By THCBist
We’re excited to announce the official release of our first e-book.
You won’t want to miss “Surviving Workplace Wellness” by industry critics Al Lewis and Vik Khanna.
Go read the release. Then go buy a copy.
Go read the Fast Company piece.
2014 will see wide-scale production and exchange of Consolidated CDA documents among healthcare providers. Indeed, live production of C-CDAs is already underway for anyone using a Meaningful Use 2014 certified EHR.
C-CDA documents fuel several aspects of meaningful use, including transitions of care and patient-facing download and transmission.
This impending deluge of documents represents a huge potential for interoperability, but it also presents substantial technical challenges.
We forecast these challenges with unusual confidence because of what we learned during the SMART C-CDA Collaborative, an eight-month project conducted with 22 EHR and HIT vendors.
Our effort included analyzing vendor C-CDA documents, scoring them with a C-CDA scorecard tool we developed, and reviewing our results through customized one-on-one sessions with 11 of the vendors.
The problems we uncovered arose for a number of reasons, including:
Here is a sweeping generalization: When doctors write for the lay public they tend towards tiresome self-flagellation.
Samuel Shem’s House of God is an exception; a refreshing read.
Perhaps he wrote for physicians so he wrote with such open face honesty.
In today’s politically correct world, Shem would have been castigated as an ageist for his brilliant acronym, GOMER (Get out of My Emergency Room), for peri-ninety year olds with advanced dementia who are skirting that narrow zone between St. Peter’s Gate and fractured ribs post-CPR.
Time for a pronouncement for medical students: There are two things you must do before starting your internship. Pass your USMLEs and read House of God.
I have read Shem’s classic twice. I remember the Rules of House of God more reliably than I recall the names of the carpal bones.
My first read was a few days in to my internship in elderly care medicine. The hospital was a rickety establishment in Britain’s National Health Service, not quite the Best Medical School that Shem described. But I seemed to share the same clinical experiences as Roy Basch, Shem’s Gomer-phobic protagonist.
There was a deluge of Gomers on New Year’s Eve; the old practice of granny dumping. I had to justify admission by finding nitrates in their urine for suspected urinary tract infection (grandson attending New Year’s bash still does not have an ICD code), or the vaguest T wave changes on EKG (unstable angina is a useful bet in a 90 year old).
If medical taxonomy could not be clinically justified there was always “acopia.”
Shem was remarkably prescient.
Take rule 13: “The delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible.” This was before physicians were inserting stents through rock hard femoral arteries to give patients an aggregate of two extra hours of survival.
Basch’s elderly patients would do the best precisely because his caring was the least aggressive. He would occasionally forget to prepare them with laxatives for a barium enema, saving them from dehydration and its cascade.
If Shem realized in the seventies that nothing was more futile than an investigation leading to a futile treatment, God knows what he would have written today.
The Obama administration announced significant adoption for the Blue Button in the private sector on Friday.
In a post at the White House Office of Science and Technology blog, Nick Sinai, U.S. deputy chief technology officer and Adam Dole, a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, listed major pharmacies and retailers joining the Blue Button initiative, which enables people to download a personal health record in an open, machine-readable electronic format:
“These commitments from some of the Nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains and associations promise to provide a growing number of patients with easy and secure access to their own personal pharmacy prescription history and allow them to check their medication history for accuracy, access prescription lists from multiple doctors, and securely share this information with their healthcare providers,” they wrote.
“As companies move towards standard formats and the ability to securely transmit this information electronically, Americans will be able to use their pharmacy records with new innovative software applications and services that can improve medication adherence, reduce dosing errors, prevent adverse drug interactions, and save lives.”
While I referred to the Blue Button obliquely at ReadWrite almost two years ago and in many other stories, I can’t help but wish that I’d finished my feature for Radar a year ago and written up a full analytical report.
Extending access to a downloadable personal health record to millions of Americans has been an important, steady shift that has largely gone unappreciated, despite reporting like Ina Fried’s regarding veterans getting downloadable health information.
According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, “more than 5.4 million veterans have now downloaded their Blue Button data and more than 500 companies and organizations in the private-sector have pledged to support it.”
Our clinic is now a Certified Patient-Centered Medical Home. The whole process leading up to this reminds me of one of my favorite subjects – buying cars. Specifically, buying cars based on technical specifications in color brochures. It takes real, on-the-road experience to know if a car is right for you.
When I moved to this country in 1981, I bought a 1980 Chevrolet Citation. Back in Sweden I had owned a Volvo wagon, but secretly admired the front-wheel-drive SAAB 900. Once in America, I figured I’d buy American. My wife’s relatives sent me car brochures to help me prepare for my choice of car.
The Citation sounded like America’s answer to the SAAB: a front-wheel-drive car with a powerful engine, quirky interior and a hatchback design. A car magazine at that time ran a comparison test between the Citation, the SAAB 900 and one of the German sports sedans, and the Citation almost won. I pretty much walked onto a used car lot and bought a silver Citation with red vinyl seats.
What does this have to do with PCMH certification?
Well, I bought a Citation based on a checklist of features that on paper made it look comparable to a SAAB. Once I owned it, I noticed the cracks between the door panels, the uneven paint and the awkward positioning of the controls, some of which felt like they could break if I wasn’t careful.
Not long afterward, I found myself hitting the front bumper on the pavement in sharp turns; I heard the rear shock absorbers snoring on dirt roads; I watched the dashboard dry out and crack in the temperate Maine summer weather, and I realized with the first frost that my car did’t have a rear defroster, and it never seemed to warm up in the winter.
With the exception of rare and particularly bleak days, I don’t tend to think of myself as a moron — nor, as far as I can tell, do those who know me well and love me. I will hazard a guess that neither you nor those who love you think of you as a moron, either.
So let’s be bold, proffer one another the mutual benefit of any disparate doubts, and declare: We are not morons!
I propose, then, that this be the year we stop ingesting as if we were. Still with me? Let’s find out.
On the matter of morons, I think they are very much the exception rather than the rule. I have met a lot of people over my years. I’ve taken care of many patients over decades and come to know their intimate thoughts as the privilege of doctoring uniquely allows and requires. So I know firsthand that most of us are endowed with our fair portion of both sense and sensitivity. Formal education, the color of a collar, degrees and credentials don’t distinguish us nearly as much as some might like to think. In most ways that matter, most people have that practical brand of folksy wisdom and intelligence that serve most handily on any given day.
And yet, as a matter of routine we are fed a steady diet of both food and food for thought as if we were abject morons. That’s how it’s served to us — but of course, only we get to decide whether or not to swallow such insalubrious slop. It’s a New Year, and time for new chances. Here’s our chance to stop the slop.
On the matter of common sense, I have been driven many times over the span of my career to lament the fact that it isn’t nearly common enough. But as just noted, I think it really is — in most areas. We apply it routinely to finances, home care, our careers and our families. We just turn it off when captivating promises about effortless weight loss, miraculous vitality, or age reversal waft our way. The result, of course, tends to be that even as we get fatter, sicker and older, we get poorer — spending our sensibly earned money on a senseless parade of false promises.
Rumors have been circulating in the marketplace all week that the administration was thinking of extending the individual health insurance policies that Obamacare was supposed to have cancelled for as much as three more years.
Those rumors have now come out into the open with Tom Murphy’s AP story on Friday.
That the administration might extend these polices shouldn’t come as a shock. My sense has always been that at least 80% of the pre-Obamacare policies would ultimately have to be canceled because of the administration’s stringent grandfathering rules that forced almost all of the old individual market into the new Obamacare risk pool.
But with the literal drop dead date for these old policies hitting by December 31, 2014, that would have meant those final cancellation letters would have had to go out about election day 2014. That would have meant that the administration was going to have to live through the cancelled policy nightmare all over again––but this time on election day.
The health insurance plans hate the idea of another three-year reprieve. They have been counting on the relatively healthy block of prior business pouring into the new Obamacare exchanges to help stabilize the rates as lots of previously uninsured and sicker people come flooding in.
With enrollment of the previously uninsured running so badly thus far, getting this relatively healthier block in the new risk pool is all the more important. The administration’s now doing this wouldn’t just be changing the rules; it would be changing the whole game.
Republicans, and a few vulnerable Democrats, had essentially called for this last fall when legislation was floated in both the House and Senate with the “If You Like Your Policy You Can Keep It,” proposals. At the time, the administration and Democratic leaders rightly said if this sort of thing would have been made permanent it would have a very negative impact on what people in the new pool would pay––and on their already high deductibles and narrow networks.
At the beginning of this post I asked, Is Obamacare unraveling?
First, as I have said before on this blog, the law’s reinsurance provisions will mean Obamacare can keep limping along for at least three years. And, even making this change won’t alter my opinion on this. It will just cost the government more reinsurance money to keep the carriers whole.
By asking if it is unraveling, what I really wonder about is the whole sense of fairness in the law and the expectation that everybody needs to get the Democrat’s definition of “minimum benefits” whether they want them or not.
In light of Thursday’s bicameral, bipartisan release of a Medicare physician payment policy to permanently replace the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula – an achievement to be celebrated in its own right – some are seeing momentum toward passage of such a deal before the current doc fix expires on March 31.
But the scope of what the committees issued Thursday represents as much of a step back as a step forward, at least relative to their aspirations and timeline for accomplishing them.
Once the appointment of Senator Baucus to be Ambassador to China was announced, the committees agreed to make it “as far as they could” toward a comprehensive SGR replacement policy prior to his confirmation, including identifying offsets to pay for the $125-150 billion (over 10 years) bill. For those who missed it, Senator Baucus was confirmed on Thursday.
Only in the past week did the key committees acknowledge that achieving agreement on offsets by this deadline was unattainable, but finalization of the so-called “extenders,” a hodge podge of Medicare payment plus-ups and other polices perennially included with the doc fix, was still the goal.
(Recall that the Senate Finance Committee passed an SGR replacement bill with extenders in December, but their House counterparts have yet to do so.)
In negotiations on that extenders element, House Republican leads reportedly would not agree to include beneficiary-oriented policies, such as funding for outreach to Medicare enrollees regarding low-income subsidy programs and for Family-to-Family Health Information Centers.
While some Democrats involved in the talks may have been inclined to make this concession, others sharply objected, scuttling a deal on this front and demonstrating the difficulty of compromise on this relatively non-controversial topic.
Furthermore, and has always been the assumption, identifying offsets for the package continues to be an exponentially heavier lift than any other aspect of the process. On that front, the key camps have outlined their broad parameters for what they might accept.
House Republican leads desire and likely require meaningful cuts to ACA-related spending as well as a substantial balance of Medicare beneficiary-impacting cuts, such as those relating to premiums and coinsurance.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed designated February as American Heart Month to acknowledge and combat the “staggering physical and economic loss to the nation” caused by cardiovascular disease.
Unfortunately, that proclamation is proving to be a timeless document.
Even with broad awareness of heart disease, expansive research and a number of clinical and public health efforts to prevent, diagnose and treat cardiovascular conditions, it remains the leading cause of death in the nation. About 600,000 people die from heart disease in the United States each year—making it responsible for one out of every four American deaths.
As a research institute dedicated to helping patients and those who care for them make better informed decisions that lead to better outcomes, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is acutely interested in producing new information that supports more effective cardiovascular care. The directive in our establishing legislation to consider “disease incidence, prevalence, and burden” when prioritizing research funding is a clear call for studies of cardiovascular conditions.
I’m proud to say that PCORI has answered that call. Cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and stroke, is the most commonly studied topic in our research portfolio. It is addressed in several dozen of the 192 primary research studies that PCORI has funded to date, including projects that conduct a comparative assessment of heart disease interventions, as well as those that test the effectiveness of decision support tools. Communicating information and providing tools to patients in ways that motivate them to make healthy choices is often a major challenge for clinicians.
Our comprehensive approach funds research that addresses the gaps in both information and communication that are responsible for poor outcomes in cardiovascular care.
The Sustainable Growth Rate mechanism creating a zero-sum game for Medicare Part B reimbursement rates (dropping rates as volume picks up) has long been unsustainable, and so Congress has been messing around with short-term SGR fix legislation for years now. Every six to twelve months we’ve been hearing about the impending 20% or 30% Medicare pay cut about to hit physicians’ pocketbooks, and the likely exit of physicians from the rolls of participating providers.
However, the stars are now aligned in such a way that real progress seems likely: multiple powerful Congressional committees have signed off on a deal to replace the SGR rule with something more workable: A unified approach to financial incentives to physicians and other medical professionals who are Medicare participating providers intended to promote quality and enrollment in alternative payment arrrangements.
The full text of the bill will be available here: It’s H.R. 4015. Check out the SGR fix section-by-section-summary and the websites of the House Energy & Commerce Committee and the Senate Finance Committee too. The substance of the proposal is discussed below.
How has this happened?
One of the sticking points involved in fixing this problem is that the price tag for a permanent SGR fix has long been seen as too high. How do we know the price? and How high is too high? you may ask. Well, Congress looks at CBO projections of the cost of implementing legislation over a ten-year planning horizon. When physician cost trends are on a steep increasing slope, that ten-year budget number looks bigger. When the trends flatten out a bit, the big number gets smaller. At present, that ten-year cost projection is “only” $125 billion, and Congress has spent over $150 billion on short-term fixes. So the time is right.
THCB's Podcasts
Listen to them on Itunes or Spotify
