Above the Fold
Health IT and the Other Disparities
On October 18 2010, Dr. Blumenthal published a letter to EHR vendors titled "Health IT and Disparities" urging them to “include providers who serve minority communities in their sales and marketing efforts”. Reiterating the assumed benefits of Health IT to both quality of care and efficiency of care delivery, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology stressed the importance of EHR vendors working together “to provide EHR adoption opportunities for physicians and other healthcare providers working within underserved communities of color”. This is obviously an important and welcome appeal. Physicians who provide care for impoverished minority communities usually lack the means to purchase EHRs and perhaps some EHR vendors will heed Dr. Blumenthal’s request and make special arrangements for these doctors and their clinics. The stimulus incentives may also help. But how about those who serve equally impoverished populations and are practically barred from incentives?
In my home State of Missouri there are about 350 Rural Health Clinics (RHC) serving a state which with very few exceptions is one big Medically Underserved Area/Population (MUA/MUP) which is a geographical area or a population designated by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) as having: too few primary care providers, high infant mortality, high poverty and/or high elderly population. For the uninitiated, RHCs are designated by CMS and have to meet certain requirements. The practice has to be located in a rural area and it has to provide team care, which is all the rage now, meaning that a Nurse Practitioner or a Physician Assistant and a Certified Nurse Midwife have to be on premise and team up with the physician in providing patient care. RHCs can be independent practices or they can be owned by rural hospitals. Either way RHCs are paid by Medicare differently than a practice without RHC designation. RHCs are required to submit reports of their operational costs and their total number of visits. Based on these two parameters the reimbursable cost per visit is calculated by Medicare. The entire process is complex and subject to rules, regulations and caps. The main point here is that RHC providers are not reimbursed according to the regular Medicare physician fee schedule and therefore will be unable to receive EHR incentives under Medicare. A few RHCs may qualify for Medicaid incentives, but in most cases they don’t have the prerequisite 30% Medicaid patients.
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The Decade-Long Journey To NEJM Case 34-2010
By , MD
The most popular article in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine did not tout the discovery of a novel gene, nor describe a cardiology clinical trial with a clever acronym as its title. Rather, it was the report of a case in which a surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital performed the wrong operation on a 65-year-old woman.
This was a breakthrough for the Journal – the first time in its storied 86-year history that the Case Records of the MGH published such a report. But it was not the first opportunity the NEJM had to publish such a piece… that occurred a decade earlier. The story of the path from then to now reflects the evolution of the patient safety movement. It’s a story I know well since it involved one of the lowest points in my professional life.
Before I share the back story, a word on last week’s article. David Ring, a prominent Harvard hand specialist, performed a carpal tunnel release on a patient who actually needed a trigger finger release – an entirely different operation. Showing great courage, Ring described his own error, with safety expert Gregg Meyer providing the color commentary.
As always, the pathophysiology of this misfire was a combination of active (i.e., somebody did something wrong) and latent (the system was a setup for failure) errors that jibed entirely with Jim Reason’s famous “Swiss cheese model” of “organizational accidents.”
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The Congressional Shift and Health IT
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Following the shift to a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, the pre- and post-election focus of GOP leaders on repealing all or parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) have led to much discussion and media attention on whether the few true health IT aspects of the Act are in jeopardy, and has even extended speculation – and in some cases confusion – as to whether physician and hospital incentive funds within the government’s previous Meaningful Use initiative are also a target.
There are several foundational elements – and one major point of Meaningful Use funding – that should allay concerns for current and future funding for the adoption of certified electronic health records (EHRs).
Fundamentally it’s important to note that the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, from which the Meaningful Use program and its funding originates within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, is an entirely different statute than PPACA.
Bipartisan support for the tenets and the spirit of HITECH dates back at least seven years, and it is also noteworthy that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), which administers Meaningful Use, was created by the Bush administration and a Republican Congress.
Politics aside though, the reason that Meaningful Use funds are secure is because they are drawn from the Medicare Trust Funds held by the U.S. Treasury, and are therefore not subject to annual Congressional budget appropriations or oversight.
In other words, the funding is grounded in law, and has inherent flexibility to encompass the number of ambulatory practices and hospitals seeking Meaningful Use incentives capture. The incentive payments are procured through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
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Announcing the Health 2.0 2011 Conference Schedule
We are pleased to announce our conference schedule for 2011. Our Spring Fling conference will be held in San Diego on March 21-22. This event will focus on three themes where there is a sense that Health 2.0 can make a real and lasting difference: containing health care costs; the future of research; and the triad of prevention, wellness, exercise and food. For our Fifth Annual Fall Health 2.0 Conference, we’ll be back in San Francisco on September 26-27.
Meaningful Meaningful Use
By ROB LAMBERTS, MD
Quiz:
What does the term “meaningful use” mean?
a. Using something in a way that gives life purpose and leads to carefree days of glee.
b. It depends on your definition of the word “term.”
c. It is not mean. It is really nice.
d. A large number of rules created by the government to assess a practice’s use of electronic medical records so that they can spur adoption, give criteria for incentive rewards, and have physicians in a place where care can be measured.
e. Job security for those making money off of health IT.
The answer, of course is d and e.
Meaningful Use, in the eyes of many is seen as curse words, especially doctors.Continue reading…
Have We Found the Magic Acronym?
By 
Sometimes, reality just delivers – this morning in the form of some funny Google search results.
Aghast at the fluidity of my acronymic spew in an email exchange with a colleague (“ACOs can be MSOs instead of PHOs because Stark now safe-harbors EMRs for IPAs, so the PPMs and hospitals can share IT to TPA the risk piece, and…”), I decide to brush up on these new-fangled entities in the health reform law called “ACOs,” or Accountable Care Organizations.
In case you’re still stuck back on page 689 of the law, the ACO is This Year’s Model – the TLA (Three Letter Acronym) with Big Mo. An ACO is a contracting entity, codified in the health reform law, through which a group of physicians and a hospital or several hospitals work together to share in the financial risks and rewards associated with patient care. Sound eerily familiar? To me, the concept sounds like a bad movie I once saw – a really long and dreary drama with nothing close to a Hollywood ending. Or maybe it was a bad waking dream I had while dozing at a population risk management conference in 1998, thanks to a slight fever, two Sudafed, and half a bottle of Robitussin. Or maybe it was something I read that same year.
Hospital and physician integration has become ‘thinkable’ now, if only because physicians and hospitals finally recognize that they will sink or swim together, thrown as they have been into the same turbulent, unforgiving waters of a self-correcting marketplace. As a reaction to the cost crises of the 1980s and early 1990s, government and private purchasers – directly and through MCOs [managed care organizations] – have blamed both hospitals’ and physicians’ self-serving clinical behaviors, inefficient practices, and excess capacity as the main driver of their own health care spending woes. This is precisely why the purchasers turned the MCOs on them in the first place. This is why MCOs have been positioned as the enemy of both types of providers. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend, or so the thinking goes.
OMG, that was some big thinking! So the purpose of the 1998 vintage ACOs was to punch the MCOs (i.e., the 1998 vintage HMOs/EPOs/PPOs/POSPs/MOUSEs) in the nose. OK! But more on this little artifact in a moment.
