The Health Care Blog – Page 926 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Frances Dare explains HITECH, really well

Mar 4, 2009

By Matthew Holt

Frances Dare from Cisco is a buddy of mine who has more and more been their student of what's going on in Washington. Given that we just saw the biggest piece of health care IT legislation ever pass, I thought I'd check in with her. Frances, has really done her homework about exactly what's in that $19.2 billion pot and more (yes there's more than that) and how it's going to be spent.

This is a long(ish) and detailed interview, but if you care about IT in health care, I highly suggest you listen!

Comparing the Effectiveness of Comparative Effectiveness Research

Mar 3, 2009• 3

By SARAH ARNQUIST

An increased investment in comparative effectiveness research to gather additional evidence on what medical therapies and technologies work best is often cited as a fix for the nation’s rising health costs.

Unfortunately, lessons from its use abroad and in the U.S. show that this dramatically overstates its benefits as a cost-containment tool.

Comparative effectiveness research entities, such as England’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and Germany’s Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health care (IQWiG), have not led to decreased national health spending on new technologies. NICE recommendations are thought to account for 10 percent of the increase in England’s health costs.

And as Tara Parker Pope reminded us this week in her NY Times Well column, the uptake and adoption of the evidence, which is just as important as the research, varies widely among physicians.

While it hasn’t always been called comparative effectiveness research, the U.S. has plenty of evidenced-based guidelines for physicians and has a long, sordid history with technology assessment (another name for CER).

Reform? Marginal, I fear…

Mar 3, 2009• 36

By Matthew Holt

Today’s news is that there is now a double header running health care with the addition of the
(notably all-female) team of Sebelius & DeParle joining Orzsag, Zeke Emmanuel and a host of others with influence on the health care policy tiller. We await a CMS leader, and probably multiple other appointments quickly down through the ranks.

However, I remain convinced that not much is going to happen, and that even if Obama’s “plan” gets enacted, it’s a limited reform that is not the big bang we need to do the job.

Thankfully rather than me having to explain why, Bob Laszewski (who makes me feel like an inadequate noobie every time I read his stuff) details the problems over at Health Affairs blog. The Bob L summary?

Obama’s team has not aggressively gone after the hard cost problems as part of Medicare & Medicaid, preferring to trifle around the edges with modest cuts
For the (these days relatively modest!) $120 billion a year the reforms are going to cost it’s only looking to the health care system to pony up around half of it—the rest (c. $65bn a year) will come from the taxpayer.
The details of the plan are being left to the Congress which means that it’ll be watered down.

As I said in the looooong comment thread on Maggie Mahar’s piece on THCB yesterday—BTW Maggie’s comment on her own piece may be the longest comment I have ever seen on any blog!—there’s no reason that the rest of the economy should contribute more to the health care system. As John McCain might say (albeit with disapproval), we need to redistribute the wealth within the system.

Grand Rounds, up, pithy

Mar 3, 2009

At the Health Business Blog.

How to Win Docs and Influence Patients

Mar 3, 2009• 36

By Val Jones MD

Pretty much everyone agrees that we need to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to patients. We’ve all heard the frightening statistics
from the Institute of Medicine about medical error rates – that as many
as 98,000 patients die each year as a result of them – and we also know
that the US spends about 33% more than most industrialized country on healthcare, without substantial improvements in outcomes.

However, a large number of quality improvement initiatives rely on
additional rules, regulations, and penalties to inspire change (for
example, decreasing Medicare payments to hospitals with higher
readmission rates, and decreasing provider compensation based on quality indicators).
Not only am I skeptical about this stick vs. carrot strategy, but I
think it will further demoralize providers, pit key stakeholders
against one another, and cause people to spend their energy figuring
out how to game the system than do the right thing for patients.

There is a carrot approach that could theoretically result in a $757
billion savings/year that has not been fully explored – and I suggest
that we take a look at it before we “release the hounds” on hospitals
and providers in an attempt to improve healthcare quality.

Kathleen Sebelius, Healthcare Reform and the Budget

Mar 3, 2009• 12

By JOHN HALAMKA

Today, according to the Associated Press and Washington Post, President
Obama will announce
Kathleen Sebelius as his nominee for Secretary of
Health and Human Services. She has a once in a lifetime opportunity to
execute healthcare reform – a popular President, a sense of urgency,
and enough resources to get the job done. What are these resources?

You'll find the Office of Management and Budget FY2010 Budget Overview Document online The full FY2010 Budget is expected to be released this Spring.

Highlights from the Healthcare portion of the overview document include:

*
A reserve fund of more than $630 billion over 10 years to finance
fundamental reform of our health care system, funded half by new
revenue and half by savings proposals that promote efficiency and
accountability, align incentives for quality, and encourage shared
responsibility. Examples of new revenue include a proposal that
individuals earning more than $85,000 pay higher premiums for their
Medicare drug coverage starting in 2011. Examples of savings include a
revision of payments to insurers that provide Medicare Advantage plans.
Those payments have been on average 14% higher than what the government
typically spends per beneficiary. Under the budget proposal, insurers
would be required to competitively bid to offer plans beginning in
2012, which the administration believes would lower per-patient outlays.

Classified: Fair Managed Care

Mar 3, 2009

What’s fair in managed care? Get involved. Join the conversation. FAIR
is an emerging national grassroots movement focused on changing the
debate about health care costs and holding managed care companies
responsible for their behavior. Supported by patients, hospitals,
physicians, business owners and policy makers, FAIR brings a unified
voice to the table at the peak of a national discussion on health care
reform.

HIMSS still raising that neutrality question

Mar 3, 2009• 5

By Matthew Holt

And although the fuss about CCHIT’s corporate issues seems to have been more or less settled, there are still some real questions about the inter-relationships between HIMSS, CCHIT and EVRA.

And frankly it doesn’t really help un-muddy the waters when HIMSS comes out with a guide for providers on how to spend all that lovely money that the Feds just tossed your way as though they’re a neutral body.

They call it the HIMSS Online Buyer's Guide. It’s actually a guide to companies that are exhibiting at HIMSS; or for a mere $395 a year you too can buy an ad in it. Now I know it’s a service from a company that runs conferences, publications and consulting. And given that’s something I do too in a much smaller way I have no problem with them doing that.

But given the influence HIMSS peddles on behalf of (mostly big) vendors, and the real concerns over the neutrality of CCHIT, perhaps they could change their terminology to make it a little more transparent about what this “Buyer’s Guide” actually is—a list of advertisers and vendors, not a neutral publication from a organization that only has providers & buyers at heart.

Health care reform : What we can learn from Costco

Mar 2, 2009• 11

By JANE SARASOHN-KAHN

The most telling point about health reform in President Obama's budget is that, "Some researchers
believe that healthcare costs could be reduced by a stunning 30 percent — or about $700 billion a year — without harming quality if we moved as a nation toward the proven and successful practices adopted by the lower-cost areas and hospitals."

That sentence gives us some grist for forecasting some of the elements of health reform — in particular, the last phrase which talks about moving from higher-cost, unproven health practices to lower-cost proven approaches.

In a post earlier this week, I talked about the importance of understanding practice variations, especially those behaviors that lead to increasing costs without improving health outcomes. Under the New England Journal of Medicine paper's scenario, all practitioners would be incentivized to behave as if they practiced in Salem, Oregon and not Miami, Florida.

What will it take to "move" medical practices? We can take a page out of Costco's playbook to answer this one. Three Costco tactics which keep the business resilient will be relevant to this scenario: standardization, deployment of information technology, and tough negotiations with suppliers.

Commentology

Mar 2, 2009• 9

David Longstreet had this to say in response to Andre Blackman's post last week on the the increasing importance of technology in public health. ("Why Technology is No Longer Optional in Public Health."

"the biggest change in software technology is the growing trend of specialization along industry disciplines. The healthcare field is too complex for "generalist" software developers. Those software organizations that specialize in healthcare have productivity and quality rates orders of magnitude higher than generalist firms.

This should not surprise anyone in the healthcare discipline because healthcare has understood the value of specialization for some time now. Unfortunately there are still software firms whose employees work for a bank one week and a hospital the next week…."

Christopher George wrote in reply to Bob Wachter's piece on the implications of comparative effectiveness research. ("Are We Mature Enough to Make Use of Comparative Effectiveness Research?")

"Because the only case which you discuss is one in which supposedly greedy doctors perform ineffective surgery for profit, one might be left with the impression that the principal problem in healthcare is restraining rapacious doctors.

It is well known in certain segments of the medical community that back surgery, and cardiac angioplasty are largely ineffective. It is also well known that regulators with government sponsorship have a limited grasp of statistics and science, and an uncanny tendency to target effective procedures as often as stupid ones. Don't be surprised if you don't like the result once a soviet style Supreme Extra-ordinary Medical Committee makes enforcable decisions about what heathcare is on your treatment menu.

Remember an early target of those who would use government to eliminate medical progress: The CT scan. The assault on the Cat scanner was nearly successful. When you torture the data enough, a CT scanner can seem like a silly thing to use. Why not practice like they did at the dawn of time?"