The Health Care Blog – Page 596 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Being Human

Nov 6, 2012• 1

By David Shaywitz, MD

The human connection is threatened by medicine’s increasingly reductive focus on data collection, algorithms, and information transaction.

If you follow digital health, Rachel King’s recent Wall Street Journal piece on Stanford physician Abraham Verghese should be required reading, as it succinctly captures the way compassionate, informed physicians wrestle with emerging technologies — especially the electronic medical record.

For starters, Verghese understands its appeal: “The electronic medical record is a wonderful thing, in general, a huge improvement on finding paper charts and finding the old records and trying to put them all together.”

At the same, he accurately captures the problem: “The downside is that we’re spending too much time on the electronic medical record and not enough at the bedside.”

This tension is not unique to digital health, and reflects a more general struggle between technologists who emphasize the efficient communication of discrete data, and others (humanists? Luddites?) who worry that in the reduction of complexity to data, something vital may be lost.

Technologists, it seems, tend to view activities like reading and medicine as fundamentally data transactions. So it makes sense to receive reading information electronically on your Kindle — what could be more efficient?

The Eight-Year Journey to Accountable Care

Nov 6, 2012• 1

By Justin Barnes

Now that the healthcare industry can work with clarity on care coordination strategies and programs, a new expansion of ACO models, trends in patient behavior and the companion issue of provider scope of practice have quickly emerged as critically-relevant spotlights. Historical perspective helps.

Simply put, even with the political tumult this fall, there is strong bipartisan support for aligning payment and care delivery models with improving quality to create a smarter and sustainable healthcare system, backed by historical precedent.

For me and my colleagues in the trenches of pursuing fiscally sound care delivery nearly a decade ago, it is well remembered that the origins of accountable care reside within a 2004 HHS document entitled “The Decade of Health Information Technology: Delivering Consumer-centric and Information-rich Health Care.” This “Framework for Strategic Action” (as it is also known) was delivered to then-HHS Secretary and GOP-appointee Tommy Thompson. And it was delivered by the nation’s first National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Dr. David Brailer.

The document’s goals of introducing health IT solutions to clinical practices, electronically connecting clinicians, using “information tools” to personalize care and advance population health reporting followed an executive order calling for widespread adoption of interoperable EHRs within 10 years.

Embracing Change: Leading Through Transformation

Nov 6, 2012• 14

By Bernard Tyson

It is often said that the one and only constant in life is change. This is certainly the case in business where every change in the external market or new initiative or idea brings some type of change to the organization. As leaders, our success or failure can hinge upon how well we are able to facilitate change and how well we help our members of our team adapt to and appreciate change.

As president of a large, national health care organization, like many other business leaders, I am involved in important decisions related not only to performance today, but also preparing the organization for what will be required in the future. This means I spend a lot of time thinking about change. What can we expect with change? How will people react to change? How can I help my team work through the change? How will change affect the way we operate or service our members? What will it cost us?

The reality is most people don’t like change because it can be stressful, especially when change happens unexpectedly. Change can be scary, and understandably so. It represents the unknown, taking us out of our comfort zones. Any time an organization embarks on a new initiative there is the risk of failure, which could have significant financial consequences. Yet, if we don’t change, failure is certain. As society evolves, we must too. Organizations that not only understand the importance of change, but embrace change, are the ones that will ultimately be most successful.

State of the EHR Nation

Nov 6, 2012

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

In a time of EHR naysayers, mean-spirited election year politics, and press misinterpretation (ONC and CMS do not intend to relax patient engagement provisions), it’s important that we all send a unified message about our progress on the national priorities we’ve developed by consensus.

1. Query-based exchange – every country in the world that I’ve advised (Japan, China, New Zealand, Scotland/UK, Norway, Sweden, Canada, and Singapore) has started with push-based exchange,replacing paper and fax machines with standards-based technology and policy. Once “push” is done and builds confidence with stakeholders, “pull” or query-response exchange is the obvious next step. Although there are gaps to be filled, we can and should make progress on this next phase of exchange. The naysayers need to realize that there is a process for advancing interoperability and we’ll all working as fast as we can. Query-based exchange will be built on top of the foundation created by Meaningful Use Stage 1 and 2.

2. Billing – although several reports have linked EHRs to billing fraud/abuse and the recent OIG survey seeks to explore the connection between EHR implementation and increased reimbursement, the real issue is that EHRs, when implemented properly, can enhance clinical documentation. The work of the next two years as we prepare for ICD-10 is to embrace emerging natural language processing technologies and structured data entry to create highly reproducible/auditable clinical documentation that supports the billing process. Meaningful Use Stage 1 and 2 have added content and vocabulary standards that will ensure future documentation is much more codified.

3. Safety – some have argued that electronic health records introduce new errors and safety concerns. Although it is true that bad software implemented badly can cause harm, the vast majority of certified EHR technology enhances workflow and reduces error. Meaningful Use Stage 1 and 2 enhance medication accuracy and create a foundation for improved decision support. The HealtheDecisions initiative will bring us guidelines/protocols that add substantial safety to today’s EHRs.
Continue reading…

Setting the Record Straight on Medicaid’s “Success”

Nov 5, 2012• 23

By David Dranove

In last Sunday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman extolled the virtues of Medicaid. Here are some excerpts from this astonishing column:

“Medicaid has been more successful at controlling costs than any other major part of the nation’s health care system.”

“How does Medicaid achieve these lower costs? Partly by having much lower administrative costs than private insurers.”

“Medicaid is much more effective at bargaining with the medical-industrial complex.”

“Consider, for example, drug prices. Last year a government study compared the prices that Medicaid paid for brand-name drugs with those paid by Medicare Part D — also a government program, but one run through private insurance companies, and explicitly forbidden from using its power in the market to bargain for lower prices. The conclusion: Medicaid pays almost a third less on average?”

In the days since this column was published, I have spoken with many experts on Medicaid who are uniformly appalled by it. While I may not reach the same audience as the New York Times (at least not yet!), I feel compelled to set the record straight on Medicaid’s “successes.”

The Future of Health Reform May Turn on Senate Races

Nov 5, 2012• 2

By Maggie Mahar

While all eyes focused on the presidential race, the ultimate fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could depend on the Senate contests in the states.

Even if Mitt Romney were elected, he alone could not overturn major provisions of healthcare reform. Only Congress can pass the legislation needed to change the ACA.

Republicans are expected to maintain control of the House, but if Democrats hold the Senate, they will be able to block House bills aimed at eviscerating “Obamacare.”

What is at stake

If Republicans take the Senate, the two chambers could pass legislation that would:

· eliminate the premium subsidies designed to make health insurance affordable for middle-income and low-income families
· bring an end to Medicaid expansion, and
· rescind the individual mandate that everyone buy insurance or pay a tax.

Under “budget reconciliation,” Republicans would need only a simple majority to pass such legislation. In the Senate, 51 votes would do it. Today, Republicans hold 47 seats.

Razor-sharp margins in many states make it impossible to predict outcomes. Polls only give us a blurry snapshot of one moment in time – and in states like Arizona, candidates have been trading leads from week to week.

Tracking the Social Doctor: Opening Up Physician Referral Data (And Much More)

Nov 5, 2012• 17

By Fred Trotter

I am happy to announce the release of the doctor “referral” social graph. This dataset, which I obtained using a Freedom of Information Act request against the Medicare claims database, details how most doctors, hospitals and other providers team together to deliver care in the United States. This graph is nothing less than a map of how healthcare is delivered in this country.

For the time being, the only way to get a copy of this data set is to support the Medstartr crowd funding campaign for either $100 (for the viral “open source eventually” version of the data) or $1000 (for the proprietary friendly version of the data, that any business can freely “merge” with other data). If you need consulting around this data, you can buy in at the $5k or $10k levels. Also, we are going to have really awesome t-shirts.

I will be writing a more in-depth technical article about this dataset over on the brand new O’Reilly Strata blog (which focuses specifically on Big Data) so I will gloss over most of the technical details here, with a few important exceptions.

First, when I say a “graph” I am not talking about a diagram. I am talking about a mathematical model that supports nodes and connections between those nodes. These are visualized as diagrams, but it is not possible to really analyze large graphs without a database. In this case, the nodes are doctors, hospitals and other providers and the connections between those nodes represent the degree to which they collaborate on specific patients.

Also, despite my branding to the contrary, this is not strictly a “referral” data set, although a fairly large portion of the data do represent referral relationships. Instead, it depicts the degree to which any healthcare provider “works” on a patient in the same time frame as some other provider. This means, for instance, that many primary care doctors are linked to emergency rooms. But this just means that a patient they were seeing was also seen by the emergency room in the same time period. Referral relationships can be inferred from this data, but not presumed.Continue reading…

“Unaccountable” An Important, Courageous and Deeply Flawed Book

Nov 5, 2012• 16

By ROBERT WACHTER, MD

In his new book, Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care, Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary promises a “powerful, no-nonsense, nonpartisan prescription for reforming our broken health care system.” And he partly delivers, with an insider’s and relatively unvarnished view of many of the flaws in modern hospitals. Underlying these problems, he believes, is an utter lack of transparency, the sunshine that could disinfect the stink.

The thesis is important, the honesty is admirable, and the timing seems right. Yet I found the book disappointing, sometimes maddeningly so. My hopes were high, and my letdown was large. If your political leanings are like mine, think Obama and the first debate.

Makary hits the ground running, with the memorable tales of two surgeons he encountered during his training: the charming but utterly incompetent Dr. Westchester (known as HODAD, for “Hands of Death and Destruction”) and the misanthropic “Raptor,” a technical virtuoso who was a horse’s ass. Of course, all the clinicians at their hospital knew which of these doctors they would see if they needed surgery, but none of the patients did. (Of HODAD, Makary writes, “His patients absolutely worshipped him… They had no way of connecting their extended hospitalizations, excessive surgery time, or preventable complications with the bungling, amateurish, borderline malpractice moves we on the staff all witnessed.”)

This is compelling stuff, and through stories like these Makary introduces several themes that echo throughout the book:

1) There are lots of bad apples out there.

2) Patients have no way of knowing who these bad apples are.

3) Clinicians do know, but are too intimidated to speak up.

4) If patients simply had more data, particularly the results of patient safety culture surveys, things would get much better.

The Election and Healthcare IT

Nov 5, 2012• 4

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

Tomorrow the Presidential election process comes to an end and the advertising will finally stop. We’ll all be relieved. I especially look forward to a quiet dinner at home without robotic election-related calls.

What about healthcare IT? Will differences in the Obama and Romney platforms impact the momentum of Meaningful Use?

Here’s what I believe.

The Obama Healthcare IT platform builds on what we’ve created over the past few years. It will continue to leverage the federal advisory committees (Policy and Standards) to engage a wide array of stakeholders. It will persist the progression to Meaningful Use Stage 3 and possibly future stages. It will embrace certification now the temporary certification process has been replaced with a permanent one. It will support the initiatives of the Standards and Interoperability framework (S&I), although the end of stimulus funds from ARRA means that ONC will move some of the S&I initiatives to private/public partnerships. It will support the current leadership at ONC – Farzad and his delegates such as Steve Posnack, Doug Fridsma, and Judy Murphy.

The Romney Healthcare IT platform notes that Healthcare IT is an issue which has broad bipartisan support. No one argues that a foundation of healthcare IT implemented properly is essential for accountable care organizations. Quality, safety, and efficiency all benefit from the process enhancement afforded by healthcare IT. Michael Leavitt, former Secretary of HHS and chair of the American Health Information Community (AHIC) will lead the Romney transition team and Leavitt has years of experience with healthcare IT issues from the early days of ONC. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney supported the early EHR rollout efforts of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.

Physician Assisted Suicide in Massachusetts

Nov 4, 2012• 7

By Holly Fernandez Lynch

Next Tuesday, those of us registered in Massachusetts will have the opportunity to vote on “Question 2″ – prescribing medication to end life, otherwise known as physician-assisted suicide.

As described by the state secretary, “This proposed law would allow a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at a terminally ill patient’s request, to end that patient’s life. To qualify, a patient would have to be an adult resident who (1) is medically determined to be mentally capable of making and communicating health care decisions; (2) has been diagnosed by attending and consulting physicians as having an incurable, irreversible disease that will, within reasonable medical judgment, cause death within six months; and (3) voluntarily expresses a wish to die and has made an informed decision.”

There are, of course, a number of other safeguards built in, such as the need to make the request twice, separated by 15 days, in the presence of witnesses. However, there could probably be stronger safeguards to protect individuals who are experiencing depression and anxiety, and might have preferable alternatives to physician-assisted death.