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Adventures in Medicine

Aug 20, 2013• 5

By Rob Lamberts, MD

While hard at work at building a new practice and (in the eyes of some) on my insanely misguided effort to build a medical record, I’ve been thinking. Dangerous thing to do, you know. It can lead to scary things like ideas, creativity, and change. I know, I should be satisfied with the usual mental vacuum state, but I’ve found it a very hard habit to kick. Perhaps there’s a 12-step group for folks with ideas they can’t suppress.

Anyway, my thoughts have centered around explaining what I am doing with all of the my time and energy, and, more importantly, why I am doing all that stuff that keeps me from writing about important things like body odor, accordions, and toddlers with flame-throwers. I’ve really strayed from the good ol’ days, haven’t I? The problem is, I’ve grown so accustomed to my nerd persona that I end up giving explanations that are harder to understand. To combat this, I’ve decided to employ a technique I learned from my formative years: stories with pictures. My hope is that, through the use of my incredible drawing talent I will not only explain things faster (saving 1000 words per picture), but prevent my readers from falling, as they often do, into a confused slumber.

So, here goes.

Adventures in Health Care: Part 1 – The Participants

This is a patient. Let’s call him “Chuck.” Chuck is not really a “patient,” he’s a person. Many doctors believe that people like Chuck don’t exist outside of their role as “patients,” but this has been proven false (thanks to the tireless work of Oprah and ePatient Dave). But since this story is about Chuck’s wacky adventures in health care, we will mainly think of Chuck in his role of “patient.”

Why are people like Chuck called “patients?” Some people think it’s to put them in their necessary subservient place in the system. I think it’s just to be ironic.

Chuck is a generally healthy guy, but occasionally he does get sick. He also worries about getting sick in the future, and want’s to keep himself as healthy as possible. This is when he uses the health care system, and when he is forced to be “patient.”
Continue reading…

What’s Science Got to Do With It?

Aug 19, 2013• 53

By Jon Robison & Vik Khanna

Penn State University is now embroiled in a national controversy over the ham-handed launch of its coercive and intrusive wellness program, which can cost recalcitrant employees as much as $1,200 per year for not joining. That ignominy of being the most distasteful and coercive program, however, belongs to Blue Care Network of Michigan, which recently published results from their “voluntary” walking program designed exclusively for their obese enrollees. The invitation to join was extended to enrollees with a body mass index (BMI, which is an unscientific, mathematically bereft proxy for health – see Keith Devlin’s excellent article ) of 30 or greater. The program was “voluntary” as long as you were okay with paying $2,000 in added insurance premiums if you did not volunteer.

Avoiding the $2,000 price tag came with its own cost in dignity and privacy. Enrollees agreed to either: 1) wear an electronic pedometer and connect it to their computer daily to document completion of at least 5,000 steps or, 2) join Weight Watchers or some other approved “weight cycling” program. This princely sum is not irrelevant to most families. In fact, it is almost exactly equal to per capita spending on food eaten at home in the US and about four percent of median US household income in 2011. So, in a household occupied by a single adult, this will almost buy your groceries for a year, meaning that is hard to refuse, and the less money you make the more likely that resistance will prove futile.

The BCN strategy legitimizes telling people who look a certain way that they should submit to online, electronic monitoring or pay more for their insurance than people who don’t look that way. Why would an obese person submit to this when it is entirely possible that he or she is fitter and more metabolically healthy than an normal weight unfit person who would never be condescended to this way?

More disturbing is the prospect that this is only the leading edge of life-invading monitoring by the wellness industry. It is easy to envision sleep monitoring because you have bags under your eyes. Or, what about wrist-worn breathalyzers to make sure you don’t go over the one or two drink limit, or sneak cigarettes after lying on your health risk appraisal that you don’t smoke? How much electronic surveillance would you be willing to undergo on the pure guesswork that it might save someone (i.e., your employer or your health plan) money?

Diagnosing Concussions and Assessing Balance- On Your iPhone

Aug 19, 2013• 6

By Mike Miesen

The fall sports season is tantalizingly near; players and fans alike are gearing up for the Friday night lights and Sunday afternoon showdowns. But the season comes at a cost; every bone-jarring hit and wince-inducing header carries the risk of sustaining a concussion.

Most media coverage focuses on the National Football League’s professional players, but 65% of traumatic brain injuries are sustained by children. The majority are thought to be undiagnosed, but the Center for Disease Control estimates that 1.6 to 3.8 million sports-related concussions occur each year. This puts athletes at risk of sustaining a second concussion before their brains are fully healed, leading to longer recoveries, permanent neurological damage, and the potentially-fatal Second Impact Syndrome.

A just-released app hopes to change that. Sway Medical, founded by Chase Curtiss in 2011, aims to help health professionals objectively rate the risk of concussion at the source: on the football field or soccer pitch. On-the-spot concussion diagnosis is just the beginning, though; in the near future, the young company plans to enter the hospital space by the end of the year.

The FDA-approved app, called Sway Balance, uses proprietary software and the iPhone’s accelerometer to assess an athlete’s balance over time. In a phone interview, founder and CEO Chase Curtiss said that the app can be used by a health professional to “set up a baseline,” then “compare an athlete over the course of a season to that established norm.” Poor performance compared to baseline is indicative of a possible concussion.

Health care professionals can purchase a yearly subscription to the app for $199 – a fraction of the cost of a typical balance platform – and the patient-facing app is free to download.

Sway Medical has partnered with ImPACT Applications, an organization which Curtiss described as conducting the “gold standard of concussion testing on the market.” ImPACT uses baseline cognitive testing – verbal and visual memory, processing speed, and reaction time – and synchronous testing immediately after a hit to assess if a concussion has occurred.

“But you don’t have an element of physical control of the body,” Curtiss said – which is where Sway Balance comes in. “[ImPACT’s] interest in us is in pairing a balance test with cognitive testing.”

Talmudic-Like Studies of Republican Health Reform Ideas

Aug 18, 2013• 65

By Uwe Reinhardt

After doing Talmudic-like studies of the doctrines on health reform promulgated by Republican health-policy makers and the conservative economists who inspired them during the past two decades, I am devastated to discover that all of those studies have been for naught. We are now told, sometimes by the same prophets of yore, that these doctrines were not only wrong, but outright heretical, which in this context means un-American.

New doctrines are rumored to be in the making, but the first word on them has yet to be committed to new, sacred tablets, mainly because there have not yet emerged any new ideas worth committing to tablets.

Do not take my word for it. Newt Gingrich, one of the Grand Old Party’s aging prophets, said so himself in his recent speech to the Republican National Committee.

Comes now conservative commentator John R. Graham of the Pacific Research Institute, telling us that Republicans seem lost in the desert even in their hit-and-run insurgency against their sworn enemy, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA).

What is a befuddled immigrant to the United States like me, eagerly trying to become a right thinking American, to make of it all?

My early introduction to the texts coming from conservative thinking on health reform was the Heritage Plan of 1989, Viewed through the prism of the ACA of 2010, its language seems eerily familiar. One provision, for example, proposed a:

“[m]andate all households to obtain adequate insurance. Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seatbelts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement” (p.5).

The Heritage Plan also called for income-related, refundable tax credits toward the purchase of private health insurance. Although it did not call for community rated premiums, it proposed means-tested public subsidies and toward high out-of-pocket expenses of individuals and families. It did not spell out the daunting administrative apparatus that would entail. But one can imagine the required new bureaucratic apparatus, replete with auditors to prevent fraud and abuse. Presumably, income-related subsidies would have involved the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in some ways as well.

Next came a text put forth by conservative economist Mark V. Pauly and like-minded colleagues in Health Affairs. It is worth a reading again. Here’s the core of these prophets’ proposal:

“In our scheme, every person would be required to obtain basic coverage, through either an individual or a family insurance plan. …All basic plans would be required to cover specified health services; plans could, however, offer more generous benefits or supplemental policies. The maximum out-of-pocket expense (stop-loss) permitted would be geared to income, with more complete coverage required for lower-income people, to ensure that no one faced the risk of out-of-pocket expenses that were catastrophic, given their income.” Again, lots of government intrusion into health care, along with links to the IRS.

There then followed a real life health bill based on these ideas, the late Republican John Chafee’s antidote to the emerging Clinton plan. It was called the “Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993” and had an impressively long list of Republican co-sponsors, among them Senator’s Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), now fierce opponents of the ACA. As the folks at the Kaiser Family Foundation have shown, many of its provisions of Chafee’s bill have a striking similarity to provisions in the ACA of 2010 and comparing.

Informed Refusal

Aug 18, 2013• 9

By Richard Gunderman, MD

Before undergoing many health care interventions, patients are asked to give their informed consent. In most cases, it represents a mere formality. The patient has come to the healthcare facility for the express purpose of undergoing the test or treatment, and after a quick explanation, the patient signs the consent form. But not always – sometimes patients elect not to go through with it.

I know a woman in her late 70s, a highly accomplished health professional with a long and remarkably distinguished record of career achievement, who was recently diagnosed with cancer. Her physician advised a complete diagnostic workup to determine how far the disease has spread, to be followed by courses of radiation and chemotherapy. A vast and sophisticated medical armamentarium, unprecedented in the history of medicine, stands at the ready to take the full measure of her disease and then beat it back.

Yet after her oncologist carefully explained the benefits, risks, and alternatives to the recommended course, she declined to proceed further. Instead of launching into an arduous medical regimen, she has chosen to focus the remainder of her time and attention elsewhere, on matters outside of medicine. Why?

On hearing such a story, some of my medical colleagues question the patient’s soundness of mind. Could she be depressed? Might she be in the early stages of dementia? Could she have simply failed to grasp the full gravity of her situation? To them, the failure to take advantage of the wonders of modern medicine smacks of irrationality. The solution? Her physicians need to sit her down again and explain the situation more clearly. Should this fail to elicit her consent, perhaps a psychiatry consult would be in order.

Yet to those who know her, these explanations are unsatisfactory. We cannot attribute her decision to a lack of intelligence or sophistication about healthcare. She has spent her entire career in the field, and helped to care for countless patients with life-threatening conditions, many of whom eventually died. She knows what the care of such patients looks and feels like from firsthand experience. She understands the risks of declining further treatment at least as well as many of the health professionals caring for her.

#MomInHospital

Aug 17, 2013• 10

By Bob Wachter, MD

A few weeks ago, a middle-aged man decided to tweet about his mother’s illness from her bedside. The tweets went viral and became the subject of a national conversation. The man, of course, was NPR anchorman Scott Simon, and his reflections about his mother’s illness and ultimate death are poignant, insightful, and well worth your time.

Those same days, and unaware of Simon’s real-time reports, I also found myself caring for my hospitalized mother, and I made the same decision – to tweet from the bedside. (As with Simon’s mom, mine didn’t quite understand what Twitter is, but trusted her son that this was a good thing to do.) Being with my mother during a four-day inpatient stay offered a window into how things actually work at my own hospital, where I’ve practiced for three decades, and into the worlds of hospital care and patient safety, my professional passions. In this blog, I’ll take advantage of the absence of a 140-character limit to explore some of the lessons I learned.

First a little background. My mother is a delightful 77-year-old woman who lives with my 83-year-old father in Boca Raton, Florida. She has been generally healthy through her life. Two years ago, a lung nodule being followed on serial CT scans was diagnosed as cancer, and she underwent a right lower lobectomy, which left her mildly short of breath but with a reasonably good prognosis. In her left lower lung is another small nodule; it too is now is being followed with serial scans. While that remaining nodule may yet prove cancerous, it does not light up on PET scan nor has it grown in a year. So we’re continuing to track it, with crossed fingers.

Unfortunately, after a challenging recovery from her lung surgery, about a year ago Mom developed a small bowel obstruction (SBO). For those of you who aren’t clinical, this is one of life’s most painful events: the bowel, blocked, begins to swell as its contents back up, eventually leading to intractable nausea and vomiting, and excruciating pain. Bowel obstruction is rare in a “virgin” abdomen – the vast majority of cases result from scar tissue (“adhesions”) that formed after prior surgery. In my mother’s case, of course, we worried that the SBO was a result of metastatic lung cancer, but the investigation showed only scar tissue, probably from a hysterectomy done decades earlier.

Preparing for 2014: Questions for Obamacare’s Opponents

Aug 16, 2013• 25

By John R. Graham

As a confident critic of ObamaCare from its genesis, I’m impressed that the law remains unpopular and that the American people appear ready to scrap it and start again. Last March, a senior bureaucrat in charge of rolling out ObamaCare fretted about a “third-world experience“.

ObamaCare’s opponents have managed to keep Republican politicians unified against the law. The only tactical question is whether the GOP can credibly threaten to “shut down the government” during the forthcoming debate over the Continuing Resolution (the legislation that funds the government in the absence of a budget).

It’s been a good three and a half years for ObamaCare’s opponents. Nevertheless, outside the political realm, businesses and investors are behaving as if ObamaCare is hardened concrete. Although ObamaCare’s opponents have overwhelmingly succeeded in convincing society of the law’s drawbacks, it is not at all clear that society is ready to accept a more free-market alternative reform.

Indeed, some of the approaches used against ObamaCare might have unintended consequences that will appear in 2014, the law’s first fully operational year, which would make repealing and replacing ObamaCare extremely difficult.

Here are a few friendly questions for ObamaCare’s opponents:

First: We’ve spend a lot of effort convincing people that state-based health-insurance exchanges will be a disaster, and succeeded in blocking their establishment in many states. To be sure, they are an unnecessary bureaucracy, but do we really believe that enrolling in the New York Health Benefits Exchange or Cover California will be the worst thing since unsliced bread? It won’t be like shopping on Amazon.com, but I’ll bet it will be easier than doing business with the DMV. The New York Times recently reported on exchange outreach efforts in Colorado (a pro-ObamaCare state) and Missouri (an anti-ObamaCare state). The take-away: In Colorado, it’s almost impossible for people to avoid learning how to enroll in the exchange, while in Missouri it’s been extremely difficult to get information. Most people will not be interested in how much it cost taxpayers to set up and operate the exchanges. Do we really believe that when ordinary Missourians learn from their Coloradan friends that their state government has helped them get federal tax credits for health insurance, that they will reward Show-Me state politicians for trying to block them?

Pioneer ACO’s Disappointing First Year

Aug 16, 2013• 15

By Jeff Goldsmith

On July 16, the CMS Innovation Center reported the first-year results for the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization program: 13 Pioneers, or about 40 percent of the participants, earned bonuses. The program saved Medicare a gross $87.6 million before bonus distributions, cutting the rate of growth in Medicare spending by 0.5 percent, from 0.8 percent to 0.3 percent annually.

However, nine of the 32 members dropped out and press reports hinted at a contentious relationship between the Pioneers and a well meaning but green and overtaxed CMS staff. It was not an auspicious beginning for a program whose advocates believed would eventually replace regular Medicare’s present payment model. There immediately followed a blizzard of spin control from ACO “movement” advocates stressing the need for patience and highlighting first year achievements.

What was irritating about the Pioneer spin is it treated the ACO as if it were a brand new idea with growing pains. This studiously ignores a burned out Conestoga wagon pushed to the side of the trail: the Physician Group Practice demonstration CMS conducted from 2005-2010. The PGP demo tested essentially the same idea — provider bonuses for meeting spending reduction and quality improvement targets for attributed Medicare patients. The pattern of arrow holes and burn marks on the PGP wagon closely resemble those from the Pioneer’s first year, strongly suggesting more troubles ahead for the hardy, surviving Pioneers.

The PGP Precedent. Like the Pioneers, PGP participants were not ordinary community hospitals or freshly formed physician groups or IPA’s. Rather, most were “high functioning” organized clinical enterprises, some with decades of global risk contracting or health plan operating experience. Particularly in light of the degree of clinical integration and care management experience of its participants, the PGP results were extremely disappointing; only two of the ten participants were able to generate bonuses in each of the program’s five years, and one, Marshfield Clinic, earned half the total bonuses. Managed care veterans like Geisinger Clinic and Park Nicollet earned bonuses in only three of their ten program years. Two other high-quality multi-specialty clinics had even rougher sledding, with Everett Clinic getting one year of bonus ($126,000) and Billings Clinic completely shut out.

The pattern in the first Pioneer year is remarkably similar. While thirteen of the Pioneers earned bonuses, it appears from press reports that four of them generated 2/3 of the savings. It is likely not coincidental that three of those four participants (Massachusetts General, Beth Israel Deaconess’ physician organization, and New York’s Montefiore) either run or practice at some of the most expensive hospitals in the country, in two of the country’s highest per capita Medicare spending markets. Orchards full of low hanging fruit (e.g. very high levels of previously unexamined Medicare spending) appear to be an essential precondition of ACO success.

Health 2.0 Introduces Big Players in Big Data

Aug 15, 2013

Bob Rogers isn’t just the Chief Data Scientist at Apixio, he’s also a physicist, prior hedge fund manager, and now an instructor for Health 2.0 EDU’s joint three-day executive education course with UC Berkeley on digital health startingOctober 3rd. Bob’s career shift to health care gave what he references as “a sense of intrinsic value” to his work in a time where the value of health care technology is only increasing:

EDU: What are you focused on right now at Apixio?

BR: My number one goal right now is to help health care organizations get seamless, simple access to all of their data, including structured data, textual documents, and images. The business and financial challenges to health care organizations to simultaneously increase efficiency and improve care are impossible to overcome without reliable data. Studies show that over two-thirds of key clinical information is missing from the coded layer of EHRs, so we are developing technology that surfaces the information hidden in clinical narrative and scanned documents. Given the number and diversity of the documents generated by health care systems, this is truly a big data problem.

EDU: Your work in application and algorithm development seems like a hard concept to grasp: How do you explain something so new but fundamental to people in health care without a tech background?

BR: The goal of information technology is to answer questions and to solve problems: The underlying technology is secondary. I like to focus on specific examples and use cases and analogies that everyone in the industry can understand and appreciate.

EDU: Why do you think it’s important for executives in organizations like hospitals and pharma companies to understand big data?

BR: Decision makers in health care and pharma need reliable information to run their businesses, but many have been burned by clunky, expensive technology that has not met expectations. Health care data is big and requires big data techniques to make it useful, so a good understanding of the opportunities and risks of big data is crucial to navigate successfully.

EDU: What new application of big data in health care are you most excited about?

BR: There are two areas that are exciting to me. In the therapeutic arena, it has become possible to make meaningful discoveries about the safety and applicability of drugs by mining clinical narrative. For example, Stanford professor Nigam Shah is doing some very impactful work in this area. On the clinical care side, it is now possible to construct a network model of an entire health system using big data techniques. This creates opportunities to empower care coordination, chronic disease management and cost management for populations.

EDU: What are you most looking forward to in your upcoming UC Berkeley course with Health 2.0 EDU, and what do you hope your students will take away?

BR: I’m looking forward to learning about the challenges and use cases that are impacting my students. I hope they will come away with the confidence and knowledge to embrace the aspects of big data analytics that can help them run their organizations successfully.

Registration for the executive course ends September 1, 2013. The full agenda is available HERE.

The Federal Health Data Services Hub Hubbub

Aug 15, 2013• 17

By Adrian Gropper, MD

Secrecy breeds suspicion. The role of secrecy in health care is practically non-existent so when we see examples of secrecy, as in the operational details of the Federal Data Services Hub, we get the recent outcry from a range of politicians and journalists waving privacy flags. For Patient Privacy Rights, this is a teachable moment relative to both advocates and detractors of the Affordable Care Act.

There’s a clear parallel between the recent concerns around NSA communications surveillance and health care surveillance under the ACA. Some surveillance is justified, to combat terrorism and fraud respectively, but unwarranted secrecy breeds suspicion and may not help our civil society.

“The Hub” is described by the government as:

“For all marketplaces, CMS [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] is also building a tool called the Data Services Hub to help with verifying applicant information used to determine eligibility for enrollment in qualified health plans and insurance affordability programs. The hub will provide one connection to the common federal data sources (including but not limited to SSA, IRS, DHS) needed to verify consumer application information for income, citizenship, immigration status, access to minimum essential coverage, etc.

CMS has completed the technical design, and reference architecture for this work, is establishing a cross-agency security framework as well as the protocols for connectivity, and has begun testing the hub. The hub will not store consumer information, but will securely transmit data between state and federal systems to verify consumer application information. Protecting the privacy of individuals remains the highest priority of CMS.”

Here’s where the secrecy comes in: I tried to find out some specific information about the Hub. Technical or policy details that would enable one to apply Fair Information Practice Principles? Some open evidence of privacy by design? Some evidence of participation by privacy experts? I got nothing. Where’s Mr. Snowden when we need him?