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GAO and CMS Spar over Research Methods: Media (as usual) Miss the Boat

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By David Dranove

The New York Times and other media outlets are trumpeting a new GAO report that blasts an ongoing $8 billion Medicare demonstration project. CMS has put the money towards a new pay-for-performance scheme for Medicare Advantage plans. The media have focused their attention on part of the GAO study describing how most of the money will go to average performing plans (those receiving as few as three “stars” out of a possible five), with 90 percent of plans receiving some sort of bonus.

If that were the gist of the GAO complaint, then the GAO would have been the ones guilty of wasting taxpayer money for writing a useless report. But the key elements of the GAO report pertain to a different matter: will the demonstration allow CMS to determine whether the new pay-for-performance scheme is superior to the existing scheme? Here the GAO report gets bogged down in the details of research methodology. The media understandably got lost in this discussion and have given this part of the report short shrift. As a result, I expect politicians to blast CMS for “giving $8 billion to bad health plans” and other stuff of nonsense.

Let me explain why it is pointless to focus on how the money is distributed among Medicare Advantage plans. The purpose of any pay-for-performance scheme is to provide incentives for improving quality. (A scheme that rewards the best plans but does nothing to alter the status quo really is a waste of money.) Some of the comments by the GAO and aped by the media would have you believe that the best way to improve quality is to reward the top achievers. Tell this to parents of a D student who would be grateful to see their child get C’s. Should they tell their child “we will take you on a nice vacation but only if you get all A’s?” Talk about killing motivation.

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101 Ways to Engage Patients to Easily Exceed Stage 2 Meaningful Use Requirements

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By Dave Chase

I believe the Health 2.0 community can put to rest any concerns that patient engagement will be difficult by commenting below on how apps they’ve built or seen can help blow away the requirements proposed in Stage 2 Meaningful Use.

In an earlier piece, I asked the question “Will the ONC provide a huge stimulus to Health 2.0 startups?” I touched on how this could be the biggest boost the health 2.0 startup community has ever received. Elsewhere, there has been pushback such as an article in Healthcare Informatics that describes patient engagement as The Least Popular Thing About Stage 2 MU So Far. In particular, providers question the requirement that 10 percent of patients access their data.

I don’t doubt that the proposed requirements will be difficult for some but I hope we aren’t, once again, beset by the tyranny of low expectations. 10% is a strikingly low # when you consider that health items are the 3rd most searched items across the entire population (not just sick people who should be much more motivated on a relative basis). While we know that some people are difficult to engage, it’s a llllonggggg way from 90%.

It’s only difficult (today) because the incentive systems have created a dynamic where providers have become highly skilled at getting as big a bill out as fast as possible. Why wouldn’t they have developed that skill? That is exactly what the flawed “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement has rewarded. The byproduct is they haven’t honed their skills at engaging patients. Having worked with hundreds of providers and dozens of vendors, these are smart and motivated people. I have ZERO doubt that they will rise to the expectations if they are given the chance.

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Is Medical School Admission Squashing Creativity?

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By Ilana Yurkiewicz

What does it take to get into medical school today?

High MCAT scores. Pre-requisites galore, coupled with a stellar GPA. Research experience. Clinical experience. Volunteering.

It has become a series of check-boxes, many going through the process gripe. Worse, it’s an exercise in conformity.

Last week at TEDMED, Dr. Jacob Scott shone the spotlight on this system as a root cause of the lack of creativity among people going into medicine.

“You can’t take any risks, or you won’t get in [to medical school] – you won’t get into the club,” he told the audience. But, he continued, that means weeding out creativity. Future doctors are being trained to “memorize certainty,” rather than think imaginatively.

Having gone through the admissions process recently, I could relate to many of Dr. Scott’s sentiments. It’s true: preparing to get into medical school does little to encourage risk-taking. Admission criteria are rigid. And you know if you don’t do what they ask, there is no shortage of others who will.

Want to become a doctor? You can’t slip up, or you’ll fall behind. You can’t rock the boat, or you won’t get admitted.

This critique is not unique to medical education. Scott’s talk reminded me of a speech by former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz to the 2009 plebe class of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Skeptical of modern benchmarks of success, Deresiewicz told the young cadets:

“It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through [to get into college], starting from way back… What I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors…. I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life.”

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Mission Critical: How Translation-Focused Disease Foundations May Save Medical Research

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By David Shaywitz, MD

Patients waiting expectantly for medical research to produce important new cures are finding bad news almost everywhere they turn.

Pharmaceutical companies are suffering from a much-discussed innovation crisis, as old drugs lose patent protection without new drugs to replace them; meanwhile, the small biotechs that could potentially bail big pharma out struggle to raise capital .

University scientists, for their part, are beset by an unseemly credibility crisis, as the intrinsic fragility of medical research is now vividly apparent from the soaring number of high-profile retractions, and the well-documented difficulty of reproducing many published findings outside the originator’s lab.

At the heart of this crisis is the misalignment of two very different cultures.

Academic scientists tend to focus on publishing papers, and usually assume that the results will eventually be useful. They place a high value on novelty, and relatively less value on whether the data are robust, easily reproducible by others, or truly relevant to human disease. Captivating data from putative laboratory models of disease generate publications, even if the model is not very predictive of human disease – and unfortunately, most models aren’t.

Conversely, big companies traditionally focus on generating efficiencies through scale, and on developing reproducible processes. This works very well for manufacturing, reasonably well for large late-stage clinical trials, and essentially not at all for early-stage (discovery) research.

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PlaceMe: A Creepy Model For Health Information?

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By Phil Bauman

Data, information, interpretation and decision-making are among the vital components of prevention, diagnosis, management and treatment.

The problem we have today is how to gather and manage the data that our bodies radiate.

In order to solve this problem, we have to surmount other problems – which are not just technological but also behavioral, cultural and financial.

But if you want an idea of what an extreme version of data-collection might look like, check out the application Placeme.

Now Placeme is *not* a Healthcare application. What Placeme does do, however, is to continually (in almost real-time) track the places that you visit. No check-ins; no need to enter and data – the application simply runs in the background and does its magic.

When you think about that (from the cultural perspective of today), that’s creepy.

And yet, this “creepy” model is the future. It represents the technological and cultural arc that social software is throwing us. We can fight it (and should in order to flesh out the nuances so we can ensure safety) but in the long-run we shall have to accept the trend and work accordingly.

So think of Placeme in terms of what the ‘Quantitative Self’ movement is attempting to achieve.

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Conference Highlights Rapid Growth of Health Impact Assessments in the United States

By Aaron Wernham

According to a recent poll in Washington State, 71 percent of voters supported a bill that would require the state to consider impacts on people’s health when planning new transportation projects. This poll speaks to the growing recognition that illnesses like asthma, obesity, and diabetes, as well as injuries are shaped by the conditions in the places where we live and work. To address this, we need to factor health into decisions in fields like transportation, energy, housing, and agriculture.

The level of interest in the inaugural National Health Impact Assessment (HIA) Meeting held April 3 and 4 in Washington, D.C., highlights that this approach has become a centerpiece of community, state, and national efforts to improve Americans’ wellness. An HIA is a type of study that allows decision makers to factor health into projects like planning roads, passing agriculture policy, and siting schools. I have been using HIAs for over eight years, and until recently, I knew most of the people in the field. In organizing the National HIA Meeting, I worried that we might not find 200 people to attend. Instead, we had to close registration six weeks early: more than 430 leaders in public health, urban planning, housing, transportation, agriculture, and environmental regulation participated, and many more were on the waiting list.

The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, sponsored the two-day meeting, along with The California Endowment, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Network of Public Health Institutes.

Keynote speaker Jonathan Fielding, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health who also chairs the U.S. Community Preventive Services Task Force, gave an overview of the fast-growing approach. “The first HIAs were done roughly 12 years ago in the United States,” he said. “There has been huge progress in this field.”

At the Health Impact Project, we are tracking this growth. Today, nearly 200 HIAs have been completed or are ongoing. In 2007, there were only 27 such studies on the books.

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A Response to Critics on the Founding Fathers and Health Insurance Mandates

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By Einer Elhauge

Last week, I wrote an article describing several purchase mandates adopted by the framers in early Congresses, including two medical insurance mandates imposed on shipowners and seamen. These examples rebut the claim by challengers to Obamacare that purchase mandates are wholly unprecedented in a way that allows us to infer they are unconstitutional, a claim on which they rely heavily because there is no text, history, or case law that affirmatively supports a ban on purchase mandates.

Not everyone agrees with me. Some comments to my article, here and elsewhere, have suggested that these early medical mandates are distinguishable from Obamacare because they reflect Congress’ power to enact maritime law, not its power to regulate commerce. But the Constitution’s list of congressional powers nowhere includes a maritime law clause. Early Supreme Court cases all held that the Commerce Clause was what gives Congress the power to enact maritime law. For example, in The Daniel Ball, a case decided in 1871, the Court stated that navigable waters form “a continued highway for commerce, both with other States and with foreign countries, and is thus brought under the direct control of Congress in the exercise of its commercial power. That power authorizes all appropriate legislation for the protection or advancement of either interstate or foreign commerce…” In The Lottawanna, the Court held that it was under this commerce clause power that Congress had enacted statutes that determined “the rights and duties of seamen” and “the limitations of the responsibility of shipowners.” These early medical mandates were thus enacted under the very Commerce Clause at issue in the Obamacare case.

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Rebooting the Medical Meeting – 9 lessons from TEDMED

By Ronan Kavanagh, MD

A few things that medical meeting organisers could learn from the organisers of TEDMED.

1. Most presentations at TEDMED are 18 minutes long. This allows for large numbers of presentations with fine tuned ideas to presented in a polished digestible format to an audience.  George Bernard Shaw said. “I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” Even the most excruciating presentation is bearable if you know it’ll be over shortly.

2. Give speakers guidance on their style of presentation with specific suggestions; e.g. “think big,  make the complex plain, connect with peoples’ emotions, don’t flaunt your ego, don’t read your talk, finish on time” etc. Check their slides well in advance of the talk and offer guidance. Speakers need to be guided and managed.

3. Introduce talks which stimulate thought, innovation and creativity rather than didactic hard data. It’s not always essential to have the answer or solution to make a presentation interesting.

4. Introduce an element to your meeting with speakers from disciplines outside medicine. At this TEDMED the innovative dynamic is generated by bringing together people from all sorts of disciplines passionate about healthcare; Some of the most exciting conversations / commentaries that took place this year at this years were with Architects, Climate Change specialists, Neurobiologists, Experts in Social Networks, Plant Biologists, Technology Entrepreneurs, Gamers, Military personnel, Poets, Musicians and dancers.

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Meeting the Health Needs of 21st Century Veterans

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By David Anderson

After a decade of conflict in Iraq, our troops have come home, producing the largest increase in the number of American veterans since the 1970s. After Vietnam, an America tired of war and consumed with political angst neglected its veterans. Fortunately, the veterans of today are receiving the homecoming they deserve. To make that homecoming complete, America needs to ensure that our returning warriors have access to one of the most important benefits they have earned: health care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A Health Care Challenge: Fewer Battlefield Deaths, More Injuries

The United States military is the most technologically sophisticated fighting force in the world. This technological advantage means that our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are subject to fewer casualties than in Vietnam. But those who do receive injuries are significantly more likely to survive because of body armor and the high quality of medical care. According to a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, only 13 percent of those injured in Iraq were likely to die compared to those injured in Vietnam, where the fatality rate was nearly 25 percent. But our ability to save lives also means that many more veterans are returning home after losing limbs or suffering from the after-effects of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) from blasts experienced in battle or as a result of improvised explosive devices.

A frightening aspect of TBI is that it can be quite difficult to diagnose. It is possible for someone exposed to an explosion to show no signs of injury until weeks or months later when symptoms—such as depression, anxiety or anger issues—become apparent. Untreated, these symptoms can lead to major depression, substance use problems, unemployment and ruined family relationships. In addition to TBI, other problems—from back injuries to exposure to toxins—may only become apparent after the veteran has been separated from service for months or even years.

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Sending Some Love to Our Bodies

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By Linnea Duff


When first diagnosed with cancer, I felt as if my body had not only let me down, but actually turned on me. Some of my own DNA had gone rogue, grabbed some prime real estate in my lungs, and set up headquarters. Even when forcibly evicted, the rebel cells kept returning. Their numbers grew, and soon recruits were colonizing new neighborhoods.

Attempting to slow the spread of cancer has required unyielding vigilance. Emotionally and spiritually, I believe this has resulted in an unforeseen benefit; a chance for personal growth.

Physically, it has taken quite a toll. My body has been a battleground and I am scarred inside and out. This could potentially be distressing, as we live in a beauty and youth oriented society where great measures are taken to avoid the imperfections associated with aging and disease.

I am not afraid of getting old. I hope to hell I do. And I made peace with myself some time ago. Not only is all forgiven (the whole cancer thing), I have an abiding affection for this body of mine. We’ve been through a lot together, and somehow, some way, we both just keep on going.

Must be love.

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