THCB

Categories

Above the Fold

The Power of a Network: Health Information Exchanges

• 3

By JACK BUXBAUM

The idea behind a network is that it grows stronger as more participants join it. A basic example is a cell phone provider that allows its members to make free calls to other members – the policy becomes more valuable as more people join the network.

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) work on the same principle – networks connecting electronic health record (EHR) systems, pharmacies, Medicaid Management Information Systems, etc. The idea is sound, but the information shared is only as valuable as the number of participants and the quality of the data and resources.

Interconnectivity and interaction among providers can potentially do so much to raise the standard of patient care that it’s important we do all we can to facilitate participation in HIEs. With that said, we must recognize that it takes time to build quality and we want to make sure we’re getting it right.Continue reading…

HITECH in High Gear

By DAVID BLUMENTHAL, MD

We’ve known for years that health information technology can improve health care. But until recently, the implementation rate among providers has been low, except for a few early adopters.

In the last two years, however, there has been a significant upward inflection in the adoption rate. For primary care providers, adoption of a basic EHR increased by half from 19.8 percent in 2008 to 29.6 percent in 2010.

And with HITECH Act programs now in full swing, it looks clear that adoption and use of health information technology will go into high gear. Already, 81 percent of hospitals and 41 percent of office physicians are saying they intend to achieve meaningful use of EHRs and qualify for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments.

A recent edition of the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC) helps us understand why the accelerated move to EHRs is so important. This special issue devoted to health information technology presents perspectives on health IT from a wide range of stakeholders—providers, policymakers, and patients. Contributors include representatives of private companies and public agencies, managed care organizations and academic medical centers, medical educators and a medical student—confirmation that the potential of health IT is compelling for a broad spectrum of Americans.Continue reading…

Is Economic Credentialing A Tool for Primary Care to Lead ACOs?

• 4

By VINCE KURAITIS, JD

Is economic credentialing — the use of economic factors such as loyalty and utilization rates in the physician credentialing process — a potential tool for primary care physicians to lead ACOs?   and reestablish the vitality of primary care in American health care?

Keith Wright and Gregory Drutchas’ incisive article Economic Credentialing: A Prescription To Secure Shared Savings Under Accountable Care provides useful history and context about economic credentialing:

For many years, the use of economic factors by hospitals in making medical staff credentialing decisions has been the subject of much discussion and debate among physicians, groups such as the American Medical Association (AMA), healthcare providers, payors, and attorneys….the implementation of healthcare reform is likely to bring the debate over economic credentialing to the forefront once again.

While economic credentialing has been talked about a lot, it’s rarely been used.

The controversy over economic credentialing arises again with ACO’s…and this time the answer might be different — and opportunistic for primary care.Continue reading…

A Family Physician’s Manifesto

By PAUL M. FISCHER, MD

As a third-year medical student in 1977, I joined the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP).  In those culturally tumultuous years, it was a way to declare my belief that America needed physicians who cared for the whole person, family and community. It was also a declaration that, in choosing the primary care path in a field ripe with tempting medical specialties, money was not my primary goal.

For much of my 33-year membership, I have considered the AAFP to be “my” organization. However, there is a time when one must step back and declare independence from organizations that have lost touch with their members.  The AAFP does much that supports my day-to-day life as a busy family doctor, but for 33 years, its leadership has failed to fix the central problem for primary care in America: poor reimbursement.

I deal every day with complicated health problems of complex patients who are insured by companies singularly focused on limiting even the smallest cost.  In return for managing these patients, which often involves critical and life-or-death decisions, I am paid by Medicare 60% less per hour than is a dermatologist, who, for the most part, treats trivial disease that involves no nighttime emergencies and little intellectual challenge.Continue reading…

Jonathan Bush @HIMSS11

• 3

We caught up with always outspoken athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush backstage in Orlando.



Conflicts Of Interest In Guideline Development: A Dirty Little Secret Gets Aired Again

By DAVID WILLIAMS

An Archives of Internal Medicine article (Conflicts of Interest in Cardiovascular Clinical Practice Guidelines) is getting a lot of notice this month. In essence, many of the physicians who develop guideline that influence practice patterns and payment decisions have conflicts. The authors recommend only allowing those without conflicts to write the guidelines.

This isn’t a new issue. In 2006 I wrote a piece (Another dirty little secret is out in the open) and am reposting it below because it’s timely:

A year ago in Time to deal with medicine’s dirty little secrets?, I wrote about a variety of practices that are relatively well-known in the health care field but would be shocking to outsiders. Industry often takes the blame for “aggressive marketing tactics,” and no doubt some of that is deserved. But physicians are also culpable.

The open secrets include the ghostwriting of journal articles by industry sponsors, physicians and academic medical centers holding ownership stakes in companies whose products they are researching, the clinical role sometimes played by orthopedic sales reps, and perhaps the most egregious example: physicians who set guidelines having financial relationships with the companies that benefit from how those guidelines are set.

Now we have a new example, which is even more serious than usual. A recent New England Journal of Medicine article blames Eli Lilly for overzealous promotion of Xigris. According to the Boston Globe:

Eli Lilly and Co. funded medical guidelines created for the treatment of [sepsis] in an effort to boost sales of a drug with questionable benefits. The allegation was made by senior scientists at the National Institutes of Health. [They] said Lilly tried to shape the guidelines for use of the drug Xigris by sponsoring a three-pronged marketing campaign

The first two phases are by now almost standard practice in the industry:

  1. Lilly paid a task force to spread the word that hospitals were rationing Xigris because of its cost, which forced docs “to decide who would live and who would die”
  2. Lilly “orchestrated” the development of practice guidelines to treat sepsis that called for early use of Xigris (an example of the phenomenon I have described before)

But then Lilly allegedly took a third step, which was a little shocking even to me:

Now, Lilly is sponsoring lobbying efforts to turn the guidelines into quality standards. Hospitals that follow such quality measures receive higher payment from insurers.

What’s happening here? Basically, an influential group of doctors is being lazy and greedy, and Lilly is enabling their behavior. The doctors put their fingers in the cookie jar and Lilly keeps restocking it. The public is paying for the cookies –in the form of higher product sales and sub-optimal health care– and should get fed up!

I have no problem with companies using legal means to promote their products, even if their tactics are “aggressive.” They owe it to their shareholders to maximize return on investment. But it isn’t in their long-term interest to push things as far as the medical profession often lets them.

Industry leans on the reputations of individual physicians (aka “key opinion leaders”), medical societies (aka guideline writers), and journals to legitimize their marketing messages. It’s up to the medical profession to scrutinize industry claims and issue independent guidelines and quality standards. Sometimes these claims hold up and deserve to be propagated. Sometimes they don’t. If the docs and journals don’t do their jobs they deserve to lose credibility.

It’s hard to know the extent to which medical guidelines are already corrupted. The situation is a bit like the incident when the Chinese President’s plane was refitted. In the process of fixing up the plane someone inserted a bunch of listening devices (presumably at no extra charge). When the Chinese checked out the plane and realized it was bugged they had to rip the whole thing up. That’s something like what is going on within the major payers. They’ve stopped treating journal articles and guidelines as objective and have started doing their own analyses. But do we really want to leave health care decisions just to them?

Here’s some free advice to the different players in health care:

  • Industry: Feel free to market your products and services aggressively, but don’t take things too far. If you do you’ll end up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. No one will trust doctors, guidelines or journals anymore
  • Physicians: Remember that pharma and device companies are not stupid. If they spend money supporting your research or sending you to conferences or sponsoring continuing medical education it’s because they expect to get a return on their investment. It’s awfully hard to remain objective in such instances. Your job is to adopt the best medical practices and put the patient first –sometimes that requires expensive new treatments and sometimes old, cheap standbys are better
  • Payers: Go ahead and challenge the objectivity of journal articles and guidelines. On the other hand, don’t pretend that low cost is always synonymous with best treatment. Expect physicians to keep you in line on that.
  • Patients: You need to look out for yourself. Find a good, honest physician. Take a look at who’s sponsoring the educational materials you receive. Ask your physician about alternative treatments and do some research yourself

Emotional Automation Revisited

• 4

By JOSEPH KVEDAR, MD

Last week we all watched in awe as the IBM computer, Watson, trounced two of Jeopardy’s finest.  This event has been much heralded but it is worth stopping for just a minute to reflect on the experience of watching Jeopardy those three nights.  I had no trouble rooting for Watson, feeling disappointed or embarrassed when he missed a question and chuckling when he displayed any behavior that seemed the least bit human.  I knew the whole time, on one level, that Watson is a computer.  On another level though, I bonded with him and felt a good deal of emotion regarding his success.

MIT Prof. Sherry Turkle recently released a book entitled Alone Together.  She was also interviewed recently on TechCrunch.  Turkle puts forth the view that technology is a poor substitute for interaction with a human being. However, she notes that when technologies (robots, relational agents and the like) respond to us, they push “Darwinian buttons,” prompting us to create a mental construct that we are interacting with a sentient being.  This brings a host of emotions to the communication including affection.  Turkle makes an argument that in the realm of human relationships this phenomenon is unhealthy for our species.

I’d like to bring in principles from behavioral psychologist, Robert Cialdini, who has authored several books on the psychology of persuasion.  Cialdini offers simple tools that can be used in everyday life to persuade others to adopt one’s point of view.  In doing so, he lays out solid experimental evidence that these tools are effective, in most cases without the recipient being aware.  Continue reading…

OCR Imposes $4.3M Penalty for Violation of HIPAA/HITECH Privacy Rule

• 3

By BOB COFFIELD

UNTIL TODAY, many health care providers questioned whether HHS and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) would ever issue any significant penalties for violations of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. However, will OCR ever be able to collect the penalties.

Today, HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced a civil money penalty (CMP) of $4.3 million against Cignet Health of Prince George’s County, MD for violating the HIPAA Privacy Rule. This is the first ever civil money penalty issued by OCR for a violation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. It is significant not only because it is the first – but also because of the size of the penalty and the basis for the violation.

OCR issued a Notice of Final Determination on February 4, 2011, outlining the procedure for payment of the $4.3 million civil money penalty. The Notice of Final Determination also indicates that Cignet failed to request a hearing on the matter or reach settlement with OCR. Prior to the issuance of the final notice, OCR had issued a Notice of Proposed Determination on October 20, 2010, which details the basis for the penalty, details the findings of fact, grounds for violation of HIPAA, and calculation of the penalty amount.Continue reading…

What’s Yours Is Actually Mine

• 3

By LISA SUENNEN

Imagine someone you barely knew came to your neighborhood and took a picture of you playing with your kids at the park and then turned around and used it in an advertisement to promote a product they developed.  How would you feel?  Presumably you would be highly perturbed.  You might even want to sue them for invasion of privacy.  Most likely your case would turn on the violation of your right to publicity, which is, according to the Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP): the right of a person to control and make money from the commercial use of his or her identity.   It probably wasn’t illegal for that person to take your picture since you were in a public place, but their use of it in a money-making endeavor changes the rules.

CMLP goes on to say that if someone “sues you for interfering with that right [of publicity]” they “generally must show that you used his or her name or likeness for a commercial purpose. This ordinarily means using the plaintiff’s name or likeness in advertising or promoting your goods or services, or placing the plaintiff’s name or likeness on or in products or services you sell to the public.” In order to be a protected use in that advertising scenario, the photographer would have had to get your permission to use the photograph for that purpose.

I bring this up because I got to thinking about the topic after finishing a terrific book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Amazon’s Number 1 book of 2010).  The book is about a poor black woman from Baltimore who, in the 1950’s, has cancerous tissue removed from her body and, while she goes on to die from the cancer itself, the harvested tissue lives on in perpetuity, becoming the first “immortal” human cell line used in medical research, first by Johns Hopkins and later by the worldwide scientific community.

Henrietta’s cells, called the HeLa cell line, were removed from her with her permission (of course she wanted the cancer out), but the subsequent use of her tissue for research purpose occurred without her permission.  And now, more than 60 years later, her cells are still in wide use in scientific laboratories worldwide, producing literally billions of dollars in revenues for those who either packaged and sold the cells for commercial use or used the cells themselves to develop drugs and diagnostics.  If that ain’t using someone’s likeness in a product or service you sell to the public, I don’t know what is.  And yet Ms. Lack’s heirs were never even informed about the tissue repurposing and they certainly never received a dime in recompense.  In fact, according to author Skloot, the family members were contacted to provide additional medical tissue samples to augment the research record and weren’t even told that was the purpose of that exercise.  They are understandably a bit perturbed.Continue reading…

Survivor

• 7

By MICHAEL TURPIN

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”  Charles Darwin

As the legislative reform volcano rumbles and angrily spews magma into the Washington night, nervous industry stakeholders competing for survival on this unstable island of American healthcare are still betting that the seismic activity is merely a false eruption.

Survivor contestants are using every possible means to ensure they are not voted off the island.  The stakeholders are a veritable who’s who of personalities – the powerful, the wealthy, the prima donnas, the tough love advocates, the national health zealots, the well-intended academics, the bellicose politicians, the under-employed, the overweight, and the disenfranchised. It remains to be seen whether Congress, market forces or the American people will be the ultimate judge of who stays and who goes.

If the contestants cannot change in the next five years, 2015 will find them staring at a terrifying wall of regulation and governmental intervention that will be more destructive than the changes from the 2010 proposed legislation.Continue reading…

assetto corsa mods