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Above the Fold

Health Reform and Medicare: Part I

Sep 30, 2009• 12

By THOMAS L. GREANEY

Here’s a pop quiz on health reform: Which prominent Republican said the following:

And if you don’t [oppose this health care legislation] and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

OK, it’s a trick question: the answer is Ronald Reagan, paid spokesman for the American Medical Association’s Women’s Auxiliary, speaking in 1961 against the bill that ultimately emerged as Medicare. (A recording of his “coffee klatch” talk, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” is here.

Although what political scientist Jonathan Oberlander has termed “a politics of consensus” lasted for some thirty years after Medicare’s enactment, bipartisanship broke down in 1995 when Newt Gingrich targeted Medicare for cuts of 30% and urged privatization using managed care. By the lights of conservative Republicans, severe cuts in traditional Medicare would encourage flight to managed care alternatives, so that, in the famous phrase of Newt Gingrich, Medicare would “wither on the vine.” (1 St. Louis U.J. Health L. & Pol’y 5-43 (2007), Abstract). Although President Clinton used the Republicans’ Medicare reform to his own benefit (polls showed that his defense of Medicare helped him secure re-election), ultimately much of the Republicans’ agenda for reform was adopted in 2003. Since then Republicans have not relented in their criticism of the program– with some in leadership positions even questioning the government’s role in health care for seniors. (See Rachel Maddow’s cable television show featuring a parade of video clips of Republicans bashing Medicare, including former Speaker DeLay –echoed by Representative Roy Blunt–asserting that “Medicare shouldn’t be a government program”).

Swine flu, uninsurance and not-so fondly remembering the teenage years

Sep 30, 2009• 5

By Matthew Holt

We get sent lots of rants to our tips line, most of which we ignore in an amused jaundiced way. But this one I found very amusing. I’m not sure it’s 100% accurate, but it is very funny and essentially details something that we know happens every day. So to have some fun with how to buy individual insurance in California, head over to this post on a blog usually concerned with selling you credit cards.

By the way, a close colleague of mine trying to buy a short-term stop-gap policy while her husband changed jobs got a very similar “we’re not selling you insurance and we’re not telling you why” just last week.

Don’t forget that virtually any form of the bills in Congress outlaws these shenanigans.

Medicare Policy Might Discourage Proper Care for Hospital-Acquired Infections

Sep 29, 2009• 7

By MAYA SEQUEIRA

Medicare’s recent policy of refusing to pay hospitals’ additional costs to treat hospital-acquired infections fails to adequately incentivize prevention and proper treatment of these complications, associated with 99,000 deaths annually. A recent analysis by Peter McNair and colleagues in the journal Health Affairs suggests that, in the entire state of California, only 11 hospitalizations complicated by infection would have received lower reimbursement as a result of the policy if it had been in place in 2006.The Medicare policy focuses on infections that have low mortality, such as catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and infections that affect few people, such as mediastinitis after CABG surgery. This means that the vast majority of severe hospital-acquired infections remain completely unregulated.

To Change Health Care, Change Diabetes.

Sep 29, 2009• 14

By DANA HAZA

As we work to change health care in America, we must recognize the need to dramatically change diabetes. Twenty-four million Americans have diabetes at a cost to our nation of an estimated $218 billion for diabetes and pre-diabetes, according to a series of studies recently published in Population Health Management. Imagine the effects diabetes will have on our health and economy in the future if we don’t take action now. The prevalence and economic burden of undiagnosed and pre-diabetes make the case for the importance of policies that promote early diagnosis and prevention. About 25 percent of Americans with diabetes aren’t even aware they have the disease. And, those with undiagnosed diabetes result in $18 billion in health expenses, or $2,864 per person each year, according to one of the studies mentioned above.

Morons like us

Sep 29, 2009• 27

By Matthew Holt

I still read the articles every day that Google and the rest of my searches spit into my inbox. But as the sausage gets made I despair for the country. Not so long ago the NY Times met the Rush Limbaugh fan who decries the government takeover of health care, even though his wife ran up $68,000 in care while she had breast cancer and no insurance. Somehow because his local hospital let him off the charges, he thinks that the system was OK, and drove for an hour to shout at a Democrat who wanted to change it! (Of course the taxpayer absorbed the costs).

Yesterday NPR reported about the Sacramento man who loves his current health insurance. He’s had six or seven surgeries in the past five years—in other words he would be completely uninsurable if he lost his job (post-COBRA). He even sort of understands that.

“I mean you hear horror stories about people who have insurance and then all the sudden get denied coverage down the line because they may have had a pre-existing condition,” Koenig says. He, too, worries that he’s one step away from being dropped from his plan or losing his job and not being able to afford coverage…..And that’s why Koenig is on board with parts of the big push to change the health care system.

And like about half of other Americans, he’s actually been uninsured.

In the early nineties he was laid off and went without insurance for several months. He says it was an uncertain time and he sympathizes with the millions of Americans who don’t have coverage — or could be dropped at any time

So what does he think?

he says the focus should be on regulating the insurance industry and not a government take-over, which he believes President Obama is pushing for.

Let’s quickly review here.

Obama/Baucus/HR3200 all basically keep employer-based insurance as is with a bit of expansion, keep Medicaid as is with some expansion to suck up a few of the uninsured poor, and change the regulations in the insurance market to prevent (some of) the problems the Sacramento man understands. Oh, and they sort of put in place a backstop public plan (well HR 3200 does anyway) which people could buy into if there wasn’t a private plan they liked.

So does this sound like “regulating the insurance industry” or is it “a government take-over”.

I hesitate to remind the Sacramento man that a government takeover means the communists collectivizing your farm and stealing your pigs, and shipping you off to Siberia. What Obama/Baucus/HR3200 is proposing is minor reform of the insurance market.

And yet, somehow that message cannot get itself into the thick skulls of people who those reforms would actually help.

Another Look: Incident Reporting Systems

Sep 28, 2009• 4

By BOB WACHTER, MD

When the patient safety field began a decade ago with the publication of the IOM report on medical errors, one of its first thrusts was to import lessons from “safer” industries, particularly aviation. Most of these lessons – a focus on bad systems more than bad people, the importance of teamwork, the use of checklists, the value of simulation training – have served us well.But one lesson from aviation has proved to be wrong, and we are continuing to suffer from this medical error. It was an unquestioning embrace of using incident reporting (IR) systems to learn about mistakes and near misses.

The Aviation Safety Reporting System, by all accounts, has been central to commercial aviation’s remarkable safety record. Near misses and unsafe conditions are reported (unlike healthcare, aviation doesn’t need a reporting system for “hits” – they appear on CNN). The reports go to an independent agency (run by NASA, as it happens), which analyses the cases looking for trends. When it finds them, it disseminates the information through widely read newsletters and websites; when it discovers a showstopper, ASRS personnel inform the FAA, which has the power to ground a whole fleet if necessary. Each year, the ASRS receives about 40,000 reports from the entire U.S. commercial aviation system.

HIV/AIDS: The Future Looks Promising, but What About Now?

Sep 28, 2009• 5

By JONATHAN ROCHKIND

Red_aids_ribbon_hi-res

After years of disappointing trial and error, a vaccine shows success in a clinical trial in preventing the transmission of HIV/AIDS. Granted, the trial shows a less than one-third success rate. Compared to the 85 percent success rate of the new H1N1 swine flu vaccine, that’s quite low. Yet it clearly is the most promising success to date , and we can only hope that it soon leads to a workable vaccine that that immunizes against the HIV/AIDS virus. But what until then? Each year, in the United States alone there are 1.1 million people living with HIV and it is estimated that someone in the U.S. is infected every 9 and a half minutes. Even under the best conditions, the optimistic view is that it will take at least three years before a HIV vaccine is available in the United States. What can be done to help those who have the disease now? Is the American public ready to act?

Actually, a lot–though it seems most Americans remain unaware of this. As a researcher for Public Agenda, a non-profit non-partisan research and public engagement organization in New York City, I have had the opportunity to study both what could be done today to reduce the effects of HIV/AIDS transmission and increase treatment and to see what the public thinks of these ideas. The gap between the solutions that HIV/AIDS experts push for and what the public understands about how to address the AIDS epidemic is wide indeed.

Will Victory on Health Care Reform Mean Defeat for the Democrats?

Sep 27, 2009• 50

Being a futurist is not really about making predictions, but people ask for them anyway.

So here is one: The way things are trending right now, Obama and the Democrats will succeed in getting a reform bill – and it will cost them the Congress in 2010 and possibly the presidency in 2012. Why? Because it will be ineffective at bringing most voters any tangible benefits soon, and ineffective especially at bringing down the cost of health care.

Obama (along with everyone else) repeatedly talks about “affordable” health care. What the bill is most likely to bring is health insurance reform. This is very important, and will bring tangible benefits especially for those who must go without insurance now because they have “pre-existing conditions.” But there is nothing in the bills that are most likely to pass that will really bring down the costs of health care any time soon. Yet the bills demand that the health plans cover many more people, and the providers treat them, while putting in place no mechanisms that would forcefully and quickly control costs – so costs are likely to go up even faster than before.

Medical Data in the Internet “Cloud” – Data Privacy

Sep 27, 2009• 12

By ROBERT ROWLEY, MD

The concepts of “security” and “privacy” of medical information (Protected Health Information, or PHI) are closely intertwined. “Security,” as described in the second part of this series, has to do with breaking into medical data (either data at rest, or data in transit) and committing an act of theft. “Privacy,” on the other hand, has to do with permissions, and making sure that only the intended people can have access to PHI.

So, who actually “owns” the medical record? The legal status of medical records “ownership” is that they are the property of those who prepare them, rather than about whom they are concerned. These records are the medico-legal documentation of advice given. Such documentation, created by physicians about patients, is governed by doctor-patient confidentiality, and cannot be discovered by any outside party without consent. HIPAA Privacy Rules govern the steps needed to ensure that this level of confidentiality is protected against theft (security) and against unauthorized viewing (privacy). HIPAA-covered entities (medical professionals and hospitals) are held accountable for ensuring such confidentiality, and can be penalized for violation.

The question of privacy, then, revolves around sharing PHI between professionals in order to coordinate health care – after all, health care is delivered by networks (formal or informal), and data sharing is necessary to deliver best-practices levels of care. In the traditional world of paper charts, record-sharing is accomplished by obtaining consent from the patient (usually a signed document placed in the chart), and then faxing the appropriate pages from the chart to the intended recipient. Hopefully the recipient’s fax number is dialed correctly, since faxing to mistaken parties is a vulnerability for unintended privacy violation using this technology.

When medical data moves from a paper chart to a locally-installed EHR, the organization of medical data across the landscape is not really changed – each practice keeps its own database (the equivalent of its own paper chart rack), and imports/exports copies of clinical data to others according to patient permission (just like with traditional paper records). Such clinical data sharing is often done by printout-and-fax, or by export/import of Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) if the EHR systems on each end support such functionality.

As technology evolves, new layers of medical data sharing emerge, which challenge the simple traditional “give permission and send a copy” method of ensuring privacy. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are emerging regionally and nationally, and are supported by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for health IT. HIEs are intended to be data-exchange platforms between practitioners who might be using different EHR systems (that do not natively “talk” to each other). Only certain types of data are uploaded by an EHR into an HIE – patient demographic information, medication lists, allergies, immunization histories. HIEs, then, function as a sort of evolving “library” of protected health data, where local EHRs feed their data on a patient-permission-granted basis, and can download data (if granted the permission to do so) as needed. The potential impact on quality of care is dramatic.

In addition to being a “library” of shared data, HIEs can serve to assist in public health surveillance. This can range from CDC-based surveillance of the emergence or prevalence of specific diseases, to FDA-based post-market surveys of the use of new medications (and shortening the timeline for identifying problems should they arise). This sort of use of HIE data is de-identified, so that permissions around using PHI are not violated – patient-specific data in HIEs is only used with permission, and used for direct patient care (e.g. downloading into your own EHR your patient’s immunization history).

HIEs, however, are essentially a “bridge technology” that tries to connect a landscape where health data remains segregated into “data silos.” A newer frontier of technology can be seen arising from web-hosted, Internet “cloud”-based EHRs, such as Practice Fusion. In this setting, a single data structure serves all practices everywhere, and local user-permissions determine which subset of that data are delivered as a particular practice’s “charts.” This technology raises the potential to actually share a common chart among multiple non-affiliated practitioners – based upon one physician referring a patient to another for consultation (with the patient’s permission to make the referral), both practices are then allowed access to the shared chart, see each other’s chart notes, view the patient medications, review labs already done (reducing duplication of services), see what imaging has already been accomplished, securely message one another, and even create their own chart-note entries into the common, shared chart.

This “new frontier” of technology, where clinical chart sharing between practices (based on patient permission) occurs across all boundaries of care, makes the Practice Fusion vision an “EHR with a built-in HIE.” Extending this even further – shared EHRs and linkage with Personal Health Records (PHRs) – is beyond the scope of this particular article, and will be addressed subsequently. With good design, as pioneered here, the balance between ensuring security and privacy of PHI on the one hand, and permission-based sharing of clinical information for the betterment of overall health care delivery on the other hand, a truly remarkable technology is being built. The impact on transforming health care is profound.

Dr. Rowley is a family practice physician and Practice Fusion’s Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Rowley has a first-hand perspective on the technology needs and challenges faced by healthcare practitioners from his 30 year career in the sector, including experience as a Medical Director with Hill Physicians Medical Group and as a developer of the early EMR system Medical ChartWizard. His family practice in Hayward, CA has functioned without paper charts since 2002. You can find more of his writing at the Practice Fusion Blog, where this post first appeared.

If you liked this post you might be interested in these related posts:

Medical Data in the Internet “Cloud” (part 1) – Data Safety
Is “Cloud Computing” Right for Health IT?
Freenomics and Healthcare IT
Practice Fusion gets investment from Salesforce.com

September 27, 2009 in EHR/EMR, Privacy | Permalink

HIPAA’s Broken Promises

Sep 27, 2009• 19

By SUSANNAH FOX

If you hate HIPAA, it’s your lucky day. Paul Ohm is handing you ammunition in his article, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization.” His argument: our current information privacy structure is a house built on sand.

“Computer scientists…have demonstrated they can often ‘reidentify’ or ‘deanonymize’ individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease.”

Ohm’s article describes HIPAA, in particular, as a fig leaf – or worse, as kudzu choking off the free flow of information.

“[I]t is hard to imagine another privacy problem with such starkly presented benefits and costs. On the one hand, when medical researchers can freely trade information, they can develop treatments to ease human suffering and save lives. On the other hand, our medical secrets are among the most sensitive we hold.”