inherent love-hate relationship with bureaucracy. As I discuss in Citizen Patient, till the end of the 20^th Century American medicine contained and controlled its own bureaucracy and was willing to downplay such short-comings as inequities in the delivery and quality of care. Even the legislating of a Medicare bureaucracy had little impact on the medical hegemony; the legislation delegated clinical indications and fees to medicine’s own bureaucracy and much else that is costly to the marketplace. American medicine remained secure in its autonomy. Meanwhile, elsewhere, in nearly all similarly “advanced” countries, the will to tackle inequities in the distribution and quality of care and in cost-effectiveness had come to predominate by early in the 20^th C. These countries sought a solution in the evolution of governmental bureaucracies. Several of these bureaucracies, these national health insurance schemes, remain examples of Weber’s rationality. Several of the national health insurance schemes, such as in the United Kingdom and France, are fraying.

Guideline-Centered Care

Jan 30, 2016• 2

By JOHNATHON TOMLINSON, MD

flying cadeucii Doreen, Ahmed and Henry have recently had their medication changed in response to a new guideline for prescribing Statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs.

None of them came to ask for a change in their medication. In each case the change was recommended by a clinician in response to a new guideline against which our practice will be judged and financially rewarded or penalised.

Here are the NICE guidelines 2015:

The NICE guideline on lipid modification recommends that the decision whether to start statin therapy should be made after an informed discussion between the clinician and the person about the risks and benefits of statin treatment, taking into account additional factors such as potential benefits from lifestyle modifications, informed patient preference, comorbidities, polypharmacy, general frailty and life expectancy.

and

NICE recommends that statin treatment for people with CVD [Cardio–vascular disease] (secondary prevention) should usually start with atorvastatin 80 mg daily.

It is very easy to judge whether or not people with CVD are on Atorvastatin 80mg, but almost impossible to judge whether the decision to start therapy has been made as a result of thoughtful deliberation between the patient and the clinician. Thoughtful deliberation is at the heart of patient-centered care – not doing whatever the patient wants, as is often confusingly assumed.

Employer Sponsored Insurance: Unfair and Unaffordable

Jan 28, 2016• 5

By ROGER COLLIER

flying cadeucii For all those Americans faced with higher health insurance premiums or less coverage (that’s most of us), the temptation is to blame the Affordable Care Act. Maybe instead we should be blaming the one thing the ACA didn’t significantly change: employer sponsored insurance—the norm for most working Americans.

Although the ACA imposed some new standards for coverage, ESI employers remain free to dictate most insurance details, the tax-exclusion of ESI benefits is largely unchanged, ESI premiums are still generally independent of income, and small employers can still offer ESI or not.

Unfortunately for millions of workers, it’s a model that’s increasingly neither affordable nor equitable. What seemed a reasonable approach fifty or sixty years ago when healthcare costs were far lower is now one of the most regressive health insurance systems in the industrialized world.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s most recent employee benefits report demonstrates the problem.

Enduring Effects of Trauma in Newtown and Beyond

Jan 28, 2016• 1

By JOAN COOK and MARJORIE S. ROSENTHAL

https://youtu.be/ZF7YbDlqPWQ

This month’s Sundance Film Festival, a 10-day salute to movies that are often hailed as tapping into the national zeitgeist, have two films this year on gun violence: Katie Couric’s “Under the Gun” and Kim Snyder’s “Newtown.” Both will be screened by influential audiences this week with a plan for larger distribution over the year. And both will no doubt question what we as Americans should do to prevent mass shootings and to heal afterward.

The ripple effects of mass shootings are immense. Earlier this month school leaders in Newtown testified to Connecticut’s state board of education about the ongoing mental health difficulties that children in Newtown are having three years after the massacre at Sandy Hook. As a trauma psychologist and a pediatrician, we were saddened, but not surprised, by this report. Working in New Haven, just 20 miles from Newtown, we both have colleagues and patients who are in those concentric circles of Sandy Hook and have felt the effects in our professional and personal lives. As health care professionals, mothers, and neighbors of Newtown, we wondered what we as a nation have learned about long-term healing in places like Columbine and Virginia Tech.

Data Socialism

Jan 26, 2016• 4

By SAURABH JHA, MD

In an unusually candid editorial in the NEJM, Longo and Drazen say that data sharing may be problematic because some researchers fear that the data could be used to by others to disprove their results. The editors predicted a new class of researchers who use data created by other researchers without ever taking the trouble to generate data themselves – research parasites.

With this editorial, the NEJM has firmly established itself as descriptive (the way the world is), rather than normative (the way the world ought to be). I, for one, find this move rather refreshing. I have been pumped to a diabetic state by the saccharine naivety of the hopey-changey, “we need this and that” brigade. The editors merely said what some researchers secretly think, and how many actually behave.

Why Are Physician Engagement Scores So Dismal?

Jan 25, 2016• 4

By RICHARD GUNDERMAN, MD

Gunderman Many hospitals around the nation have been stung by dreadful physician engagement scores. Engagement is a problem not only for demoralized physicians, but for healthcare organizations, their employees, and everyone they serve. They should take note, because low levels of engagement are associated with higher physician turnover, increased error rates, poorer rates of patient cooperation in treatment, and lower levels of patient satisfaction.

Definitions of engagement vary, but it generally includes pride, loyalty, and commitment. When engagement scores are low, physicians take little pride in the hospital, would not recommend it to a job-seeking colleague, and believe that the hospital’s mission and vision are not in sync the needs of patients. On the other hand, engaged physicians are more likely to perform better in every area, including patient care, education, and research, which benefits everyone.

To better understand the roots of poor physician engagement, I recently sat down for a conversation with a large group of students from the Indiana University Kelley Business of Medicine MBA program. Its students are practicing physicians from around the country who have realized that to improve patient care they need to become better leaders. Many work in hospitals that have identified engagement challenges and are attempting to develop solutions to the problem.