By ASHISH JHA, MD

Last week, Marshall Allan and Olga Pierce, two journalists at ProPublica, published a surgeon report card detailing complication rates of 17,000 individual surgeons from across the nation. A product of many years of work, it benefitted from the input of a large number of experts (as well as folks like me). The report card has received a lot of attention … and a lot of criticism. Why the attention? Because people want information about how to pick a good surgeon. Why the criticism?  Because the report card has plenty of limitations.

As soon as the report was out, so were the scalpels. Smart people on Twitter and blogs took the ProPublica team to task for all sorts of reasonable and even necessary concerns. For example, it only covered Medicare beneficiaries, which means that for many surgeries, it missed a large chunk of patients. Worse, it failed to examine many surgeries altogether. But there was more.

The report card used readmissions as a marker of complications, which has important limitations. The best data suggest that while a large proportion of surgical readmissions are due to a complication, readmissions are also affected by other factors, such as how sick the patient was prior to surgery (the ProPublica team tried to account for this), his or her race, ethnicity, social supports—and even the education and poverty level of their community.

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By HEALTH CATALYST

TODAY JULY 22/ 1 PM EST Analytics are becoming imperative to researchers in recruiting patients into studies, making  breakthrough discoveries, as well as monitoring the clinical implementation of these discoveries.

This webinar will be for organizations that want to leverage their enterprise data to power more  effective research.

THCB’s MATTHEW HOLT SAYS: “HealthCatalyst are a highly interesting and fast-growing database company not to mention a THCB supporter. This webinar should be required for anyone interested in how healthcare organizations can leverage their existing data to power medical research and build strong clinical trial programs. Check it out.“

By IYUE SUNG

Americans typically don’t switch health insurance, and that has not changed much with healthcare reform. Despite controversy with the converse scenario – the ability to keep the same insurance – and the introduction of health insurance marketplaces, data from ACAView suggests switching behavior has been modest.

For this latest ACAView research, our team set out to determine how the ACA’s insurance coverage expansion has influenced patient behavior in switching insurance coverage. We looked at patients’ switching patterns, and how those have shifted for a subset of patients who have visited primary care providers at the same practice at least once a year between 2013 and 2014 and/or between 2014 and 2015.

Our research revealed five key findings:

In Medicaid expansion states, over 40% of uninsured patients obtained insurance the following year, in both 2014 and 2015. In comparison, in non-Medicaid expansion states, about 25% of previously uninsured patients obtained insurance during the same time periods. Conclusion: Medicaid expansion has allowed a higher proportion of previously uninsured patients in continuous care to obtain insurance.

In Medicaid expansion states, the proportion of commercially insured patients switching to Medicaid coverage – though rare – has doubled. In 2014, 1.2% of commercially insured patients in continuous care switched to Medicaid coverage. Prior to coverage expansion, only 0.6%  switched to Medicaid coverage in the subsequent year. (In 2015, this proportion increased to 1.6%.)

With coverage expansion, the percentage of commercially insured patients who switch coverage the subsequent year has increased: from 15.0% pre-expansion to 18.3% in 2014 and 17.3% in 2015. This may occur because some commercially insured patients switch to plans on the health insurance marketplaces because they are eligible for subsidies.

The switching behavior of people who changed plans or payers had no notable impact on utilization. Whether patients switched commercial insurance plans with the same payer, or they switched payers, there were no clear changes in either visit frequency or relative value units (RVUs) per visit.

Patients with a range of chronic conditions[1] (high cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes) are less likely to switch insurance coverage. In contrast, patients diagnosed with mental disorders were more likely to receive insurance coverage.

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By PO-HAO CHEN, MD

Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick predicted supercomputers more intelligent than humans.  In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL states, with typical human immodesty, “The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made… We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.” Forty years later, IBM’s Watson pummeled humans in Jeopardy – a distinctly human game.

Watson is a big shot oncology fellow at MD Anderson – he is already impressing nurses and the attendings.  The supercomputer presented patients in the morning rounds, parsed data within seconds, and made few mistakes. The real oncology fellow, the human I mean, flabbergasted by the efficiency of his binary colleague, relayed to the Washington Post, “Even if you work all night, it would be impossible to be able to put this much information together like that.” Watson doesn’t have to worry about duty hour restrictions.

CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, claims that Watson 2.0 will interpret medical imaging like a radiologist.  In its third iteration, the supercomputer will “debate and reason.” Why hire radiologists who sap productivity with lunch breaks and sleep?  Watson will never complain about the dearth of vegan food in the cafeteria, never get tired, and – best of all – never whine about Medicare reimbursement cuts.

But forgive me for snoring at night without fear of the Robo-Radiologist. The reasons are simple.

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