The Health Care Blog – Page 603 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

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How the Rest of the World Does It: New Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital

Oct 7, 2012• 17

By ASHISH JHA, MD

I visited Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi today – an institution with 1,531 beds and 145% occupancy rate. Yes, 145%. You do the math. A lot of bed sharing and asking families to bring in cots. It’s right across the street from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the premier public healthcare institution in India. While both AIIMS and Safdarjung are run by the federal government, only AIIMS is renowned for famous specialists, world class facilities, and an international reputation to boot. Safdarjung doesn’t suffer such burdens – its specialists are not well known, facilities are dilapidated, and you probably have never heard of it.

I spent several hours walking around, talking to lots of physicians, visiting ICUs and cath labs. I visited the outpatient department where 7,000 people show up every day, many lining up the night before, to get a ticket by 11 a.m., when registration closes and those who haven’t gotten a ticket are out of luck. In the ER, there was a line of between 50 and 100 people waiting to get rabies shots. This is the hospital where every poor person in Delhi unfortunate enough to get a dog bite is sent. They have the rabies serum. Most other public hospitals do not.

Safdarjung has “efficiency” baked in. In a typical year, they do 800 cardiac surgeries, 2,000 angioplasties, 3,000 echocardiograms, and 100,000 EKGs. They see tens of thousands of patients in the cardiology clinic. They have 4 (yes, four) full-time cardiologists on staff. The rest of the work is done by medical residents, who call when they get into trouble. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which probably doesn’t have one quarter the volume of this place, has 140 cardiologists. The patients at Safdarjung pay essentially nothing. Even their medications are free. For those who are not extremely poor (and I doubt there are many non-poor patients who go to Safdarjung), you do have to pay for your own devices. Need a stent? Bare metal ones cost $200 to $1000. Drug eluting stents are $1500 to $2500. You get to decide which one you want. They have a chart with pictures and prices that looks a lot like a dinner menu. Continue reading…

Single Payer Health: It’s Only Fair

Oct 5, 2012• 134

By SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS

The United States is the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care as a right to its people. Meanwhile, we spend about twice as much per capita on health care and, in a wide number of instances, our outcomes are not as good as others that spend far less.

It is time that we bring about a fundamental transformation of the American health-care system. It is time for us to end private, for-profit participation in delivering basic coverage. It is time for the United States to provide a Medicare-for-all, single payer health coverage program.

Under our dysfunctional system, 45,000 Americans a year die because they delay seeking care they cannot afford. We spent 17.6% of our GDP on health care in 2009, which is projected to go up to 20% by 2020, yet we still rank 26th among major, developed nations on life expectancy, and 31st on infant mortality. We must demand a better model of health coverage that emphasizes preventive and primary care for every single person without regard for their ability to pay.

It is certainly a step forward that the new health reform law is projected to cover 32 million additional Americans, out of the more than 50 million uninsured today. Yet projections suggest that roughly 23 million will still be without insurance in 2019, while health-care costs will continue to skyrocket.Continue reading…

Can Banks Offer the ‘Digital Key’ to Healthcare?

Oct 5, 2012• 3

By John Casillas

Recognition of medical banking, or the convergence of banking and health IT, is gaining ground. Yet, of the many ideas evolving from this unique and growing cross-industry area, none may have more impact than using banking identity and access management systems for healthcare. By using “digital keys” offered by banks, the patient could gain a solution for securely accessing his or her electronic health records and much more. I want to share four compelling reasons for why I think banks can offer digital keys for healthcare:

1. Innovations in Banking and Health IT Are Ripe for Collaboration

Cost and convenience is driving new forms of efficiency in payment processing and this is driving banks further into the health IT arena. For example, medical banking innovations have helped one healthcare system move 4 million “explanation of benefits” (EOBs) from paper to digital processing, providing a conservative annual savings of $2 per form, or $8 million. Both providers and consumers have less paper to manage when following the digital approach.

2. Banks Have Addressed Identity Theft; Healthcare Desperately Needs a Solution for Medical Identity Theft

In 2006, the World Privacy Forum declared medical identity theft as the fastest-growing form of identity theft. Move ahead to 2010 when, according to the Ponemon Institute , more than 1.4 million people were victimized by medical identity theft, and the average cost to resolve their cases totaled about $20,000. Over half reported having to pay for medical coverage they did not receive to restore their health coverage. In fact, nearly one third indicated their health premiums increased after they were victimized.

State of Disruption

Oct 5, 2012• 12

By Jonathan Bush

Disruptive leadership. That’s a thing now? I’m told that this is a kind of leadership—I thought it was a market dynamic.

Hmmm…

What does it take to be a “disruptive” leader?

Does it mean talk like a pirate when explaining how the company will be cutting benefits?

Does it mean dress like Ali G and try to imitate him but only muster a WASP accent?

I suppose it does…but that’s the easy part.

Job #1 in leading a true market disruptive: FIND AND FERTILIZE THE HIDDEN RAGE AT THE STATUS QUO THAT LIES WITHIN ALL OF US. Find it in yourself and feed it and then find it in others and attract them to work with you.

I’m constantly looking for change in my personal life. For example, I just bought a Tesla. My other car is a 1983 Land Rover. Why? Because in 1983 you didn’t need to sell cars with a seatbelt dinger and airbags in the front seat andD because Tesla is the first ATTACKER disruptive car maker to make it past the fetal stage in my entire life. I must feed them. I HATE the established car industry! I have been trapped inside a small number of culturally (and occasionally financially) bankrupt brands that have lost any interest in fighting the over-regulated morass that constraints.

The Data Entry Paradox

Oct 4, 2012• 16

By William Hersh, MD

Everyone, including this blog writer, has been touting the virtues of the vast troves of data already or soon to be available in the electronic health record (EHR), which will usher in the learning healthcare system [1, 2]. There is sometimes unbridled enthusiasm that the data captured in clinical systems, perhaps combined with research data such as gene sequencing, will effortlessly provide us knowledge of what works in healthcare and how new treatments can be developed [3, 4]. The data is unstructured? No problem, just apply natural language processing [5].

I honestly share in this enthusiasm, but I also realize that it needs to be tempered, or at least given a dose of reality. In particular, we must remember that our great data analytics and algorithms will only get us so far. If we have poor underlying data, the analyses may end up misleading us. We must be careful for problems of data incompleteness and incorrectness.

There are all sorts of reasons for inadequate data in EHR systems. Probably the main one is that those who enter data, i.e., physicians and other clinicians, are usually doing so for reasons other than data analysis. I have often said that clinical documentation can be what stands between a busy clinician and going home for dinner, i.e., he or she has to finish charting before ending the work day.

I also know of many clinicians whose enthusiasm for entering correct and complete data is tempered by their view of the entry of it as a data blackhole. That is, they enter data in but never derive out its benefits. I like to think that most clinicians would relish the opportunity to look at aggregate views of their patients in their practices and/or be able to identify patients who are outliers in one measure or another. Yet a common complaint I hear from clinicians is that data capture priorities are more driven by the hospital or clinic trying to maximize their reimbursement than to aid clinicians in providing better patient care.

Rethinking the Provider Certification Game

Oct 4, 2012• 3

By David Shaywitz, MD

Quality is the new watchword in healthcare; it’s what we seek – and increasingly, what we try to measure. Medications, devices, care delivery, hospital services – all are now scrutinized as we seek to gauge their benefit, and justify their cost.

The idea of using metrics to evaluate quality make sense, but only if we can trust the metrics themselves. Otherwise, we risk becoming party to an updated version of craniometry, systematized false-precision that focuses on easily-measurable parameters (such as head circumference) that may not represent meaningful proxies for the assessments we’re really after (i.e. intelligence).

The good news is that the science of testing, of developing evaluation instruments, has improved over time. We’re now better able to recognize the qualities and properties of good tests – and to identify where they’re likely to fall short.

We’re also getting more comfortable with demanding robust evaluation instruments. For example, the FDA’s approach to patient-reported outcomes places exceptional (and appropriate) emphasis on the assessment tool chosen, and requires that it demonstrates the appropriate properties before relying on its results.

Unfortunately, one critically important area within our healthcare system that seems to have escaped such careful review is the way the competence of care providers is typically assessed and certified.

Whether you are an X-ray technician, a physical therapist, a registered nurse, or a transplant surgeon, you are required to pass through a gauntlet of costly certification exams. These tests, already significant, are assuming an even greater importance as the healthcare system increasingly looks to them as proxies for quality. Certification can be required for employment and for admission privileges, and frequently impacts the reimbursement rate for healthcare providers.

All this makes complete sense – provided the certification tests themselves are sound.

Unfortunately, the world of healthcare worker certification remains a bit like the wild west, as medical organizations and professional societies approach certification testing with profoundly different degrees of rigor — and generally little-to-no transparency.

The Art of Diagnosis

Oct 3, 2012• 4

By Maggie Mahar and Clifton Meador, MD

A young doctor and his wife had just moved to the mountains of eastern Kentucky, near the border of West Virginia. The small town was nestled among the coal mines of the region. Nearly all of his patients would be coal miners or family members of a miner. Bill would practice family medicine. His wife, a veterinarian, hoped to build a small-animal practice.

Liz McWherther, the forty-seven-year-old wife of a miner, came to see the young doctor. Over several weeks, she had developed a curious set of complaints. Each morning she woke with a dry mouth and slurred speech. She also noted blurred vision and difficulty urinating. Within a couple of hours of waking, she was completely free of any symptoms. These symptoms had been occurring each morning and going away by afternoon.

Liz had had a series of tests done by the previous physician, but none of these tests were abnormal. The physical examination by Dr. Hueston was entirely normal. She denied drinking alcoholic beverages or using illicit drugs. Hueston had briefly considered some unusual response to marijuana or other drugs that were prevalent in the area. Liz had not been down in the mines, nor did her husband bring back anything unusual into the house.

Vinod Khosla Thinks I’m Narrow-Minded

Oct 3, 2012• 6

By Margaret Polaneczky, MD

There’s a (tiny) bit of a discussion going on in Twitter about a post I wrote responding to Vinod Khosla’s statement that 80% of the work that doctors do will one day be replaced by computer algorithms.

In my post, I talked a bit about the marketplace-driven IT innovations in healthcare, and medicine as seen through the eyes of the IT entrepeneurs. I questioned just how much of what doctors do today can really be replaced by algorithms, particularly the doctor-patient relationship.

I then asked if Khosla was right and answered myself – Maybe. I stated that we were in the midst of a huge disruption in healthcare, and reflected on how I was already seeing signs of that disruption in my current practice. And while I still did not see anything changing too much just yet, as far as the future Khosla predicted? I wasn’t so sure.

I then stated that if there is a revolution in healthcare, we docs needed to make ourselves a part of it now. I urged my fellow physicians to become involved, in order to be sure that what happens in the IT-driven healthcare future actually improves our patients’ health beyond what we are doing today.

It’s a completely legitimate concern, and, I believe, an extremely important one. As an example, I cited the evolution of the EMR – a system that has created high hopes and caused huge disruption at enormous cost, even as we continue to struggle to find conclusive evidence that EMR use actually improves patient outcomes.

The Health Care Debate Within the Debate

Oct 3, 2012• 10

By David Merritt

In tonight’s first presidential debate, Governor Romney and President Obama will spend 15 minutes discussing healthcare. This is a perilous topic for both, but whoever wins this debate within the debate will take a big step to winning on November 6th.

The Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare as both candidates now call it, will be center stage. The president will offer his standard defense, saying it helps middle-class families by making insurance more affordable and more secure.

But the president knows a full-throated defense will not work. A majority of Americans have consistently supported repeal since day one.

Rather than defend the indefensible – higher costs, higher taxes, Medicare cuts, government expansion – the president will attack.

First, he will tie together ObamaCare and the reform law Gov. Romney signed in Massachusetts, arguing that they are the same.

Gov. Romney should stipulate that there are some policy similarities between the two, but that the differences are what matter. He can deflect this attack and return the spotlight to the president’s unpopular law by clearly saying:

“I did not raise taxes. You raise taxes by $500 billion.

“I did not cut Medicare. You cut Medicare by more than $700 billion to pay for a new entitlement that the public opposed. Your cuts jeopardize seniors’ access to care.