The Health Care Blog – Page 551 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

From the Case Files of the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, Dec 2015

Jun 7, 2013• 16

By James Salwitz, MD

May 30-8:12pm: 27 yo teacher, Pam S., is out for her evening run. The delicious evening air fills her nose and lungs. She feels strong, healthy, and alive.

May 30-8:13pm: Pam pushes up a gentle hill. She feels sudden and severe pain, as if stabbed deep by a flaming splinter. Pam stops, almost falling. She struggles the mile home. The searing throb begins to fade. A long hot shower gives some relief.

June 3-5:45am: The torment progressed through the weekend and curled around pillows, drenched in sweat, she has not slept all night. As traces of sunrise light frame her bedroom window, she decides to get medical care.

June 3-9:22am: Pam tells her story to her Primary Medical Doctor (PMD) and is examined. Her pain is intense with any movement and he is worried. He orders blood work, pain medication and calls an orthopedic surgeon. The PMD completes his history and physical report, as well as his differential, in his Electronic Medical Record (EMR). The note is transmitted instantly to the surgeon.

June 3-9:59am: STAT blood work is drawn at a lab down the street.

June 3-10:37am: Pam picks up the pain medication.

June 3-11:25am: The orthopedic surgeon reads the PMD’s note, listens to Pam’s story and examines her. He orders an emergency MRI.

Calling All Patients: Blue Button Patient Co-Design Challenge

Jun 7, 2013• 1

By Pat Salber

June 3rd was the kick-off for an amazing Challenge – the Blue Button Patient CoDesign Challenge. Developers everywhere are being invited by the Office of the National Coordinator to develop apps and other tools to use patient data, acquired via the Blue Button. You might be thinking: why is that so amazing? Because the entire Challenge has been designed to actively involve the ultimate users of the tool – patients. Imagine that!

Here are the details:

http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/blue-button-co-design-challenge/

From now until June 11th, patients (which includes almost all of us) are invited to go to Health Tech Hatch to post their ideas about how they want to see their data used to create tools that they can use themselves or with their doctors. There are already over 50 ideas already posted, which include:

Please help my wife manage our children’s immunizations
A tool that simplifies the management of chronic multiple conditions,
Make my prescription management stink less (my favorite)

Data Points: Scope of Practice. When You Get Right Down To It, We’d Rather See a NP/PA Than Wait …

Jun 6, 2013• 10

By Mike Miesen

In my last post on California and Texas’s imminent expansion of their scope of practice regulations, I didn’t cover one important question: what do patients actually want?

Fortunately, a study just released in Health Affairs looked into it, and the results are clear: many patients want to be seen by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician’s assistants (PAs) – especially if it allows them to be seen sooner.

To be clear: generally, Americans still prefer being seen by a physician. But preferring a NP/PA – or “not having a preference” between a NP/PA and a physician – is a big deal; it insinuates that, for certain ailments, the public views a NP/PA as just as effective a clinician. That has significant repercussions for how care is delivered, particularly for young people and underserved populations.

The researchers conducted a survey that focused on three different scenarios to judge patient preferences: a straight-up comparison of preference for physicians vs. NPs/PAs; a scenario where a patient could see a NP/PA today vs. a physician tomorrow for a minor ailment; and a scenario where a patient could see a NP/PA today vs. a physician in three days for a minor ailment. Continue reading…

Physicians Face Unexpected Obamacare Loophole

Jun 5, 2013• 17

By Matthew Wayt

Doctors who contract with state health insurance exchanges next year might find themselves on the hook for treatment costs resulting from what many are calling a loophole in the Affordable Care Act.

Some say the provision might prompt doctors to avoid the exchanges altogether, while other experts say few health care providers are aware of the issue and likely won’t know about the loophole until it’s too late.

Provision Permits Care Without Coverage

Under the ACA, if families who obtain subsidized health plan coverage through the exchanges fail to pay their premiums, they have a three-month grace period before the policy is cancelled. However, insurers are responsible only for paying claims during the first month of that grace period.

During the other two months, families are asked to pay their doctor’s bill or their insurance premium if they seek health care services. However, if they do not pay either bill, physicians are left to cover the cost of the treatment.

Such families would face a tax penalty for missing payments, but they would not receive a fine, a premium rate increase or a repayment order. They also would not be barred from purchasing another subsidized plan during the next enrollment period.

A ‘Laudable’ Design With Flaws

“I believe this part of the law was designed for logical and laudable reasons,” Lisa Folberg — vice president of medical and regulatory policy at the California Medical Association — said.

She explained that the three-month grace period was meant to ensure continuity of care for low-income families who might be between jobs and cannot afford to pay their premiums for a few weeks.

Why Is Obamacare So Unpopular?

Jun 5, 2013• 7

By Jason Shafrin

Views on the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare, a.k.a. Health Reform) are mixed. Despite the fact that many people support individual provisions, overall, the measure is unpopular. Why would that be the case?

A revealing Health Affairs interview with Cythnia Morgan, may reveal the answer. Morgan is a fifty-eight-year-old former hotel manager, has been out of work and uninsured for the past three years. Her income is low, but not low enough to quality for Medicaid. She is exactly the type of person the health insurance exchange is supposed to help. So why wouldn’t like someone like her support the Exchanges?

After being told of how the ACA’s health insurance exchanges would work, she stated:

“Oh, God, that would be great—if there’s going to be a plan that’s affordable. But come on now, it’s really hard to believe.”

A Democrat would read this and claim that Mrs. Morgan is ignorant of the provisions and yes, in fact, this is exactly what the ACA will do. Republicans will say that Mrs. Morgan is 100 percent correct. Although the provisions do promise affordable care, she is correct to be skeptical that government can deliver on this promise when private industry could not.

Datapalooza Report on Data Economics and a Call for Reciprocity

Jun 5, 2013• 4

By Adrian Gropper, MD

Uwe Reinhardt said it perfectly in a Tuesday plenary but I can only paraphrase his point: “health information is a public good that brings more wealth the more people use it.” Or, as Doc Searls puts it: personal data is worth more the more it is used. Datapalooza is certainly the largest meeting of the year focused on health data, and our Health and Human Services data liberation army was in full regalia. My assessment is: so far, so good but, as always, each data liberation maneuver also reveals the next fortified position just ahead. This post will highlight reciprocity as a new challenge to the data economy.

The economic value of health data is immense. Without our data it’s simply impossible to independently measure quality, get independent second opinions or control family health expenses. The US is wasting $750 Billion per year on health care which boils down to $3,000 per year that each man, woman and child is flushing down the drain.

Data liberation is a battle in the cloud and on the ground. In the cloud, we have waves of data releases from massive federal data arsenals. These are the essential roadmap or graph to guide our health policy decisions. I will say no more about this because I expect Fred Trotter (who is doing an amazing job of leading in this space) will cover the anonymous and statistical aspects of the data economy. Data in the cloud provides the basis for clinical decision support.
Continue reading…

Electronic Health Records. Are We There Yet? What’s Taking So Long?

Jun 5, 2013• 20

By Michael Painter, MD

I am a family physician, but one who doesn’t currently practice and importantly, one who isn’t slogging day after day through health care transformation. I do not want to be presumptuous here because the doctors and other health professionals who are doing this hard work are the heroes. They are caring for patients while at the same time facing tremendous pressure to transform their life’s work. That includes overwhelming pressure to adopt and use new information technology.

This level of change is hard, difficult and confusing—with both forward progress and slips backward. Nevertheless, doctors take heart because you are making progress. It may be slow at times, but it’s substantial—and it’s impressive. Thank you.

The Annals of Internal Medicine today published a study (I was one of the authors) finding that more than 40 percent of U.S. physicians have adopted at least a basic electronic health record (EHR), highlighting continued progress in the rate of national physician adoption of EHRs. The study, also found that a much smaller number, about 9.8 percent of physicians, are ready for meaningful use of this new technology.

Some might say, “Wake up, folks!” Look at those small meaningful use numbers. Change course, now. After all of this time and tax-payer expense, less than 10 percent of doctors are actually ready to use these important tools meaningfully. What’s up with that?

To me, though, this study is good news. All who care about health care transformation should be heartened by the progress—but also impressed by the enormous challenge that our health professionals have undertaken.

An Anesthesiologist Thinks Out Loud

Jun 5, 2013• 14

By Shirie Leng, MD

Anyone who has read my work knows that articles like the one written in the New York Times on Sunday by Elisabeth Rosenthal will immediately get a response out of me. If you haven’t read it, here’s the link.

Where do I start with this??? I’m going to let Ms. Rosenthal tell you about how many unnecessary colonoscopies we do. I’ll let her tell you how much more it costs here than anywhere else. I will address the anesthesia bit. Let me tell you a little story. When I was a baby anesthesiologist my hospital sent anesthesiologists “downstairs” to do anesthesia for GI procedures maybe once a week for a few hours.

This was in 2004 or so. Now we send three board certified anesthesiologists to various GI units every day all day. We do maybe 25 cases a day on average. Now, some of this is due to the aggressive expansion of the advanced GI procedures unit as well as the addition of an outside private group that was recently folded into the greater hospital system. It’s also because we’re there. It’s no accident that as soon as we committed troops to the GI battle all of a sudden everybody needed anesthesia.

The NYT article uses Dierdre Yapalater as an example, a healthy 60-something. Putting aside the ridiculous cost for the overall procedure, she was billed $2,400 for anesthesia. But she didn’t need anesthesia. There is absolutely no reason for her to have an anesthesiologist involved for that case. None.

Anesthesia care used to be limited to very sick patients, not because they are harder to sedate (they’re actually often easier) but to monitor them closely because of their tenuous physiologic status. Now everybody is getting it. Why did she get anesthesia, why did the anesthesiologist give it, why does insurance pay for it?

A SEC for Health Care?

Jun 4, 2013• 9

By Peter Pronovost, MD

If you have ever tried to choose a physician or hospital based on publicly available performance measures, you may have felt overwhelmed and confused by what you found online. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Joint Commission, the Leapfrog Group, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, as well as most states and for-profit companies such as Healthgrades and U.S. News and World Report, all offer various measures, ratings, rankings and report cards. Hospitals are even generating their own measures and posting their performance on their websites, typically without validation of their methodology or data.

The value and validity of these measures varies greatly, though their accuracy is rarely publically reported. Even when methodologies are transparent, clinicians, insurers, government agencies and others frequently disagree on whether a measure accurately indicates the quality of care. Some companies’ methods are proprietary and, unlike many other publicly available measures, have not been reviewed by the National Quality Forum, a public-private organization that endorses quality measures.

Depending where you look, you often get a different story about the quality of care at a given institution. For example, none of the 17 hospitals listed in U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Hospitals Honor Roll” were identified by the Joint Commission as top performers in its 2010 list of institutions that received a composite score of at least 95 percent on key process measures. In a recent policy paper, Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute, Harlan Krumholz, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and I called for dramatic change in measurement. (Thanks to The Health Care Blog for highlighting this analysis recently.)

We made several recommendations, including focusing more on measuring outcomes such as mortality and infections rather than processes (e.g. whether patients received the recommended treatment) or structures of care (e.g. whether ICUs are staffed around the clock with critical care specialists). We urged that measures be at the organization level rather than clinician level, to reflect the fact that safety and quality are as much products of care delivery systems as of individual clinicians. We propose investments in the “basic science” of measurement so that we better understand how to design good measures. You can read these and other recommendations in the analysis.

The Doctor is Viral

Jun 4, 2013• 5

By Rob Lamberts, MD

A post I wrote nearly three years ago has recently gone viral, bringing tens of thousands of readers and a huge number of comments. It’s a letter I wrote to my patients who do something that all but guarantees a bad relationship with many (if not most) physicians: they don’t get better. There are basically two responses I get to this post: either readers are grateful to have a doctor admit to our flawed humanity, or they are furious that I would suggest that patients, the ones with the disease, should see physicians as needy and flawed humans and therefore watch how they act around them. If you haven’t done so, read the comments to this post and hear the deep frustration and anger brought out by a letter that sympathizes with their pain and (apologetically) tries to help.

Amidst the dichotomy of reactions, both of which I understand, is the obvious question: why has a relationship that exists for the purpose of healing and helping become one of frustration and anger? The corollary to this question is perhaps more important: what can be done to heal this broken relationship? A reader of my last post (about viewing patients from a different perspective) asked me point blank: ”Dr. Rob, for the 99.999% of us who do not have a primary care doctor who is thinking as progressively as you, what advice can you give so that we can get our doctors to be treating us in the manner in which you are treating your own patients?”

I must admit, I get a bit uncomfortable with this, as it sounds like I am putting myself above my colleagues morally. Ironically, it is my deep understanding of my own huge flaws, coupled with an upbringing that scorned conformity, that rips me away from the survival self-centeredness most docs eventually adopt. Putting myself on any moral high ground only invites a very public (and deserved) fall back to the low ground I usually inhabit. No, I’m also not putting myself down out of false-modesty; I’ve made peace with my flaws, embracing them for what they are: a lens with which I can understand my fellow human scum-bags. Of course, as my best friend (and best man) used to remind me: “remember, I am doctor scum bag to you.”

Now, I don’t lay the whole problem at the feet of the fallen nature of mankind. I believe that our system of “health care” doesn’t just fail to counter the flaws of our nature, it actively promotes bad relationships. It does this by:

Reducing patients to “problems.” The payment system requires we use “problem codes” to classify patients and justify visits. The problem-oriented approach is not just a byproduct of the payment system, though, it is at the very core of medical education. Despite a 100% ultimate failure rate, we are still taught that death and disease are the opponents we need to outsmart or out-procedure. Perhaps its analogous to the public infatuation with the tawdry and grotesque (the more gruesome the murder, the more news shows cover it), but we physicians love “interesting cases.” But nobody ever wants to be an “interesting case.” Ask any of the people who commented on the blog post. Boring is better.