The Health Care Blog – Page 658 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

The Fall of a Pink Giant?

Feb 26, 2012• 5

By Rachel Kerestes

The move a few weeks ago by the Susan G. Komen Foundation to stop providing grants to Planned Parenthood, the quick reversal after widespread backlash, recent staff resignations and ongoing controversy exposed a weakness in a brand many once thought unassailable. But women’s health may be better off for it.

As the self-described “global leader of the breast cancer movement,” Komen carries the weight of the breast cancer brand on itsshoulders. And women—the brand’s core constituency—took to the social media airwaves to decry what they perceived as hypocrisy by Komen. The breast cancer brand, many women argued, is built on supporting and improving women’s health and defunding Planned Parenthood flies in opposition of that mission.

Komen fell into the classic trap of seeming inauthentic to its audience. Despite pursuing an aggressive strategy to lay claim to the title of sole women’s health brand, thus allocating other causes and conditions to the margins, the foundation seemed surprised to find that it was viewed as representing the voice of women’s health.

Now that the dust is settling the question of damage remains. Will this misstep loosen breast cancer’s grip on its leadership position? And if so, is what’s bad for the breast cancer brand good for women’s health?

Make no mistake—breast cancer is the biggest brand in the history of disease. Everyone from the NFL to Yoplait to American Airlines attempts to get a piece of that brand equity each October by pink-washing themselves in solidarity. As the face of the breast cancer movement, the Komen Foundation is the main benefactor of all that attention raising an estimated $35 million each year from marketing partnerships.

It’s We, the Public, Who Are Flip Floppers

Feb 25, 2012• 7

By Peter Ubel, MD

As I pointed out in a previous post, Theda Skocpol’s wonderful book, Boomerang, provides many telling details about Bill Clinton’s futile efforts to reform the U.S. health care system in the early ’90s. The book details many of the mistakes that the Clinton team made in drafting and promoting the legislation. But the failure of health care reform does not rest solely at the president’s feet. Instead, we, the general public, are also to blame. We ultimately got the policies we deserved.

Skocpol relates a powerful anecdote that nicely captures the sense of public confusion surrounding the general public during the Clinton reform efforts. It was March of 1994, and the Clinton team was trying to convince reluctant legislators to craft a bill consistent with its general approach to health care reform, which was a politically moderate bill that shunned the single payer plan preferred by liberals in favor of a bill based on “managed competition,” an idea embraced early on by moderate Republicans. Around this time, a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll asked people what they thought of a plan that would “guarantee a standard private health benefits package… and promote competition… and require employers to buy insurance” for their employees. This description fit the Clinton plan to a “t,” and 76 percent of the public viewed it favorably. The dude had found the policy sweet spot!

Only one problem. When that same poll asked people if they approved of the “Clinton plan,” only 37 percent demonstrated support.

Public contradictions over health care reform run even deeper than antipathy to anything Clinton-esque. In its own polling, for example, the Clinton team learned that any plan they crafted that emphasized guaranteeing people “standard or basic” health care benefits would fail, because people wanted “comprehensive benefits,” feeling like it was only these more generous benefits that would be relevant to their own lives. (The administration also learned that the words “plan” and “program” were, ahem, program killers!) At the same time that the public clamored for comprehensive benefits, people also expressed their skepticism that a Democrat like Clinton could craft a health care reform bill that wouldn’t burden the taxpayers with a huge new expense. Well, of course Clinton couldn’t do that. It’s kind of hard to give everybody a Lexus at Hyundai prices!

Better Ways of Thinking About the Future

Feb 24, 2012• 4

By Joe Flower

2012 and 2013 present an opportunity for health care executives to produce significant change. If we hope to be, as Buckminister Fuller said, “Architects of the future, not its victims,” we have to change the way we think in specific ways.

How do you learn to “Think Different” as Steve Jobs’ famous ads put it?

Let’s think about the structure of thought for a moment. The great experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow, shows how much of our thinking and decision making is driven by illusions and assumptions, such as the “illusion of validity” (the false belief in the reliability of our own judgment), the “availability bias” (a biased judgment based on memories that are more easily available or more vivid) and the “endowment effect” (the tendency to value something more highly when we own it than when someone else owns it).

This makes sense. Kahneman’s analysis resonates strongly with my experience working with executive health care teams, including providers, health plans and suppliers, and with governments in North America, Europe and China over several decades. Smart, seasoned executives can make seriously poor judgments, especially when the environment changes.

Curiously, these illusions and biases and assumptions are driven by our experiences. So being more experienced does not necessarily exempt us from illusion, unless something in our process constantly and directly tests the results of our judgments (as, say, a robust retail market does on price setting). Even if the judgments are correct, they are based on an environment: in the jungle or the savannah, in a controlled market or a retail market, in a risk-bearing business arrangement or an endowed business arrangement. When our environment shifts, the illusions and biases and assumptions persist, even though they may be dangerously out of date.

Why Can’t the ICU Be More Like a Cockpit?

Feb 23, 2012• 17

By Peter Pronovost, MD

In the world of patient safety, we’re constantly reinforcing the importance of teamwork and communication, both among clinicians and with patients. That’s because we know that patient harm so often occurs when vital information about a patient’s care is omitted, miscommunicated or ignored.

Yet for all we do to improve how humans work together, clinicians compete against an environment in which there is very little teamwork or communication among the technologies that they need to care for patients. And there’s little that clinicians or hospitals alone can do about it.

Take, for example, the plethora of alarms from cardiac monitors and other devices that compete for clinicians’ attention. Vendors act as if we are in an alarm race, with each making their devices’ beeps more annoying but no clear prioritizing of the most important alarms. A study on one 15-bed Hopkins Hospital unit a few years ago found that a critical alarm sounded every 92 seconds. As a result, nurses waste their precious time chasing an ever-growing number of false alarms—or becoming desensitized to false alarms and ignoring them. Across the country, this has had tragic consequences, as patients have died while their alarms went unheeded. (Read a 2011 Boston Globe series about this issue.)

In most other high-risk industries, such as aviation and nuclear power, technologies are integrated. They talk to each other, and they automatically adjust based on feedback. Indeed, because of systems integration, pilots fly a small amount of a flight, and even in some treacherous situations, they hand over the reins to the autopilot. Although Southwest Airlines or the U.S. Air Force can buy a working plane, you cannot buy a working hospital or ICU. You must put it together yourself.

There are many other examples of how health care is grossly under-engineered. Consider these:

Is a New Federal Patient Safety Effort Doing Enough to Curb Medical Errors?

Feb 23, 2012• 1

By Michael Millenson

The Medicare program is betting on a new course of action to curb what one medical journal has dubbed an “epidemic” of uncontrolled patient harm.

The effort is pegged to the success of a little-known entity called a “hospital engagement network” (HEN). In December, the government selected 26 HENs and charged them with preventing more than 60,000 deaths and 1.8 million injuries from so-called “hospital-acquired conditions” over the next three years. That would be the equivalent of eliminating all deaths from HIV/AIDS or homicide over the same period.

Despite those big numbers, and an initial price tag of $218 million, it’s unclear whether the HENs are adequately ambitious or still only pecking away at the patient safety problem. While this is by far the most comprehensive public or private patient safety effort ever attempted in this country, it still aims to eliminate less than half the documented, preventable patient harm.

The inspiration for these networks comes from similar collaborative projects run by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and other groups. Dr. Donald Berwick, IHI’s founder and president, headed up the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for two years and launched a larger Partnership for Patients that includes the HENs.

In December, the government chose a mix of national and local groups — primarily health systems and hospital organizations — to run individual HENs. Each HEN is charged with spreading safety-improvement innovations that have been proven to work in leading hospitals to others through intensive training programs and technical assistance. Although the program lasts three years, initial HEN contracts are for two years, with an “option year” dependent upon performance.

Can We Really Expect Innovation from an Industry Stuck on White Male Former Sales Reps? Perhaps.

Feb 23, 2012• 4

By David Shaywitz, MD

It’s easy to muster a cynical response to Tuesday’s announcement that the world’s largest health products company, J&J, is replacing their current CEO William Weldon (athletic white male and former sales rep who rose through the commercial organization) with Alex Gorsky (athletic white male and former sales rep who rose through the commercial organization). After all, he will be in good company, joining Novartis’s Joe Jimenez (athletic white male – see here — with a background in marketing) and AZ’s David Brennan (athletic while male and former sales rep), among others. Indeed, of the major pharma companies, only Lilly’s John Lechleiter is a scientist (no word on whether he’s athletic; I’m told by Stephen Colbert that he is white).

Even the world of biotechs have fewer medical scientist leaders than you might think (and more white male athletes); true, Gilead, Vertex, and Seattle Genetics are led by scientists, as was Genentech prior to its acquisition by Roche. Yet, many other distinguished large biotechs don’t have medical scientists at the helm – consider Amgen (Kevin Sharer, and his designated successor, Robert Bradway); Celgene (Robert Hugin), Biomarin (Jean-Jacques Bienaime), and Genzyme, prior to their acquisition (Henri Termeer), to name a few. As detailed by Monica Higgins in “Career Imprints,” the development of the biotechnology industry owes much to “the Baxter Boys” – a group of mid-level Baxter-trained managers like Termeer who went off in search of new challenges.

As the pharmaceutical industry seems headed along the lines anticipated in 2010 by Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Baum (now at Citi) and gradually moves from a “research and development” model towards a “search and development” model, it’s easy to attribute this change to senior leadership teams that never fundamentally understood research, and lacked appreciation for its unique challenges and culture. In simple terms, it’s easy to see why someone more comfortable with the more traditional business processes of making and selling things would look for reasons to remove discovery — the most uncertain and difficult to manage part of the enterprise (even if it’s where, however inconveniently, value is initially created).

Live from HIMSS12: Justin Lanning, Xerox

Feb 23, 2012

Justin Lanning runs the Xerox Midas + solutions set which is a real time analytics tool used for clinical management in hospitals. Matthew Holt spoke with Justin at HIMSS 2012 about the fast growth in the product line since Xerox acquired his company last year.

Who Is Biz Stone and What Is Twitter?

Feb 22, 2012• 3

By Fred Trotter

Yesterday, one of the founders of Twitter, Biz Stone, gave the opening keynote at HIMSS.

This is probably going to be the best keynote at HIMSS, followed by a speech from Dr. Farzad Mostashari, which will also be excellent. It goes downhill after that: there will be a talk about politics and another talk from an “explorer.” I am sure those will be great talks, but when I go to HIMSS, I want to hear about health information technology. Want to know what @biz actually said? As usual, Twitter itself provides an instant summary.

HIMSS stands for Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. The annual HIMSS conference is the largest Health IT gathering on the planet. Almost 40,000 people will show up to discuss healthcare information systems. Many of them will be individuals sent by their hospitals to try and find out what solutions they will need to purchase in order to meet meaningful use requirements. But many of the attendees are old school health IT experts, many of whom have spent entire careers trying to bring technology into a healthcare system that has resisted computerization tooth and nail. This year will likely break all kind of attendance records for HIMSS. Rightly so: The value of connecting thousands of health IT experts with tens of thousands who are seeking health IT experts has never been higher.

It is ironic that Biz Stone is keynoting this year’s talk, because Twitter has changed the health IT game so substantially. I say Twitter specifically, and not “social media” generally. I do not think Facebook or Google+ or your social media of choice has had nearly the impact that Twitter has had on healthcare communications.

HIMSS, and in many cases traditional health IT along with it, is experiencing something of a whirlwind. One force adding wind has been the fact that President Obama has funded EHR systems with meaningful use, and made it clear that the future of healthcare funding will take place at Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) that are paid to keep people healthy rather than to cover procedures when they are sick. It is hard to understate the importance of this. Meaningful Use and ACOs will do more to computerize medicine in five years than the previous 50 years without these incentive changes.Continue reading…

So Much For “Everyone Can Get Care In An Emergency Room”

Feb 22, 2012• 4

By Aaron Carroll

We’ve long argued this meme isn’t true. But now it’s explicitly false:

Last year, about 80,000 emergency-room patients at hospitals owned by HCA, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, left without treatment after being told they would have to first pay $150 because they did not have a true emergency.

Led by the Nashville-based HCA, a growing number of hospitals have implemented the pay-first policy in an effort to divert patients with routine illnesses from the ER after they undergo a federally required screening. At least half of all hospitals nationwide now charge upfront ER fees, said Rick Gundling, vice president of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, which represents health-care finance executives.

So sure you can get non-emergent care in an ED – if you pay for it out of pocket. Please understand I’m not saying that all care should be free. I’m saying that the emergency department is no different than a physician’s office. If you have insurance, or can pay for care yourself, you get it. Otherwise, you don’t. No matter where you are.

Why is this happening?
Continue reading…