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How Many More Dead Patients?

Mar 10, 2012• 1

By Michael Millenson

Here’s a quiz for Patient Safety Awareness Week (and after): The number of Americans who die annually from preventable medical errors is:
.
A) 44,000-98,000, according to the Institute of Medicine

B) None, thanks to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s “100,000 Lives Campaign”

C) 90,000

D) No one’s really counting

The correct answer is, “D,” but I confess it’s a trick question. With a slight twist in wording, the right answer could also be “C,” from an as-yet-unpublished new estimate with a unique methodology. (More below.) The main point of this quiz, however, is to explore what we actually know about the toll taken by medical mistakes and to dispel some of the confusion about the magnitude of harm.

Answer “A” refers to a figure in the oft-quoted (and often incorrectly quoted) 1999 IOM report, To Err is Human. The IOM estimate of 44,000-98,000 deaths and more than 1 million injuries each year refers only to preventable errors, and then just in hospitals. The quiz asked about all preventable harm. As the sophistication and intensity of outpatient care has increased, so, too, have the potential dangers.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in 2011 that the majority of central-line associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) “are now occurring outside of ICUs, many outside of hospitals altogether, especially in outpatient dialysis clinics.” CLABSIs are both highly expensive and kill up to 25 percent of those who get them. Even in garden-variety primary care, one analysis found a harm rate of one per 35 consultations, with medication errors the most common problem. To Err is Human was silent about those types of hazards.

It’s NOT the Economy, Stupid!

Mar 8, 2012• 51

By J.D. Kleinke

With the US economy dragging itself to its feet, the housing and stock markets crawling back, and the Republican presidential candidates (and their nationally syndicated Falstaff) doing everything imaginable to alienate most American women, President Obama has been having quite a run of good luck. But there is one piece of good news clearly not welcome around the White House: new data showing that health care costs are stabilizing.

I know, I know – this is health care, costs are always out of control, and the sky is always falling. What could I possibly be talking about?

I’m talking about the actual numbers. The accompanying graphs reveal that health spending has actually been stabilizing for several years, and the system we all love to hate is finally re-entering the economy’s normal orbit after three decades of skyrocketing growth.

This of course is hardly a cause for celebration around the Obama Administration, for obvious political reasons. Why else would economists from the same department tasked with implementing health reform choose to tell us that this long-awaited good news is actually – well – bad news.

Huh? In both graphs below, newly released data through 2010 show that health spending over the past several years has been normalizing to the rate of overall inflation rather than outpacing it – or grossly outpacing it – as has been the case, nearly without interruption, since the 1970s.

Pharma: Beatings to Continue Until Morale Improves?

Mar 8, 2012

By David Shaywitz

For the last decade, as the biopharmaceutical industry has struggled — largely unsuccessfully — to live up to its anticipated potential, a litany of experts, analysts, participants, and commentators have offered up their diagnosis and treatment for pharma’s productivity problem.

The basic question they’re all trying to solve: how can it be that despite profound improvements in many aspects of drug discovery, actual productivity – measured by cost per new NME – seems to be declining?

That’s the problem that Jack Scannell (an industry analyst at Bernstein & Co.) and colleagues tackle in the latest issue of NRDD (here – abstract only), expanding upon a nice piece of work they did on this subject last year to now offer an even more comprehensive and thoughtful review of this important subject. While painfully depressing, the article is worth reading, as it cogently summarizes many years worth of hand-wringing and angst.

Having spent much of the last decade wrestling with many of the same issues (his topics will be familiar to regular readers of this column), I was perhaps most struck by the rather dismal take-away: there isn’t a clear unifying explanation for the R&D productivity problem; perhaps if each company examined its internal failures rigorously, new insight might emerge, but meanwhile, essentially, beatings will continue until morale improves.

More specifically: the payor environment is likely to make reimbursement increasingly difficult; regulators will always have an easier time tightening screws than loosening them; each success raises the bar higher; and the only immediate solution is likely to be continued R&D cuts.

What Is the Cause of Excess Costs in US Health Care? Take Two

Mar 7, 2012• 59

By Mark Hoofnagle, MD

We’ve discussed it before. Why are costs so much higher in US healthcare compared to other countries? The Washington Post has a pointless article which seems to answer with the tautology costs are high because healthcare in America costs more. How much more? Well, we spend nearly twice as much per capita as the next nearest country while failing to provide universal coverage.

In the WaPo article they make a big deal of the costs of individual procedures like MRI being over a thousand in the US compared to $280 in France, but this is a simplistic analysis, and I think it misses the point as most authors do when discussing this issue. The reason things costs more is because in order to subsidize the hidden costs of medical care, providers charge more for imaging and procedures. For instance, Atul Gawande, in his New Yorker piece “The Cost Conundrum” wonders why it is that costs are higher to treat the same conditions in rural areas and in a major academic centers like UCLA than at a highly specialized private hospitals like the Mayo Clinic? I think the reason is it’s not nearly as expensive to administer and provide care for a select group of insured midwesterners at the Mayo than it is to provide care to the underserved in the poor areas of inner-cities and in poor rural locations.

Stop Lying to Your Doctor

Mar 7, 2012• 2

By James Salwitz, MD

George Washington never met an Oncologist. I know this because of the Cherry Tree story. If our first President had spoken to a cancer doc, then that honesty fable would have been different. Anyone can tell the truth about cutting down a tree. It takes real guts to say to an oncologist, “I cannot tell a lie, I have a problem.”

Doctors frighten all of us. No matter how warm and congenial they are, there is always the threat of what they may say. A few words from a physician can change your entire life. An oncologist may be the scariest of all. For this reason it can be very hard for any of us to tell our doctor the complete absolute truth.

It is easier to diminish or deny pain, then describe in detail and submit to tests. Emphasizing the balance in a diet has less risk than noting it is only 600 calories. Increasing fatigue can be blamed on stress, not progressive weakness. Everyone seems to have quit smoking, despite yellow stained nails. “Social” drinking sounds better than a daily six-pack. We carefully parcel out the information we tell our doctor. It is gut level denial and it does us no good.

Physicians understand the desire of patients to limit and control the conversation. They learn to recognize incomplete and evasive answers. They try to ask questions which produce accurate information. A compassionate doctor knows that his response to a patient’s words is as important as the question asked.

Even though it can be hard, it is in our best interests to supply good information to our caregivers. Doctors cannot make correct diagnoses or order proper treatment using erroneous data. Unneeded X-rays are frequently ordered to fill gaps in information, which the patient could have supplied. Understanding it can be tough to disclose personal medical facts, here are several ideas that might make communication easier and more complete:

Four Healthcare Trends Hospital Executives Cannot Ignore

Mar 7, 2012• 2

By KENT BOTTLES

Hospital leaders are busy trying to cope with the changes brought on by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the realization that the federal budget deficit translates into less money for all healthcare providers in the future. The seemingly inevitable transition from fee-for-service to global payments creates anxiety about how quickly the financial incentives will shift.

While the above-described issues are certainly enough to monopolize any busy hospital executive’s time, there are other large-scale changes on the horizon that may impact hospital operations just as much. Leaders who ignore these trends will do so at their organization’s peril.

The important trends include: personalized medicine that concentrates on the individual not the population; the “quantified self” movement with constant remote physiologic monitoring; the smartphone health applications explosion, and the artificial intelligence, healthcare robot movement.

Personalized medicine: Advances in genomics and digital technology are making it possible to shift the focus of evidence-based medicine from the population to the individual patient. Today drug treatment and disease screening follow a one-size-fits-all approach that leads to overtreatment and unnecessary expense. Genetic testing allows us to individualize the treatment for the patients.

For example, about 20 percent of diabetic patients treated with metformin do not respond to the drug, a condition that can be identified by genotyping that is not routinely done today. Likewise, cancer screening by mammography after age 40 in women and colonoscopy after age 50 in men and women does not take into account the different genetic predispositions for breast cancer and colon cancer in individual patients. Two new books should be on every hospital executive’s reading list because they explore the implications for hospitals of personalized medicine: Eric Topol’s “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” and David Agus’ “The End of Illness.”

Research Shows … the Obvious

Mar 6, 2012

By Merrill Goozner

A couple of studies out today from Health Affairs belabor the obvious.

First, the one less covered: Hospital Compare, the government website that for the last seven years has provided the public with detailed information about hospital performance, had no discernible impact on improving outcomes. It had no impact on how well the studied hospitals treated heart attacks and pneumonia, and only a modest improvement in outcomes for patients with heart failure. “The jury’s still out on Medicare’s effort to improve hospital quality of care by posting death rates and other metrics on a public website,” says lead author Andrew M. Ryan, an assistant professor of public health at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Comment: Since when has disclosure ever affected behavior? Has it stopped physicians from taking money from the drug industry? Has detailed nutrition labels ended the obesity epidemic? Look at how well it is working in campaign finance reform. We have more information than ever about how our elections are being bought and sold. Disclosure is the reform that avoids reform. The real issue for hospitals is how well they do in improving their performance on checklists of quality indicators, and whether that improves outcomes (the QUEST demonstration project at CMS suggests it does). Disclosure of poor performance may be a goad to action (or not, as this current study suggests). But it is not a substitute for action.

The second, more widely reported study showed that doctors with electronic access to patients’ prior imaging studies wound up ordering more imaging tests than doctors without access to such electronic records. Absent other incentives, why would anyone expect otherwise? Imaging is one of the great generators of “false positives” in the medical system. See something on a scan, better get a biopsy or do an angioplasty. Or at least another scan. Double the number of eyes seeing that scan and you double the number of false positives. The depressing fact is that under the current fee-for-service payment system, everyone gets paid that second time around.

How Much Will a Data Breach Cost You?

Mar 6, 2012• 4

By DAVID HARLOW

The going rate for a compromised medical record seems to be $1000 (well, at least that’s the asking price) as seen in papers filed in the eleven class action lawsuits against Sutter Health following the theft of a desktop computer last fall. The computer contained unencrypted protected health information on about 4.24 million members. The eleven class action suits are likely to be consolidated for ease of handling by the courts.

For an outfit whose most recently reported year-end financials show just under $900 million in income on just over $9 billion in revenue, a $4.24 billion claim certainly qualifies as a big deal. The data breach claims against Sutter Health were filed last year following its self-reporting of the computer theft, and are in the news again due to the potential consolidation.

The company had reportedly begun to encrypt its data last year, starting with more vulnerable mobile devices, and moving on to desktop computers, but had not gotten to the desktop in question by the time of the breach. It remains to be seen how these facts end up affecting the final damages awarded in this case.

Wrong Rx for the FDA

Mar 6, 2012• 3

By Henry Miller

The congressional legislators who oversee the Food and Drug Administration and control the nation’s coffers have shown again that they neither understand drug development nor the regulatory problems that plague it.

In February, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski(D-Md.) unveiled a bipartisan bill intended to spur innovation in research and drug development for chronic, costly health conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

According to the press release, the bill will invest “in public-private partnerships to ensure scientists and researchers are able to develop new safe and effective drugs,” shrink product development timelines, increase the number of drugs in the development pipeline and expedite the FDA review process.

However, there is currently plenty in the development pipeline. The federal government is boosting funding for research and development on Alzheimer’s disease; the Department of Health and Human Services alone will allot more than $500 million to it in fiscal year 2013. Moreover, drug companies spend more than $65 billion annually on R&D.

For example, there are now nearly 100 drugs in development for Alzheimer’s disease, dementias and other cognitive disorders, and almost 900 medicines being tested for cancer.

Autofill Gone Wild

Mar 5, 2012

By Dinosaur, MD

I appreciate getting notes from specialists. Really. It’s great to be kept in the loop with patients’ care, especially when other doctors are using EMRs that directly fax me notes the same day as the visit. Sometimes, though, things can get a little out of control.

I’ve ranted before about offices that use templated EMRs to generate documentation of things they never actually did. Today I received the following letter:

Reason for the appointment:
1. Abdominal pain
2. Post colonoscopy with biopsy

History of present illness:
1. Abdominal pain: he failed to show up for this appointment

Current medications:
[med]
[med]
[med]

Past medical history:
[problem]
[problem]
[problem]
EGD 2008 negative, EGD 2011 negative, colonoscopy 2005 normal
2010 Chest CT with 3 mm lung nodule, low risk