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How We Ration Care

• 27

By JOHN GOODMAN

There are not very many good things you can say about a deep recession. But from a researcher’s point of view, there is one silver lining. This recession has given us a natural experiment in health economics — and the results are stunning.

But, first things first. Here is the conventional wisdom in health policy:

  • In the United States, we ration health care by price, whereas other developed countries rely on waiting and other non-price rationing mechanisms.
  • The U.S. method is especially unfair to low-income families, who lack the ability to pay for the care they need.
  • Because of this unfairness, there is vast inequality of access to care in the U.S.
  • ObamaCare will be a boon to low-income families — especially the uninsured — because it will lower price barriers to care.

As it turns out, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Here is the alternative vision, loyal readers have consistently found at this blog:

  • The major barrier to care for low-income families is the same in the U.S. as it is throughout the developed world: the time price of care and other non-price rationing mechanisms are far more important than the money price of care.
  • The U.S. system is actually more egalitarian than the systems of many other developed countries, with the uninsured in the U.S., for example, getting more preventive care than the insured in Canada.
  • The burdens of non-price rationing rise as income falls, with the lowest-income families facing the longest waiting times and the largest bureaucratic obstacles to care.
  • ObamaCare, by lowering the money price of care for almost everybody while doing nothing to change supply, will intensify non-price rationing and may actually make access to care more difficult for those with the least financial resources.

Continue reading…

U.S. Hospitals Face Gloomiest Economic Outlook in 20 Years

• 4

By JANE SARASOHN-KAHN


Revenues = volume x price. This is the financial reality for every organization that makes its money serving customers, whether for-profit or not-for-profit.

For the U.S. hospital sector, both volumes and prices are falling, leading to a depressed top-line. Reimbursement reductions from Medicare, Medicaid and commercial health plans are all under pressure: that’s the ‘price’ part of the equation. On the volume multiplier, the recession economy has caused patients to delay care, such as elective surgeries. Hospitals are forced to scrutinize every aspect of operations, according to Hospital Revenues in Critical Condition; Downgrades May Follow, from Moody’s Investors Service.

Moody’s points to declines in inpatient admissions, and falling outpatient indicators including ER visits, outpatient visits, and outpatient surgeries, all due to the “sluggish economy,” the agency wrote.

Exacerbating the negative bottom-line impact is the continued growth of uncompensated care: that is, health services provided to patients who leave the hospital without paying their bill.

Continue reading…

Shifts in Humanitarian Aid: A Look at Post-Recession Data

• 1

By SANJAY BASU, MD

A few agencies have recently published their concerns that the “double dip” recession will negatively affect humanitarian aid, even as the worst famine in decades continues to hit East Africa. Have aid levels really been affected by the recession? If so, which countries are likely to feel the most impact? What factors are shaping aid decisions? In this post, we look at the latest data from the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the definitive source for international humanitarian aid data, and discuss the changes in aid that have transpired since the start of the 2007 recession.

Overall trends

If humanitarian aid shifts during this recession, such a shift would be a new phenomenon; when we investigated global aid trends during prior recessions, we found that aid usually didn’t significantly change during or soon after economic downturns, probably because foreign assistance is such as small part of government budgets, and because aid changes are often driven by disasters and conflicts rather than supply-side politics alone.

The first graph above depicts global humanitarian aid from 2006 to 2009 (all graphs are courtesy of GHA; note that the colors in this graph are incorrect for the last column, which should be black on top and green on the bottom). As shown in the graph, humanitarian aid actually increased a bit during 2008, likely reflecting commitments made before the recession. But aid then decreased 11% to $15.1 billion in 2009. The 2010 numbers won’t be released until later this year. The available figures refer to forms of aid that reach “delivery agencies” such as United Nations subsidiaries, non-governmental organizations and the Red Cross. Of note, while the 2008 contribution from governments is smaller than 2007, it still remains higher than earlier years. Of particular interest is that private donations have increased almost 50% since 2006 and have remained steady during the recession.

Continue reading…

Decision Fatigue

• 6

By JOHN HALAMKA

We’re all suffering from information overload.  More projects with fewer staff on shorter timeframes mean more email, texts, blogs, online meetings, and phone calls.

We make more decisions and have more accountability than ever before.  Regulatory complexity and the need for risk management has increased.  We’re pressured to make decisions faster and there is less tolerance for mistakes.   Making all those decisions in a high stakes environment like healthcare leads to decision fatigue,  that numbness you feel at the end of an overloaded day when you decided what to spend, who to hire, and what to do, hundreds of times.

I believe decision fatigue is an escalating threat to our ability to manage the events of each day and keep balance in our lives.

When I think back on my early career as a leader, in the 1980’s, there was no email, no overnight shipping, and limited numbers of fax machines.

Issues were escalated by writing and mailing a letter.    The time it took to compose, type, mail, and deliver a letter meant that many problems solved themselves.  Since the effort to escalate was significant, many problems were never escalated.Continue reading…

Will One Medical justify $40m in venture funding?

• 11

By MATTHEW HOLT

One Medical is a San Francisco-based “concierge lite” primary care service. I happen to know it pretty well because I’m a patient there and have known CEO Tom Lee and given free (probably unwanted) consulting to COO Sharon Knight since before the NY Times made them famous.  So yesterday’s news that they’ve raised another $20m (making their total $46m) gave me pause. Not because I don’t think my doctor (Andrew Diamond) isn’t fantastic. He is. Plus when you go to an appointment–which really can be booked same or next day online–you get a full half an hour, it really runs on time and the office environment is fabulous. Ian Morrison used to tell us that quality in health care was being in a waiting room with people richer than you. At One Medical everyone is better looking than you (well, than me anyway!).

The added cost for this? Only about $150 a year. Oh and that added cost is actually voluntary, as Tom Lee pointed out in an email last year after local IPA Brown & Toland complained. Yes that fee gets you rapidly answered emails, online prescriptions, same day appointments and way more. So what’s the catch? There doesn’t seem to be one. This concerns me for several reasons:Continue reading…

Data to the User!

• 2

By ESTHER DYSON


NEW YORK – Customer data is a concept that most companies, especially those involved with health and health care, see as a threat rather than an opportunity. Most companies associate consumer data with “privacy,” seeing only expensive disclosure requirements, constraints on their ability to collect information about their customers, and a potential source of legal trouble.

So they consult lawyers and IT risk specialists to consider their options. To protect against being sued, they write lengthy disclosure statements that cover every possible use of consumers’ data. They then hand these statements to their marketing departments, who hide them behind little windows in small type.

In general, these companies see consumer data as something that they can use to target ads or offers, or perhaps that they can sell to third parties, but not as something that consumers themselves might want. In fact, many so-called privacy advocates have the same constricted vision. Most pundits on either side don’t consider that  that rather than hiding from consumers or protecting them, companies should be bringing them into the game.

Over time, I’m convinced, successful companies will turn personal data into an asset by giving it back to their customers in an enhanced form – analyzed and visualized into something of value to the individuals themselves. I am not sure exactly how this will happen, but current players will either join this revolution or lose out.

Let’s start with the disclosure statement. Most disclosure statements are not designed to be read; they are designed to be consented to. But some companies actually want their customers to read and understand the statements. They don’t want customers who might sue, and, just in case, they want to be able to prove that the customers did understand the risks. A regretful customer is a vengeful one.  (The very best companies want this because they like their customers to understand what they’re getting.)

So the leaders in disclosure statements right now tend to be financial and health-care companies – as well as my favorites, space-travel and extreme-sports vendors. Right now,  some clinical trial operators and the “extreme” companies are doing the best job – perhaps in part because some of their customers actually appreciate the element of riskContinue reading…

The Cleveland Experiment

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By JOHN MOORE

There have been a number of research studies published that question the value of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), particularly as it pertains to improving quality of care and ultimately outcomes. Chilmark has always viewed these reports with a certain amount of skepticism. Simple logic leads us to conclude that a properly installed (including attention to workflow and thorough training) of an enterprise software system such as an EHR will lead to a certain level of standardization in overall process flow, contribute to efficiencies and quality in care delivery and ultimately lead to better outcomes. But to date, there has been a dearth of evidence to support this logic, that is until this week.

Last week the New England Journal of Medicine published the research paper: Electronic Health Records and Quality of Diabetes Care, which provides clear evidence, albeit a little fuzzy around the edges, that physician use of an EHR significantly improves quality metrics over physicians who rely on paper-based medical record keeping processes.

The research effort took place in Cleveland as part of Better Health Greater Cleveland from July 2009 till June 2010 and included 46 practices representing some 569 providers and over 27K adults with diabetes who visited their physician at least twice during the study period. Several common quality and outcome measures were used to assess and compare EHR-based care to paper-based. On composite standards of quality, EHR-based practices performed a whooping 35% better than their paper-based counterparts. On outcome measures, which are arguably more difficult for physicians as patients’ actions or lack thereof are more integral to final outcomes, EHR-based practices still outperformed their paper-based peers by some 15%. The Table below gives a more detailed breakout.

Continue reading…

New Research Finds EHRs Improve the Quality of Diabetes Care

• 3

By RANDALL D. CEBUL, MD

Two years ago in an address to Congress, President Obama declared his commitment to invest in electronic health records (EHRs), saying he thought it was perhaps the best way to quickly improve the quality of American health care. Just two years later, that hunch is proving true in Cleveland, Ohio.

New EHR Research Findings:

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine released research authored by my colleagues and me at Better Health Greater Cleveland showing that physician practices that use electronic health records had significantly higher achievement and improvement in meeting standards of care and outcomes in diabetes than practices using paper records.

Though most of us assumed EHRs would have some effect on patient care, we were delighted by what’s proving to be the reality in greater Cleveland. Just consider:

Care is better: Nearly 51% of patients in EHR practices received care that met all of the endorsed standards.

  • Only 7% of patients at paper-based practices received this same level of care– a difference of 44%.
  • After accounting for differences in patient characteristics between EHR and paper-based practices, EHR patients still received 35% more of the care standards.
  • Just fewer than 16% of patients at paper-based practices had comparable results.
  • After accounting for patient differences, the adjusted gap remained 15% higher for EHR practices.

Continue reading…

Hearts on Fire: a Tale of Two Californias

• 1

By MATTHEW HOLT

The concept of practice variation raised its ugly head again this weekend in the northern California news media. And buried in the stories are several themes for our ages. But the conclusion is, the power of individual health systems and very small numbers of physicians to change patterns–and the cost–of care are enormous.

First the stories. Both about health care but also both revealing the future of investigative reporting. The BayCitizen is a non-profit blog about the San Francisco metro, created as response to the local papers cutting their reporting. It also provides stories to the NY Times–I’m unaware about how much of its revenue comes from the Times, but it’s part of  the Times’ entry into non-NY competition with retreating local papers.

For this story on heart program readmission picked up on an older UCSF press release and showed how UCSF used a $500K+ donation from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation (that’s the Moore of Intel & Moore’s law fame) to create a very sensible program that gave in-home support to newly discharged elderly cardiac patients. It cut readmission rates by 30%. The BayCitizen though will upset Gary Schwitzer as it did not include the actual numbers but the UCSF press release does, and yes this is a relative not an absolute cut. Here’s the key graf

Over the past 11 months, only 16 percent, on average, of the hospital’s heart failure patients were readmitted within a month of discharge, down from 23 percent in 2006. That’s well below the national 30-day readmission rate of 25 percent. The average readmission rate was 11.6 percent during the first four months of 2011.

So UCSF was about average and got much better and seems to be getting better still–but there’s quite a way to go. But it is an indication that at least one AMC is capable of moving the ball in the right direction. Of course UCSF is a leader in the pro-Dartmouth “use resources sensibly” camp, and we may or may not see the “keep em alive at all costs” folks at UCLA follow suit.

Meanwhile up in rural northern California it looks like the same Dartmouth data set is about to bring a series of visits from the FBI. Continue reading…

2011 Costs of Care Essay Contest

By NEEL SHAH

Do you have a story about a medical bill that was higher than you expected it to be? Or a time when you wanted to know how much a medical test or treatment might cost? How about a time you figured out a way to save money while still delivering high-value care?

As part of our second annual essay contest, Costs of Care, a nonprofit group based in Boston, is offering $4000 in prizes for anecdotes like these that illustrate the importance of cost-awareness in medicine. Judges will include former White House Budget Director Peter Orzsag, former United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Governor Jennifer Granholm, women’s health and cancer research advocate Dr. Susan Love, and Harvard University Provost Dr. Alan Garber.

The mission of Costs of Care is to expand the national discourse on the role of care providers in controlling healthcare costs. The stories we receive as part of our second annual essay contest will provide everyday examples from across the nation that illustrate the power patients and healthcare workers have to curb costs at a grassroots level. Many of the submissions we receive will be published right here on The Health Care Blog.

Submissions should be no longer than 750 words and are due by November 15th. More details are available at www.CostsOfCare.org/essay. Email submissions to co*****@*********re.org.

You can also read about our winning essays from last year here.

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