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Reality-Based Policy and the Digital Doctor: An Interview with Mark Smith

Feb 18, 2015• 25

By ROBERT WACHTER, MD

Mark Smith, MD, MBA, was the founding CEO of the California HealthCare Foundation; he served in that role for 17 years before stepping down last year. I’ve known Mark since we were residents together at UCSF in the mid-1980s, and both of us were influenced by training at the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. Mark continues to see AIDS patients at San Francisco General Hospital one day each week. He was the lead author of Best Care at Lower Cost, a major Institute of Medicine report, published in 2012. Mark is one of those rare people who can take complex and politically charged concepts and distill them into sensible nuggets – while managing to be hilarious and profound at the same time.

In the continuing series of interviews I conducted for my upcoming book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, here are excerpts of my interview with Mark Smith, conducted on July 24, 2014.

Bob Wachter: Put yourself back about 10 or 15 years ago when you were thinking about the promise of healthcare IT. As you’ve watched the last 15 years play out, what’s been surprising to you?

Mark Smith: As with most of life, it’s a lot harder in fact than in theory. My first hint of this came with the implementation of computerized order entry at Cedars-Sinai in 2002. [In a story I tell in the book, Cedars’ physicians all but threatened to go on strike after they turned on the clunky system. Within a month, they pulled the plug on the system, a hiccup that cost the organization $34 million in 2002 dollars.] That was my first window into the gap between what sounds lovely in a policy paper, and what it means in practice to implement this stuff.Continue reading…

My Doctor Just Gave Me His Cell Phone Number …

Feb 17, 2015• 15

By JASON GRAIS

That’s right…it really happened.

At the conclusion of a recent doctor visit, he gave me his cell phone number saying, “Call me anytime if you need anything or have questions.”

In disbelief, I wondered if this was a generational thing – and whether physicians in their late thirties had now ‘gone digital’.

My only other data point was our family pediatrician, who is also in her late thirties. Our experience with her dates back nearly seven years when my wife and I were expecting twins. A few pediatricians we met with mentioned their willingness to correspond with patients’ families via email as a convenience to parents. The pediatrician we ultimately selected wasn’t connected with patients outside of the office at that time, but now will exchange emails.

The Myth of Doctors Getting Overwhelmed by E-mail

Feb 17, 2015• 18

By DAVID CHASE

”Email is the killer app of patient portals.”

I heard a variation of that quote when interviewing people for the patient-provider communication chapter of the book I co-wrote (HIMSS 2014 Book of the Year –Engage! Transforming Healthcare Through Digital Patient Engagement). For the organizations who’ve pushed patient portals the furthest into their patient base, email has always been the foundation. In other words, email is the gateway drug for patient engagement which Leonard Kish called the blockbuster “drug” of the century.

Physicians are understandably concerned about being overwhelmed by emails if they provide an option for secure messaging. As healthcare transforms, financial incentives have a big effect on the willingness to take on what many perceive to be “more unpaid work” (forgetting the fact that playing voicemail tag is also unpaid and frustratingly inefficient). Interestingly, the physicians who have given out their phone number or enabled secure email (without remuneration) haven’t found they are overwhelmed by any means. In the case of the groundbreaking Open Notes study, many of the doctors just heard crickets.

Good News: NIH Discovers Data Scientists and The Private Sector

Feb 17, 2015• 1

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

Late last month, President Obama unveiled a $215 million Precision Medicine initiative, which has won early bipartisan support. The centerpiece of this proposal is an ambitious effort to integrate disparate clinical datasets to advance science and improve health. The question now is whether the National Institute of Health officials entrusted to carry out this program will seize this opportunity to leverage the thinking and experiences of the entrepreneurs, engineers, and data scientists from the private sector who have been wrestling these sorts of challenges to the ground. The early indications are encouraging.

(Disclosure/reminder: I work at a cloud-enabled genomic data management company in Mountain View, California.)

Data is the organizing principle of Silicon Valley; the landscape is dotted with companies – from behemoths like Facebook, Google GOOGL -0.99%, Salesforce, and Palantir to younger entrants like ours – devoted to collecting, analyzing, and collaborating around huge amounts of data, often enabled by cloud computing.

The same engineers who gave us photo sharing, Angry Birds, and smart thermostats are increasingly bringing their talents to healthcare, trying to enable health data sharing, motivate healthy behaviors, and empower elders living at home alone.

HIT Newser: The Not-So-Big Meaningful Use Stick

Feb 17, 2015

By MICHELLE RONAN NOTEBOOM

This Year’s Meaningful Use “Sticks”: Not that Big

CMS reports that the majority of physicians who will be penalized this year for not having met MU requirements will lose less than $1,000 of their Medicare reimbursement; 34% of the penalties will be $250 or less, while 31% will exceed $2,000.

The adjustments will impact approximately 257,000 eligible providers. While no one likes losing money, the CMS penalty “stick” is pretty small compared to the overall cost of implementing an EHR.

Mayo Provides Dr. Google with 2^nd Opinion

Google consults with the Mayo Clinic to expand its healthcare information for 400 medical conditions.

Given that 20% of all Google searches are related to health conditions, the change will no doubt shake up what Americans find when searching for medical information. The update includes the addition of illustrations for each condition, plus a full list of search results from sites such as WebMD and Wikipedia.

Healthcare’s Reform Pareto Trap

Feb 16, 2015• 28

By SAURABH JHA, MD

It is reassuring that in a country which produced HL Mencken, Homer Simpson and Mark Twain, reports of death of satire have been grossly exaggerated.

Recently, the faculty at Harvard were up in arms because their new health plan involves copayments and deductibles. With ninety cents to the dollar covered, the plan is generous by national standards, and would be rated “platinum” in Obamacare’s exchanges. It’s not as if the professors were placed on Medicaid to show solidarity with the poor.

Increased out-of-pocket contribution is the trend post health care reform. That same reform which many Harvard professors supported and some designed. This is why their revolt, an Orwellian political satire, has spread schadenfreude amongst conservatives who are enjoying Gore Vidal’s favorite words in the English Language: “I told you so.”Continue reading…

Please Choose One

Feb 15, 2015• 88

By PHILIP ALLEN GREEN

Please choose one:

The three words blink in front of me on the computer screen.

Please choose one:
Patient is-
☐Male ☐Female

I click FEMALE.

I watch as the auto-template feature fills in the paragraph for me based on my choices.

Patient #879302045

Patient is: 38-year-old female status post motor vehicle accident. Please acknowledge you have reviewed her allergies, medications, and past medical history.

I click YES.

Have you counseled her about smoking cessation?

I click NO.

A little animated icon of a doctor pops up on the screen. His mouth begins to move as if speaking. A speech bubble from a comic strip appears next to it.

“Tip of the day: smoking cessation is important for both the patient’s health and part of a complete billing record.”

The High Cost of Free Checkups

Feb 13, 2015• 33

By AL LEWIS and VIK KHANNA

A predictable irony of the never-ending Affordable Care Act (ACA) debate is that the one provision that the Republicans should be attacking — free “checkups” for everyone — is one of the few provisions they aren’t attacking. Why should they attack them? Simple — checkups, on balance, are worthless. Why provide a 100 percent subsidy for a worthless good? Where is the GOP when you need it?

How worthless are checkups? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel — one of the architects of the ACA and its “free” checkup centerpiece — recently recommended not getting them. As if “free” is not cheap enough, the ACA also pushes ubiquitous corporate wellness programs, which often pay employees to get checkups — or fine them if they don’t. This policy establishes a de facto negative price for millions of workers, making checkups the only worthless service on earth that one could get paid to utilize.Continue reading…

Could mHealth Apps Be a Reprise of the EHR? The Need For Clinician Input

Feb 13, 2015• 5

By JAAN SIDOROV, MD

While your humble correspondent continues to delight in the emerging science of “mHealth” as a newly minted start-up Chief Medical Officer, he ran across this interesting article on risk and patient safety.

Authors Thomas Lewis and Jeremy Wyatt worry that “apps” can lead to patient harm.

They posit that the likelihood of harm is mainly a function of 1) the nature of the mistake itself (miscalculating a body mass index is far less problematic than miscalculating a drug dose) and 2) its severity (overdosing on a cupcake versus a narcotic). When you include other “inherent and external variables,” including the display, the user interface, network issues, information storage, informational complexity and the number of patients using it, the risks can grow from a simple case of developer embarrassment to catastrophic patient loss of life.

In response, they propose that app developers think about this “two dimensional app space” that relies on a risk assessment coupled to a staggered regulation model. That regulation can range from simple clinical self assessment to a more complex and formal approval process.

Three Lessons Healthcare Executives Can Learn From the Sony Hack

Feb 12, 2015• 4

By DEAN STEINBECK

As if healthcare executives needed more to worry about, the recent hacker attack on Sony Pictures should send yet another reminder that data security can’t be ignored. On an international stage, Sony management learned the hard way that their e-mails, text messages, and private conversations were vulnerable to attack. Hackers accessed everything from the company’s sensitive financial information to its confidential employee communications. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Sony is facing government inquiries, class action lawsuits from employees and business partners, and a significantly tarnished reputation.

Many executives in our industry might think that healthcare facilities are better prepared to withstand hacker attacks, with numerous government agencies regulating how we store and transmit protected health information (PHI) and personal identifiable information (PII). In reality, a significant number of healthcare facilities have already suffered damaging hacker attacks over the last few years and expectations are that hacker attacks will be a continued threat for the foreseeable future. The question healthcare executives must ask is: “What are we going to do about it?”