The Health Care Blog – Page 578 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

When is a Health Care Facility not a Health Care Facility?

Feb 14, 2013• 5

By David Dosa, MD

There are 900,000 people in the United States who reside in assisted living settings, at an average age of nearly 87. On average, these individuals pay privately between $3,000-$6,000 per month for services that often include room and board, medication delivery and pill box set-up, supervision, and assistance with activities of daily living. Assisted living facilities are an integral part of the health care delivery system for many of our nation’s frailest older adults. Despite the high quality care that is often provided, the assisted living environment can often leave healthcare providers scratching their heads about what they can and cannot order for their patients. My recent experience with such a facility involving a patient with possible influenza illustrates the complex middle ground these facilities occupy.

A phone call from an assisted living facility in town interrupted me from my afternoon schedule. The facility’s nurse introduced herself and began to give me a report about my 85-year-old patient with dementia.

“Mr. Smith has a fever to 102 and is coughing up some ugly looking sputum. I’d like to order some labs and perhaps a chest X-ray. We might also want to consider an antibiotic.”

I asked the nurse a series of questions. Was my patient’s blood pressure unstable? Was he short of breath? Was he confused or disoriented?”

In each case, she told me, “no.”

“He is sitting quite comfortably watching a talk show on television. His only complaint is the occasional cough.”

I asked a few more questions and was reassured that he was otherwise fine. I told her that her initial request for blood work and a chest X-ray sounded like a good idea. We would wait on the antibiotic until the results came back.

“I’ll call you later today with the results,” she said.

Why HHS Created Partnership Exchanges and Why More States Are Choosing Them

Feb 13, 2013• 7

By Dan Diamond

New Hampshire: We’re in.

North Carolina: We’re not.

The two states on Tuesday were the latest to announce their intentions on the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges. States have until Feb. 15 to tell HHS whether they’ll retain even some control over the exchanges, or let the Obama administration run the exchanges for them.

And while New Hampshire made clear that it wants to partner with the federal government to launch an insurance exchange, North Carolina backed out of a previous plan to do exactly that.

By Friday, we’ll know where half a dozen other states stand, too.

Background on Partnership Model
The Affordable Care Act didn’t originally spell out the partnership model; under the law, states faced a binary choice of running their own insurance exchanges or punting the responsibility to the government.

But HHS officials realized they needed to tweak the ACA’s approach, as more than 30 states — increasingly led by Republicans, who took over 11 statehouses in the 2010 election — announced they planned to opt out of the exchanges altogether. This would leave HHS officials with “an awesome task in establishing and operating exchanges in [so many] different states and coordinating those operations with state Medicaid programs and insurance departments,” before open enrollment begins in October 2013, Paul Starr writes in The American Prospect.

As a result, the agency in 2011 introduced the partnership model in hopes of shifting some of the responsibility for running exchanges back to the states.

Under the hybrid approach, the federal government takes on setting up the exchange’s website and other back-end responsibilities, while states keep functions such as approving health plans and setting up consumer assistance programs. HHS also hopes that the partnership model will be a path for states that weren’t ready to run their own exchanges to take them over eventually.

Choosing Alternative Medicine

Feb 13, 2013• 116

By James Salwitz, MD

After a terribly painful and debilitating illness, Steve died. He had been treated for Stage 2 Hodgkin’s Disease with a series of intense therapies including German enzymes, American antineoplastins, Mexican naturopathy and Chinese Herbs, complemented by focused meditation, innumerable vitamins, extreme diet modification and acupuncture for severe pain. He fought the cancer with every ounce of his being, doing everything to survive, except the one thing that had an 85% chance of cure; chemotherapy.

I was struck this week by a comment on my website, which bemoaned the highly disorganized state of “alternative medicine” in this Country and in particular the “paltry sums” for alternative research funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The writer suggested that not only could the quality of health be improved with alternative medicine studies, but would go a long way towards saving health care dollars.

It seems to me that the idea that we need more Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) research goes right to the core of the confusion between so called “conventional medicine” and CAM. There is a major difference between the medicine practiced by board certified, classically trained physicians and that of alternative practitioners. That difference is research and data.

If an MD or DO is treating a cancer patient and that patient asks to see or understand the basic science and clinical studies which support the recommended therapy, that published data is readily available. Standard oncology treatment goes through 10-20 years of research, from the test tube, animal studies and through a series of supervised human multi-phase trials, until it is approved and offered to patients. Each step is refereed by competing and critical PhD and physician scientists and must be published in peer-edited journals for general review and criticism, all of which is public and transparent. Where it is not, and when people attempt to manipulate or falsify the system or data, massive blowback eventually occurs.

Drugmakers May Win Big in Effort to Curb Gun Violence

Feb 13, 2013• 2

By Matt Barry

Reducing gun violence by increasing access to mental health services may cost billions of taxpayer dollars and give drugmakers that help treat mental illness a revenue windfall. But will it reduce gun violence? The answer is uncertain.

In the wake of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there have been repeated calls to increase access to mental health services as a way to reduce gun violence in the U.S., even though the evidence is weak at best that those services actually reduce gun violence.

Absent from these calls to action is any sense of how much that policy would cost. Many argue that any cost is worthwhile if it prevents just one needless death due to gun violence. But we live in austere fiscal times and knowing the price tag before taking action makes sense (click on the image above to enlarge).

A just-published Bloomberg Government Study estimates that the potential impact on the federal deficit due to increased spending on mental health services could exceed $260 billion from 2014 to 2021.

Mislabeling Medical Illness

Feb 12, 2013• 6

By Allen Frances, MD

Many readers of my previous blog listing the 10 worst suggestions in DSM 5 were shocked that I failed to mention an 11th dangerous mistake — that DSM-5 will harm people who are medically ill by mislabeling their medical problems as mental disorder. They are absolutely right. I apologize for my previous failure to attend to this danger and hope it is not now too late to influence the process.

Adding to the woes of the medically ill could be one of the biggest problems caused by DSM-5. It will do this in two ways: 1) by encouraging a quick jump to the erroneous conclusion that someone’s physical symptoms are ‘all in the head’; and 2) by mislabeling as mental disorders what are really just the normal emotional reactions that people understandably have in response to a medical illness.

UK health advocate, Suzy Chapman, has closely monitored every step in the development of DSM-5. Her website is the best available resource for finding just about everything you need to know about DSM-5 and ICD-11. Ms Chapman sent me a troubling email that summarizes where DSM-5 has gone wrong and the many harmful consequences that will follow. More details are available at: ‘Somatic Symptom Disorder could capture millions more under mental health diagnosis’ (http://wp.me/pKrrB-29B )

Ms Chapman writes:

…The DSM-5 Somatic Symptom Disorders Work Group is planning to eliminate several little used DSM-IV Somatoform Disorders and replace them instead with an extremely broad new category that is likely to be wildly overused (‘Somatic Symptom Disorder’ — SSD).

Continue reading…

The “Post EHR” Era

Feb 12, 2013• 6

By John Halamka, MD

Over the next few months, the majority of my time will be spent discussing topics such as care coordination, healthcare information exchange, care management, real time analytics, and population health. At BIDMC, we’ve already achieved 100% EHR adoption and 90% Meaningful Use attestation among our clinician community. Now that the foundation is laid, I believe our next body of work is to craft the technology and workflow solutions which will be hallmarks of the “post EHR” era.

What does this mean?

I’ve written previously about BIDMC’s Accountable Care Organization strategy, which can be summed up as ACO=HIE + analytics.

In a “post EHR” era we need to go beyond simple data capture and reporting, we need care management that ensures patients with specific diseases follow standardized guidelines and protocols, escalating deviations to the care team. That team will include PCPs, specialists, home care, long term care, and family members. The goal of a Care Management Medical Record (CMMR) will be to provide a dashboard that overlays hospital and professional data with a higher level of management.

How could this work?

Imagine that we define each patient’s healthcare status in terms of “properties”. Data elements might include activities of daily living, functional status, current care plans, care preferences, diagnostic test results, and therapies, populated from many sources of data including every EHR containing patient data, hospital discharge data, and consumer generated data from PHRs/home health devices.

That data will be used in conjunction with rules that generate alerts and reminders to care managers and other members of the care team (plus the patient). The result is a Care Management Medical Record system based on a foundation of EHRs that provides much more than any one EHR.

My challenge in 2013-2014 will be to build and buy components that turn multiple EHRs into a CMMR at the community level.

The RUC is a Symptom. RBRVS is the Disease

Feb 12, 2013• 6

By Robert Centor, MD

The RUC is an easy target. The RUC is flawed. But the RUC is not the problem. Several bloggers have written extensively about the RUC – How the RUC Escaped a Challenge to Our Deeply Flawed Reimbursement System and US Senate Subcommittee Asks What the RUC is About.

In no way can I defend the payment schedules that the RUC has proposed to Medicare. I can defend their recent changes. Radiology payments decreased last year; interventional cardiology payments decreased last year; and many other procedures have decreased dramatically. The relative payments are still wrong (in my opinion), but the RUC actually has been responsive to criticism. They have increased primary care payments (admittedly not enough).

But if one studies the problem carefully enough, one must decide that the idea of paying per episode almost must lead to gaming the system. Forget the RUC, the entire idea of time independent episode based payment must lead to worse medical care and higher costs. If physicians can make more money by doing more, then some will.

Practice administrators push primary care physicians to see more patients each day. If we can decrease the time spent per patient from 20 min to 15 min then we could see up to 8 more patients in an 8 hour day. Our overhead has not changed – hence the marginal financial benefits are huge.

But any honest physician will tell you that the result is rushed medical care. Do we want our surgeon trying to do 5 surgeries today rather than 4? Do you want to be the 5th patient? Continue reading…

How to Win Friends and Influence Millennials: Health Exchanges Edition

Feb 11, 2013• 26

By MIKE MIESEN

America is only a few months away from Exchange Day—October 1, 2013—when the state and federal health exchanges open up for business. And when they do… well, I’d surprised if a whole lot happens at first; most people assume they open on January 1, 2014. But eventually there will be a flood of people streaming into the exchanges (virtually) to search for health insurance plans, including the Millennials.

Why? A variety of reasons. One is that people like being insured and prefer it to the uncertainty of being uninsured; those previously unable to purchase a policy they could afford now have subsidies to help them do so. Another is that people largely don’t have a choice—forego purchasing health insurance and get fined.

But the bottom line is this: whether compelled to do so by the safe feeling of being insured or the specter of a fine, Millennials are expected to be an enormous group of entrants into the exchanges: while we make up only 22% of the population, we account for 38% of the uninsured in America.

To compound our already-stratospheric opinion of ourselves, we know that the Millennials are a coveted market for health exchange insurers. Face it: you want us. Bad. That’s because we’re relatively healthy, loyal to brands we like that we see as having a positive impact (70% identify as being brand loyal), and we could actually be the first generation to recommend our health insurance plan to others.

So, culling from Millennial research, surveys, and conversations with fellow Millennials, here are a few morsels of unsolicited advice on how to win us over.

Fundamentals of Electronic Medical Record Design Part I

Feb 11, 2013• 12

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

Our ancestors began using tools millions of years ago and humanity assumed control of the planet it lives on through a succession of tools ranging from sticks and stones all the way to iPhones and drones. The basic process for discovering or inventing tools hasn’t changed much over the millennia, and it follows two basic patterns. Either an existing artifact is examined for fitness to various purposes until one such purpose is discovered accidentally or through organized efforts, or a problem is identified and a tool is then invented, or located, to solve the problem.

The problem itself could be something that was thought impossible before, such as flying, or a more mundane desire to reduce the effort and expand the capabilities associated with an existing activity, such as moving goods from one place to another. Tools can have limited effects, revolutionize an entire economic sector or can change history, and some tools can have harmful effects that must be balanced with the benefits they offer for the intended task. Tools usually undergo long processes of change, improvement and expansion, and sometimes the evolving tool looks nothing like the original invention. Why are we talking about tools here? Because programmable computers are tools. The computer hardware is like the hammer head and the programming software is like the hammer’s handle (more or less). And EMRs are one such handle.

Let’s imagine that we are software builders and we have a desire to help doctors deliver patient care. And let’s further assume that we, and our prospective customers, examined all the existing tools out there and found them not quite fit for purpose. Let’s also assume that we are not suffering from delusions of grandeur, have the humility to admit that we don’t know how to cure disease and have no interest in global social engineering initiatives. Let’s imagine that we are the misguided founders of a small social business interested in doing well by helping others do good things.