Health Insurance Reform - It's Not a Bumper to Bumper Warranty

We have some Healthcare reform in the US but we are still challenged with a system that is failing to deliver results. This piece recently: America Ranks No. 1 for Over-Priced, Inefficient Health Care featured the chart from the Commonwealth fund

That ranks the US last in a group of 11 industrialized countries.

As he puts it:

There is one way America is clearly exceptional:  we have a healthcare system that is dramatically more expensive than the rest of the industrialized world, but it doesn’t manage to make us any healthier.While  the Affordable Care Act attempts to address access it does little to address the cost of the system and the inefficiencies. This does not require a reduction in premiums it needs to address the costs built in to the system that we are all paying for in on form or another

Dr Hans Duvefelt wrote this piece on the healthcare blog: A Swedish Country Doctor’s Proposal for Health Insurance Reform that draws on his personal experience in "socialized medicine, student health, cash-only practices and government-sponsored rural health clinic working for an underserved, underinsured rural population."

His focus is as a primary care physician but most would agree this is one of the most challenging areas for reform with the shortage in clinicians and low reimbursement rates that is driving doctors out and certainly no encouraging our new generating of clinicians to dive into this essential area.

His main proposals center on basic services that are covered by a flat rate for populations

• Have the insurance company provide a flat rate in the $500/year range to patients’ freely chosen Primary Care Provider, similar to membership fees in Direct Care Medical Practices.
• Provide a prepaid card for basic healthcare, free from billing expenses and administration.

but importantly changing the responsibility and feedback on the cost from a central purchasing authority (the government for example) to the user themselves.

• Unused balances can be rolled over to the following years, letting patients “save” money to cover copays for future elective procedures.

And offers a pathway to specialty care with some appropriate oversight and appriroate levels of reimbursement.

• Keep prior authorizations for big-ticket items, both testing and procedures, if necessary for the health of the system.
• Keep specialty care fee-for-service.

 These are clever suggestions and would do much to encourage the patient engagement that will be, as Leonard Kish stated

Patient Engagement is the  Blockbuster drug of the century

He rightly points out that the current health “insurance” products are often poorly named - given that insurance that pays and copiers to identify diseases with screening but then stops short of paying to treat conditions and diseases when they are found through that screening. But most of all Insurance should be user driven and priorities and decision left in the hands of the individual and their clinician and not relegated to others who sit in offices emoted from clinical practice and focused on fiscal drivers not on care and quality fo life

Health insurance is not like anything else we call insurance; all other insurance products cover the unexpected and not the expected. Most people never collect on their homeowners’ insurance, and most people never total their car. Health insurance, on the other hand, is expected by many to be like a bumper-to-bumper warranty that insulates us from every misfortune or inconvenience by covering everything from the smallest and most mundane to the most catastrophic or esoteric.

His point about setting of priorities is important - no matter how you cut it there is no unlimited pot of money o resources to treat everything and everybody. These are difficult conversation and ripe for abuse by those with their own agenda’s through fear mongering and use of emotive terms like “Death Panels”.

None of this aspect of reform is simple but it needs to be addressed and included.

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) may not be perfect but they have started this process of addressing the challenge of allocating resources in an open manner. They developed the the quality-adjusted life years measurement (QALY) out of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). There has been criticism and push back as there will always be but the concept and methodology use is not limited to the UK. While imperfect as Laozi (c 604 bc - c 531 bc) stated:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

There is lots of detail in this piece and I would encourage you to go over and read it

Getting Value from the EHR - Yes it is Possible

I have the privilege of spending a lot of time on the road interacting with clinicians around the country (and world). I hear with too much frequency many doctors complaining about the Electronic Medical Record and how it fails to help them and in many cases makes their work harder. Some of this is a hangover from the past and the inadequate technology and in some cases hardware at the time
In fact I’ve told this story a number of times that I can date to around 1995/6 and in this piece: Clinical documentation in the EHR

Many years ago, an excited friend who worked for one of the electronic health record (EHR) vendors at that time — it was really more of a billing and patient tracking and management system than an EHR — was desperate to show me some of their latest applications. In particular, a new module they had developed to capture clinical data.
My friend pulled out his laptop, fired up the application, selected a patient and proceeded to enter blood pressure (BP). Some 20-plus clicks later, he had entered a BP of 120/80. While he was excited, I was dumbfounded. When it comes to patient care, doctors didn’t have time for 20 clicks to record BP years ago and they definitely don’t have that luxury in today’s demanding medical environment.

There is still some of that going on and not enough focus on the User Interface design and turning the technology into a barrier - this is the focus of the Art of Medicine campaign we launched some weeks ago



This article on Government HealthIT Are electronic health records already too cluttered? highlights a rising problem and one I hear about frequently. This is not just a healthcare problem and it is the focus of the work by Edward Tufte an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University who is well known for his books on information design which are bets acquired by attending one of his frequent courses on data visualization
Here is a recent overview of visualization on the iPhone



He has a section on healthcare but many of his principles apply

For Brian Jacobs the problem was even more acute working in a Pediatric ICU:

The ICU is a very toxic and tech-laden environment….because of that, it offers the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes

As he points out much of the cutter derives form the multiple notes entered into the EHR every day. "It’s not uncommon in teaching hospitals to have six to seven notes per day on one patient, by the time the attending physician, residents, consultants, other doctors and fellows check on the patient."
So they instituted a policy of One Note per day

Actually its

It’s actually one note per team per patient per day; one giant multi-contributor note. They still may be all writing their components, but it’s one note

With a template to hold the content generated each morning by the resident and then everyone contributing to that one note, adding and amending as necessary

So in addressing the issue clutter they also addressed usability and design turning the note into a living breathing document that is updated and maintained by the team that now takes care of patients
But he addressed some other important issues - especially when it comes to quality of care and the quality of the medical note

Copy Forward is subject to some warranted scrutiny from a billing and audit standpoint. Much of the repetitive and “clutter” in the note comes form the copying forward of past information. But:

These notes should never be the same

And as part of that message they moved to an "End-of-day note” that was a fresh summary of the patient.
Add to that an updated and well maintained Problem List and integration with the billing system to allow doctors to select their code for the work carried out that day and they moved to a valuable addition to the healthcare team in delivering quality healthcare with their EHR

EHRs are: more complete, legible, accessible and can be auto-populated and searched. They can provide diagnosis codes and they’re good for billing. On the other hand, they can sometimes lack quality information and are by far, too cluttered.

I said this back in 2003 (yikes!) - The Future of Technology is already here - Who’s on Board the train and who’s left at the station. I still believe it and understand that the technology does need to get better and be more integrated into the existing workflow

The next generation of health care technology is here, with visionaries and futurists pushing the envelope to enhance, create and generate the newest cutting edge in health care delivery. Advances in technology, like advances in medicine, are a shared entity that enhances life expectancy and the quality of life.

The Future of Healthcare as Seen Through the Eyes of @kpTotalHealth with @Tedeytan #HealthIT

I posted a piece that was published on FastCompany site at the end of last month:

Could The Future Of Health Care Mean No Waits In Hospitals?

It included a link to an original concept from the innovative Kaiser founder Dr Sidney R. Garfield


I shared this with my wife who is an accomplished midwife (she stopped counting her deliveries after she hit 1,000) and we both shared a laugh but as she pointed out - at the time it was a brilliant compromise between two competing interest:

On the one hand you have healthcare wanting to help mothers rest after giving birth

On the other hand you have mothers who's genes are screaming at them - be with your baby

In this particular instance the National Health Service (NHS) in England was ahead of its time, guided by an experienced and well respected cadre of midwives who promoted and encouraged rooming in of babies when they were born. We experienced this with our children but our youngest was born here in the United States and at the time it was a fight to stop the nurses from removing our daughter from the room

I had the privilege of visiting the Kaiser Total Health facility and spent an invigorating few hours with Dr Ted Eytan, Physician Director in the Kaiser Permanente Federation (@TedEytan and his blog)

He was kind enough to reply to my article in a tweet:

And the details even appeared in the wall of knowledge with the background that I captured here:

Ted shared a link to the original history
KP’s ‘Baby in the Drawer’ Helped Turn the Tide Back to Breastfeeding Babies after World War II Which tells the story of the driver on this innovation centered around better outcomes from keeping mothers and babies together:

Sidney R. Garfield he had read an interesting article about the now famous Yale University School of Medicine research experiments with rooming-in for mothers and babies

Kaiser Permanente has continued their continued innovation - Small Hospital, Big Idea which continues and contributes to their impressive growth:

An Impressive and consistent increase in Patients

All this is embodied in the Kaiser Total Health Center that brings together existing and new technology in innovative ways. Everything from the large screen introduction:

 Through to the handheld ultrasound device:

It includes patient education with the explosion of the obesity epidemics - captured in this video graphic

The mock up health room 

Mock up Patient Examination Room

and placed working technology in the reach of innovators, patients and clinicians

3-D Visualization for Patient Engagment on Medication

 and simple technology - but so important - two hand sets for one phone so patient and health care worker can both listen in to the same conversation with immediate availability for language translation (I'm willing to be we won't need a telephone for this simultaneous translation in the near future)

and the room and facility continues to be updated:

No doubt Ted who is is currently exploring the GoogleGlass Innovation (you can read about his exploration here in his blog "The USA #ThroughGlass") will be including some of his google glass experiences as they learn more about this innovation

I believe

Paper and manilla folders will become a thing of the past relegated to museums

this will be true and perhaps when I am lying in my hospital bed will look back at this age and think

Mostly, I know that someday, someone in my same CMIO and MD shoes will think how silly it was that doctors actually hand-typed patient notes

Interview from #Health2Con with @DocWeighsIn on #speechrecognition #HealthIT #NLP and beyond

Loved spending time with Dr Pat Salber (@DocWeighsIn) from the Health 2.0 conference that took place a couple of weeks ago

I had the privilege of watching her in action as she blended social media with the sessions at Health 2.0 and tweeted a picture of her in action

Here's how @Docweighsin is a leading trend setter for #health2con pic.twitter.com/T3Swrx7kmP
— Nick van Terheyden (@drnic1) October 1, 2013

We spent some time afterwards talking about innovation in HealthIT and documentation on subjects as wide and varied as Florence and INtelligent assistants through Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Clinical Language Understanding (CLU):

Technology and Focusing on the Patient

Always enjoying talking with John Lynn (Founder of the HealthcareScene.com (he goes by @techguy and @ehrandhit) and great discussion yesterday on "Technology and Focusing on the Patient" using a Google Hangout

 

 

 

21 Bow Tie Salute to Farzad Mostashari

Like many in the healthcare IT industry, I was saddened by the announcement that Dr Farzad Mostashari (@Farzad_ONC) would be retiring. I would suggest as famed football legend Vince Lombardi said

"The strength of the group is the strength of the leaders"

And, for healthcare technology, Dr. Mostashari has been a great leader. I’ve outlined below some of the many contributions he has made to healthcare.

Dr. Mostashari joined the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) in 2009, and has had a huge and positive impact on the implementation, development and overall perception of healthcare IT.  Personally impacted by the state of healthcare when his mother was admitted for arrhythmias, after having asked for the paper chart, he admitted;

I couldn’t even read the cardiology consult’s name

Perhaps this is one of the reasons he like me is a proud member of Regina Holliday (@ReginaHolliday) "Walking Gallery". This difficult, and highly personal, situation likely galvanized his vision as he took on the daunting tasks demanded by the role of the ONC. He inherited a department that had, in effect, been pushed over the edge of the luge and, whilst speeding wildly along this track, was expected steer a course that would deliver on a range of programs in record time:

• Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records (EHR)
• Certification program for EHRs
• National Standards
• Grant programs
• Regional Extension Centers

And that was just what he knew about coming in. The team endured the challenges, weathered the storm in the "Office of No Christmas"

He rapidly earned a reputation as a leader who listened and was engaged.  He made many appearances and, although he may not have been the first, he was certainly an early adopter of social media and online engagement – clear indicators of his heartfelt passion to be part of the solution. As a customer service representative I recently encountered very astutely pointed out:

I can't do anything about the past, but I can help improve the future

Successes

It is hard to pick individual highlights from such an impressive record, but here's my list of Dr. Mostashari’s top 13 achievements and quotable/notable moments from his time in office:

1. Successfully delivering on the Stage 1 Meaningful Use, despite frustrations and the challenges of a fickle and change-resistant healthcare profession.  He gracefully offered a personal hand to help steer his colleagues:
   "Meaningful use is the best-we-could-make-it roadmap to prepare for delivery of higher quality care and mitigating some of the costs toward getting there, if it's a distraction we need to change it, and I want to hear from you personally."
2. Creating a viable technical assistance program that has touched many providers and hospitals through regional extension centers (REC).
3. Driving the successful adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and electronic medical records (EMRs).
4. Interoperability (see note below on focus for the future)
5. Pushing for patient empowerment (He, like me, is a proud owner and runway model for the Regina Holliday Healthcare Collection).
6. As he said: "We’re on the right track to make meaningful use of meaningful use" 
7. ePrescribing
8. And as if to prove the point about his use of social media, this from his twitter feed: “We've made more progress with EHRs in the past 2 years then we have in 20"   
9. Championing the patient engagement he stated: "We cannot have it be profitable to hoard patient information"
10. Nailing the coffin shut on paper he said: "Once you close a paper file it's dead. You’re not able to move it or learn from it"
11. While this may not be his own personal quote but he applied cyberpunk science fiction, William F. Gibson famous quote to healthcare: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” by pointing out that we do have the technology - its just not being applied
12. Piloting Meaningful Use stage 2 criteria, which built on the success of stage 1, and pushed towards interoperability including standards for data sharing data, quality improvement, and quality measures that foster  patent engagement. As he put it: "We are using every lever at our disposal to increase the sharing of information" and "Patients need to care for themselves and become partners in their care"
13. Successfully weathering the storm of the controversial (or as he put it "headline grabbing") Health Affairs article based on data from 2008 that suggested that EHR technology was increasing the costs of healthcare.

The Future:

To the lucky individual taking the reins, I offer five suggested  areas of focus:

2. A friend once said to me: "You've put us on the horse, you might as well give us the ride." The same can be said of payment reform, which must shift from quantity-based to quality-based payment. And taking a sheet from Dr Mostashari's play book, every journey starts with a single, small action, so even a small dent would be a welcome shift.

1. Continue the engaged and inclusive discussion with all the constituents and make social media a central part of that strategy both for ONC but also for the healthcare industry.
2. A friend once said to me: "You've put us on the horse, you might as well give us the ride" The same can be said of payment reform, which must shift from quantity-based to quality-based payment. And taking a sheet from Dr Mostashari's play book, every journey starts with a single, small action, so even a small dent would be a welcome shift.
3. I must include a shout out for patient engagement. Nowhere else in the industry will you find such a large and untapped resource that is ready, willing – but perhaps not yet able to participate in the change. As I have stated many times:  when a doctor and patient are in a room, there is nobody, I repeat nobody, more interested in successful outcomes than the patient. Give them the tools and make them part of the solution.
4. Occasionally, the issue of Tort and Medical Negligence is raised, but it appears to have the "third rail" syndrome. Unless this is addressed, we will continue to see "defensive medicine" practiced. As I recently blogged in Science, Evidence and Clinical Practice, despite clear data that shows intensive monitoring causes more harm in normal care deliveries, we continue to see almost universal rates of this high-level monitoring.  While some may be attributable to the payment system, I believe a large part of this volume stems from the general inertia of and fear of litigation.
5. Above all - have fun. I made this point at every soccer practice when I was a coach. If you aren't having fun, there is little incentive to do well or, for that matter, to do at all. I know I am constantly amazed at the great fortune that finds me at this intersection of medicine and technology. I constantly have that feeling as if I paddled for the wave just at the right time:

"Surf's Up dude - ten foot waves of the Pier"

The Making of the 21 Bow Tie Salute

Dr Farzad Mostashari has been an incredible role model, a source of inspiration and a true visionary who has helped others see what the future of healthcare can look like. And so, in extreme appreciation of all that he has accomplished, I offer this 21 Bow Tie Salute.  

I was fortunate enough to have another wonderful role model, my father, take the time to teach me how to tie a bow tie, but for those of you wanting to learn the fine craft of tying a bow tie, instructions are included below (The 21 Bow Tie Salute was made with Real Bow Ties). 

Thanks Dad!

Here are some basic instructions:

News and sources include:

Healthcare IT News

ONC

Running out of Time

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking
Friedrich Nietzsche

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend
Albert Camus

I met Regina Holliday a while back at one of the many conferences that she attends:

At this conference she was there to present and was also creating a painting. Her reputation had preceded her and I was excited to meet her in person and hear her story first hand. I had seen some jackets at conferences and had discovered the story behind the Walking Gallery. An idea that came from a tragic story in a healthcare system that is broken











Back in 2011 a video was made featuring many from the gallery filmed at the Kaiser Permanente Total Health Center:


The Walking Gallery from Eidolon Films on Vimeo.

You can see her presentation on Slideshare here:

But there is nothing that could match the power of hearing this in person.

Regina offered to paint my story and it was months before I could pull together some photographs and sit down to articulate my personal journey in healthcare but that all came together a few weeks ago, almost in time for another walking gallery gathering. With so much going on Regina knew what she was going to paint but had not (as the picture shows)

 managed to download it quite yet

My journey to medical school and joining an honorable and privileged profession started when I was still at school and I remember the seminal moment that made me realize this was the pathway I wanted to take:

I was visiting my older brother in London we exited from Victoria rail station just as somebody had been run over by a bus. I watched as my brother pushed his way to the front of the crowd and he stooped own while very one watched - he was a doctor and knew what to do. As I stood on the sidelines watching I realized that I want to be doing rather than watching

I was a very young medical student and while I enjoyed medical school there was no doubting the fact that I was dealing with something that was really quite unique and challenging emotionally. Life and death was part of normal clinical activities and shortly after my 22 birthday I graduated

I have been heard to joke that the TV Series Doogie Howser was modeled on me as that was some years later - he was also the original blogger.

My Story

Running Out of Time

Practicing medicine in the United Kingdom in the national health service which while delivering great care placed an enormous burden on the people delivering that care. The environment was challenging, especially for a young junior doctor and I found myself questioning what I'd let myself in for. My first clinical job I worked 132 hours per week, I had Tuesday and Thursday evening off. At the time, that was the norm and all of my colleagues had the same work schedule as I did and I noticed that my senior colleagues not only had that working schedule but also took on more clinical responsibility. My weekends were hellacious, waking up on Friday morning and not finishing until Monday evening. I shared the work with a colleague and friend by the name of Niamh Anson. We would share the on-call work and split the activities, with one of us covering wards and the other covering the emergency department admissions.

The constant and chronic sleep deprivation took its toll and I repeatedly questioned the job I was doing and indeed whether I was even safe. The nurses proved to be our saving grace and several occasions when we made mistakes through simple tiredness they caught these mistakes and quietly corrected or prevented our errors. I don't remember a single time of being on call when I wasn't up most of the night and typically at leas every hour. Rarely did this not require a visit to either the ward or the emergency department. Many the time, I would walk from my living quarters to the emergency department angry at the system that would place such a burden on anyone and wondering if there was something wrong with me.

On one particular day my two team members were not at the hospital. Niamh was on holiday, one which had been booked many weeks ago but as is normally the case medical staffing had failed as usual to find replacement. By two in the afternoon, the emergency department had 17 patients waiting to be seen by me, there was a patient in intensive care on a ventilator that was having problems, and the cardiac care unit had a patient that was having a lignocaine reaction. I reached breaking point and called medical staffing, and told them I was quitting. Their reaction, humorous in hindsight but at the time not, was to tell me that my contract did not allow for me to quit. Fortunately the ward sister from the cardiac care unit intervened and quietly called my two attending's. The next thing I knew I received a call from one of them asking me to meet him in the emergency department. I thought my career was over and proceeded down to meet him expecting to be blasted and read the riot act. I was pleasantly surprised to find my two consultants there stuck into seeing patients and helping me out. One of them admitted all of the patients in the ED department while the other dealt with the patient on the intensive care unit in the coronary care unit.

Between us we were able to triage and treat all the patients by the end of the afternoon. Even now as I think back to that story I still find myself quite emotional about the experience and support from two outstanding individuals. They rounded it out by insisting that we went to the local pub for a drink (non-alcholic of course) and listened to me and provided counsel and support.

Sadly they were not typical of the senior staff in the health system and most took the view that they had suffered this level of overwork and therefore everybody else should experience the same. This was a recurring theme throughout my time as a clinician and I found most disturbing and many times very depressing.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.
Confucius

I remember vividly one instance where the attending surgeon I was working for heard that I was taking a sabbatical and thinking about leaving medicine. He started by saying that I was terrible shame, and I thought he was about to offer some guidance/support and thoughts about where the system is wrong and how I might cope with it. Sadly he proved to be similar to many of his colleagues and peers and felt that the system was wrong in allowing me into medical school. The system should of been better at weeding me out since there was clearly something wrong with me not with the system. He like many of his peers believed the baptism by fire, sleep deprivation and the general demeaning of junior doctors was an essential part of training and character building. As he put it, he had experienced this in his junior doctor days and he'd survived and done fine. What he failed to appreciate was that at the time he was practicing as a junior doctor, emergency call was typically a Porter coming to his door knocking on his door to tell him that somebody was "going off" and leaving a cup of tea for him. He would dress himself, drink his tea and proceed to the ward, where the patient had either died or survived, but there was very little that he could do to influence the outcome. My experience consisted of being surgically attached to an emergency page that would bark out at me at all hours, telling me to go to a ward or location in the hospital for an emergency resuscitation the could take anywhere from five – 60 minutes.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires
Nelson Mandela

My friend and colleague Niamh Anson

had many of the same experiences and like several of my colleagues elected to move away from the system leaving the NHS for Australia, perhaps hoping that this system would be more bearable. Sadly some years later she committed suicide as too many of my colleagues and friends do.

So my Walking Gallery Jacket:

As Regina described the picture:

The sky represents the never ending shifts as does the hour glass. The medical students and doctors are all standing beside me, also exhausted. My friend and colleague Niamh Anson jumping off the hour glass due to stress....

In what can only be described as a "stroke of luck" the painting of my jacket was caught on Fox 5 News doing a piece on the Walking Gallery (right around 00:24 -> 00:50 and around 01:28):

DC News Weather Sports FOX 5 DC WTTG
Or if the vide does not appear you can click this link



My jacket coming at number 227 - I hope we get all of these together one day.

If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one.
Dolly Parton

Like everyone else - I too have an oath to wear my jacket and use it as a tool to spread the word and effect change:

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path
Buddha

The law of Unintended Consequences - The "Cobra effect" on Patients

For many decades, newspapers were big; printed on the so-called broadsheet format. However, it was not cheaper to print on such large sheets of paper — that was not the reason for their exorbitant size — in fact, it was more expensive, in comparison to the so-called tabloid size. So why did newspaper companies insist on printing the news on such impractical, large sheets of paper? Why not print it on smaller paper? Newspaper companies, en masse, assumed that "customers would not want it;" "quality newspapers are broadsheet."

When finally, in 2004, the United Kingdom's Independent switched to the denounced tabloid size, it saw its circulation surge. Other newspapers in the UK and other countries followed suit, boosting their circulation too. Customers did want it; the newspaper companies had been wrong in their assumptions.

When I looked into where the practice had come from — to print newspapers on impractically large sheets of paper — it appeared its roots lay in England. In 1712, the English government started taxing newspapers based on the number of pages that they printed. In response, companies made their newspapers big, so that they could print them on fewer pages. Although this tax was abolished in 1855, companies everywhere continued to print on the impractical large sheets of paper. They had grown so accustomed to the size of their product that they thought it could not be done any other way. But they were wrong. In fact, the practice had been holding their business back for many years.

Everybody does it

Most companies follow "best practices." Often, these are practices that most firms in their line of business have been following for many years, leading people in the industry to assume that it is simply the best way of doing things. Or, as one senior executive declared to me when I queried one of his company's practices: "everybody in our business does it this way, and everybody has always been doing it this way. If it wasn't the best way of doing things, I am sure it would have disappeared by now".
But, no matter how intuitively appealing this may sound, the assumption is wrong. Of course, well-intended managers think they are implementing best practices but, in fact, unknowingly, sometimes the practice does more harm than good.

One reason why a practice's inefficiency may be difficult to spot is because when it came into existence, it was beneficial — like broadsheet newspapers once made sense. But when circumstances have changed and it has become inefficient, nobody remembers, and because everybody is now doing it, it is difficult to spot that doing it differently would in fact be better.

The short-term trap

Some "best practices" may in fact start out as bad practices, but practices whose harmful effects only materialize years after their implementation. Yet with short-term consequences that are quite positive, firms go ahead and implement them — and never connect the problems of today with the practice launched years ago.

For example, in a project with Mihaela Stan from University College London, we examined the success rate of fertility clinics in the UK. A number of years ago, various clinics began to test, select, and only admit patients for their IVF treatment who were "easy cases"; young patients with a relatively uncomplicated medical background. Indeed, treating only easy patients boosted the clinics' success rates — in terms of the number of pregnancies resulting from treatment — which is why more and more firms started doing it. It improved their rankings over the short term. However, our research on the long-term consequences of this practice clearly showed that selecting only easy patients made them all but unable to learn and improve their treatment and success rate further. Clinics that continued to take on a fair proportion of difficult cases learnt so much from them that after a number of years their success rates became much higher — in spite of treating a lot of difficult patients — than the clinics following the selection practice. Unknown to the clinics' management, the seemingly clever practice put them on the back foot in the long run.

Clearly, the long-term negative consequences of a seemingly "best practice" can greatly outweigh its short-term benefits. But when managers don't see that practice as the root cause of their eroding competitive position, the practice persists — and may even spread further to other organizations in the same line of business.

Self-perpetuating myths

When seeming best practices become self-fulfilling prophecies, they're even more difficult to expose. Take the film industry. Film distributors have preconceived ideas about which films will be successful. For example, it is generally expected that films with a larger number of stars in them, actors with ample prior successes, and an experienced production team will do better at the box office.

Sure enough, usually those films have higher attendance numbers. However, because of their belief that those films will succeed, film distributors assign a much bigger proportion of their marketing budget and other resources to those films, as professors Olav Sorenson from Yale and David Waguespack from the University of Maryland have shown (PDF). Once they factored this spending bias into their statistical models, it became evident that those films, by themselves, did not do any better at all. The distributors' beliefs were a complete myth, which they subsequently made come true through their own actions. The film distributors would have been better off had they assigned their limited resources differently.

Most experienced executives have strong beliefs about what works and what doesn't, and logically they assign more resources and put more effort into the things they are confident about, eager not to waste it on activities with less of a chance of success. As a result, they make their own beliefs come true. The good box office results of the films distributors expected to do well reaffirmed their prior — yet erroneous — beliefs. This reinforced the myth of the best practice, and stimulated it to spread and persist.

Hence, with all the best intentions, executives often implement what is considered a "best practice" in their industry. What they do not know is that some of these practices are bad habits masquerading as efficiency boosters, their real consequences lying hidden. Questioning and uncovering such practices may significantly boost your competitive advantage, to the benefit of your firm and, eventually, us all.

via blogs.hbr.org

Nice piece looking at the challenges of unintended consequences through the ages. The piece is replete with great examples of why introduction of new rules and what appears like a good idea is not always.
This is often described as the Cobra Effect named after a famous incentive introduced by the British rulers in India.

In healthcare we need to be vigilant of the same unintended consequences (as we do in medicine). The new plans with high deductibles and incentives to reduce total spend by individuals is a good case in point. If the incentives are sufficient we could end up stopping patients from seeking therapy. In a recent example related to me a high deductible plan was selected by an individual who discovered to late that his relatively minor medications for a mild skin condition went from a cost of ~$200 per year to a cost of > $4,000 per year.
Casting aside the issue of drug costs that has as yet not been adequately addressed in any of the reforms to date, the unintended consequence is patient stops treatment. This may seem minor but the long term consequences may well be significant and the mental effect alone will have impact on that individual.

It may not be possible to predict all the possible outcomes but it is important to be aware and allow for rapid course corrections as we learn more going through these big changes in our healthcare systems

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Yoda's 1st Law Of Health Quality And Performance Improvement

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via statisticalmedievalist.blogspot.com

Great post on the challenges around pay for performance that highlights an interesting fact - Bill Clinton's heart surgeon Dr Craig Smith has some relatively poor outcome measures...not because he has bad outcomes but because his practice takes some of the most high risk patients.
It is hard to take account of these numbers in the performance metrics.

So the next time you see performance or quality criteria - take a step back and dig deeper into the number

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Doctors Using Electronic Health Records Provide Higher Quality Healthcare | Government Health IT

The use of electronic health records is linked to significantly higher quality care, according to a new study by Lisa Kern and her team, from the Health Information Technology Evaluation Collaborative in the US. Their work appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, published by Springer.

Electronic health records (EHRs) have become a priority in the US, with federal incentives for 'meaningful' use of EHRs. Meaningful use entails tracking and improving specific patient outcomes, as well as gathering and storing information.

Kern and colleagues examined the effect of EHRs on ambulatory care quality in a community-based setting, by comparing the performance of physicians using either EHRs or paper records. They assessed performance on nine specific quality measures for a total of 466 primary care physicians with 74,618 patients, from private practices in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

The quality measures included: eye exams, hemoglobin testing, cholesterol testing, renal function testing for patients with diabetes, colorectal cancer screening, chlamydia screening, breast cancer screening, testing for children with sore throat, and treatment for children with upper respiratory infections.

Approximately half of the physicians studied used EHRs, while the others used paper records. Overall, physicians using EHRs provided higher rates of needed care than physicians using paper, and for four measures in particular: hemoglobin testing in diabetes, breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, and colorectal cancer screening.

The specific quality measures included in this study are highly relevant to national discussions. Of the seven quality measures expected to be affected by EHRs, all seven are included as clinical quality measures in the federal meaningful use program. There has been little evidence previously that using EHRs actually improves quality for these measures.

This study took place in a community with multiple payers. This is in contrast to integrated delivery systems, such as Kaiser Permanente, Geisinger, and the Veterans Administration, all of which have seen quality improvements with the implementation of health information technology. Most health care is delivered in “open” rather than integrated systems, thus increasing the potential generalizability of this study.

The authors conclude: "We found that EHR use is associated with higher quality ambulatory care in a multi-payer community with concerted efforts to support EHR implementation. In contrast to several recent national and statewide studies, which found no effect of EHR use, this study's finding is consistent with national efforts to promote meaningful use of EHRs."

Study: Kern LM et al (2012). Electronic health records and ambulatory quality of care. Journal of General Internal Medicine; DOI 10.1007/s11606-012-2237-8

 

Brian Ahier works as Health IT Evangelist for Information Systems at Mid-Columbia Medical Center. He is a City Councilor in The Dalles, Oregon and also serves on the Board of Mid-Columbia Council of Government, and Q-Life, an intergovernmental agency providing broadband capacity to the area. He blogs regularly at Healthcare Technology & Government 2.0.

via govhealthit.com

There's been a lot of coverage recently suggesting the Meaningful Use incentive program has failed to deliver value, EHR's have actually induced more cost in healthcare and EHRs have decreased quality of healthcare....
But as Brian Ahier rightly points out there is evidence that supports the value proposition
This study demonstrated value in a typical community setting with multiple players and found real positive impact delivering higher quality care measured by specific measures such as screening and testing for chronic diseases

We found that EHR use is associated with higher quality ambulatory care in a multi-payer community with concerted efforts to support EHR implementation. In contrast to several recent national and statewide studies, which found no effect of EHR use, this study's finding is consistent with national efforts to promote meaningful use of EHRs

Expect more studies that will demonstrate the value

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The Terrifying State of "Unaccountable" Healthcare

via online.wsj.com

The latest book exposing the healthcare system and how broken it is from Dr Makary a surgeon from Johns Hopkins. As he says

Meet 'Shrek,' a doctor who insists on surgery in every case—and has a surgical-incision infection rate of 20%.

and more troubling

He quotes a recent Hopkins survey of employees of 60 high-quality hospitals, where more than half of the respondents said they would not feel comfortable receiving care in the unit in which they work

He makes the case for flat rate payment that removes the incentive for steering care to individual specialties devoid of any decision making that is for the benefit of the patient.

Take pancreatic cancer, half of Dr. Makary's practice at Hopkins. With only a 15% cure rate, surgery is the only hope. But if the cancer is inoperable, patients may be offered chemo and radiation, which confer minimal benefit and yet make money for doctors and hospitals

There are detractors to this and without incentive there is a corresponding decline in efficiency so finding a balance between these two competing ideals seems necessary

Looks like another book to add to the reading list

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The Health Care Revolution Must be Clinician Centered

The New Yorker author, surgeon, Harvard University faculty member, and health policy adviser Atul Gawande told the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) today that checklists could help improve the quality of health care and lower costs. PCAST members seemed enamored with the idea of standardizing treatment and procedures, and also discussed how to raise the academic status of those working in the field. But another PCAST member—Google CEO Eric Schmidt—saw what Gawande was peddling as a potentially lucrative new market for the search engine giant.

Here's Schmidt's dream of what a visit to the doctor will look like in 2015. It came during a question-and-answer session following Gawande's 15-minute presentation, drawn from his new book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. You can judge for yourself whether it's sensible or scary.

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"My question has to do with the model of health care that we'll be facing in 5 or 10 years," Schmidt began. "It's pretty clear that we'll have personalized health records, and we'll have the equivalent of a UPC sticker with your medical history. So when you show up at the doctor with some set of symptoms, in my ideal world what would happen is that the doctor would type in the symptoms he or she also observes, and it would be matched against the data in this repository. Then this knowledge engine would use best practices, and all the knowledge in the world to give physicians some sort of standardized guidance. This is a generalized form of the checklists that you're talking about."

Then Schmidt made clear what was troubling him. "As computer scientists, this is a platform database problem, and we do these very, very well, as a general rule. And it befuddles me why medicine hasn't organized itself around these platform opportunities."

Gawande took a shot at responding to the billionaire's bewilderment. "I think part of the bafflement occurs because the folks who know how to make such systems don't understand how the clinical encounter actually operates." But the bigger problem, he said, is that such a search would in all likelihood generate more heat than light for the harried physician, who typically has "15 minutes to manage six problems." According to Gawande, "the three inches of guidance, explaining what the evidence suggests and so on, needs to be turned into a useful form that tells you what you can do."

But Gawande is no Luddite. He told Schmidt that he'd welcome an app—"for your iPhone or whatever the new Google one is"—that could help him the next time he sees a patient diagnosed with a rare renal tumor.

Gawande found a receptive audience for his idea that the federal government create a National Institute of Health Systems Innovation to complement the work of the National Institutes of Health, although PCAST members suggested that he consider other administrative solutions. And they also shared his unhappiness with the relatively low status of health systems analysis. "My sense is that we don't respect this stuff," said PCAST co-chair Eric Lander. "We respect the cancer genome, but not checklists. What do we need to do to send a signal to the next generation of researchers that this is a high-class, worthy thing to do? What would it take to move the needle?"

"You're absolutely right," Gawande replied. "It's not well respected. There's a reason, after all, that I'm still an associate professor."

via news.sciencemag.org

Older piece from 2012 but an interesting point made by the ever insightful and eloquent @Atul_Gawande when challenged by a non-clincinas who was "Troubled" by the state of #HealthIT.
As Dr Gawande said

I think part of the bafflement occurs because the folks who know how to make such systems don't understand how the clinical encounter actually operates

There you have it - it is easy to look in to healthcare technology and prescribe solutions based on your experience of finance, computers, C++ coding and any other discipline. But if you don't understand the fundamentals of clinical care, the taking of a history and all the nuances involved in teasing out details from patients you can't prescribe a solution that will work effectively

And in a notable humbling point Dr Gawande points out that even within the fences there is resistance to much of the application fo this technology

You're absolutely right...It's not well respected. There's a reason, after all, that I'm still an associate professor

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Khosla says technology will replace 80 percent of doctors - I think not

via venturebeat.com

Technology replacing doctors.....
Still missing The Human Element and besides in the

Mayo Clinic Proceedings March 2006 vol. 81 no. 3 338-344 they identified the most most important characteristics patients feel a good doctor must possess

confident,

empathetic,

humane,

personal,

forthright,

respectful, and

thorough

These facets are entirely human and will be hard for technology to replace

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Medical students still burdened by high debt loads

via ama-assn.org

This problem needs to be fixed - if the debt load for a student emerging from medical school training is that high their income needs will be very high just to make loan payments.

Average debt of $162,000 - $205,000: Imagine starting out your early life with that kind of debt load!

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