The #EMR, #Ebola and #Bigdata - what Can We Learn

After all the hype and knee jerk politics and media I was delighted to read this piece Ebola US Patient Zero: lessons on misdiagnosis and effective use of electronic health records by Upadhyay,  Sittig and Singh (PDF file here)

A thoughtful piece that drilled in to the detail of events surrounding the arrival and subsequent consultations, admission and treatment of Thomas Eric Duncan

who sadly died on October 8 succumbing to the ravages of the Ebola virus

As the authors state

The mishandling of US Patient Zero is receiving widespread media attention highlighting failures in disaster management, infectious disease control, national security, and emergency department (ED) care.....also brought decision-making vulnerabilities in the era of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) into the public eye

Much of the commentary generated "fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the competence of our health care delivery system" and while there were problems I agree with the authors that this is a “teachable moment”  and a chance to identify the missed opportunities and key issues that we can learn from

The authors used the publicly available documents and testimony in their quest and it is important to note that they did not have access to the full record, the EMR used or indeed all the pieces of the puzzle and made up for this in some areas with educated guesses.

It is interesting to note that in the first visit to the ED the patient's temperature spiked to 103 degrees accompanied by pain described by the patient as 8/10 in severity.

This from a Malaria Study but typical of the Spike in Temperature found with this disease

He was diagnosed on initial discharge included sinusitis but "but that CT scans of “head and abdomen” ordered during the ED visit showed no evidence of sinusitis" and perhaps with more attention and importantly time made available to the clinical staff would offer them the opportunity to focus on the history and examination and less on high tech investigation. In many cases clinicians are forced into their use not by clinical practice but rather to meet the production pressures - as the authors put it

A host of system-related factors detract from optimal conditions for critical thinking in the ED, leading clinicians to lose situational awareness. These include production pressures, distractions, and inefficient processes

The upshot was a discharge and subsequent return days later at and even then:

even after the second ED visit which led to hospitalization, strict Ebola isolation precautions were not followed for 2 days, until the diagnosis was confirmed by the CDC

Offering a window into the events that is made so much easier with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight

The authors offer some learning opportunities that are worth highlighting

Top of the list in would be working with software developers to improve EHR usability

As this case illustrates, EHR-based clinical workflows often fail to optimize information sharing amongst various team members, leading to lapses in recognizing specific clinical findings that could aid in rapid and accurate diagnosis

As an interesting addition none of the systems (or incentives) have any form of feedback loop built in to allow clinicians to learn from their actions.

As for the process of information capture - we have lost site of the information that is relevant in the fog of billing and regulatory driven template driven charting.

Condition-specific charting templates, drop-down selection lists, and checkboxes developed in response to billing or quality reporting requirements potentially distort history-taking, examination, and their accurate and comprehensive recording.. Clinicians also tend to ignore template-generated notes in their review process; often the signal-to-noise ratio in these notes is low. EHRs can lead to less verbal exchange, which is all the more needed and more effective when dealing with complex tasks and communicating critical information 

Right on except to say this does not "potentially distort history-taking" - it does distort history-taking and
not "EHRs can lead to less verbal exchange" - EHRs do lead to less verbal exchanges

The data entry requirements place an enormous burden on our clinical professionals

who are tasked and measured not on clinical practice and the delivery of great care but on specific content of documentation that is mandated to capture clinical information in specific ways determined by the reimbursement, coding and regulatory system.

Other factors, such as heavy data entry requirements and frequent copy-and-paste from previous notes, detract from critical thinking during the diagnostic decision-making process... For EHRs to be most effective, they need to be able to automatically sort through patient data, identify the pertinent findings, and present them in an easy to understand manner. Computer algorithms could combine patient-specific information with the latest evidence-based clinical knowledge to help clinicians reach the correct diagnosis

This is the next frontier of Healthcare technology and in particular clinical documentation - we know we can sort through patient data, identify the pertinent findings - focused in these examples on quality of care and evidence based guidelines and we know computer algorithms can use patient specific information combined with evidence based knowledge to help

Technology can help but there are some fundamental flaws in the design and management of healthcare that are fed by the current incentives. Many initiatives attempting to improve patient safety and value-based purchasing but don't focus on accuracy and timeliness of diagnosis and in particular Outpatient reimbursement policies do not reward diagnostic decision-making, teamwork, or quality time spent with the patient in making a diagnosis.

What you incent is what you get and this needs to be changed as well.

We Must All be Engaged in the Design, Delivery, and Re-imagination of Healthcare

Previously posted on HITConsultant

On a recent flight, I had my headphones on and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”

began to play.

It’s a song I have heard hundreds of times over the years, but I was struck by the difference listening to it with headphones made. With no distractions, I noticed the bass line, in time with the percussion, provides the perfect offset to Mick Jagger’s distinctively strained voice. It was a completely different experience than hearing the track play in the background of a movie or while at a restaurant. Being fully-immersed and listening only to that song allowed me to pick out and appreciate subtle details I had never noticed previously. It’s no surprise that things sound differently when you’re able to concentrate your full attention on what is being said, but as I was sitting there, I became acutely aware of the function headphones serve—they enable the wearer to listen, blocking out distractions.

That is exactly what we are seeking in healthcare and it has proven to be difficult to achieve – in part because of pace, complexity of care, and technology. For centuries, physicians have listened to their patients and relied on their senses— their powers of observation— and matched these insights with clinical experience to heal. Clinicians need to be able to listen and concentrate on what their patient is telling them and noticing those distinctive symptoms he or she may be exhibiting. As Sir William Osler

famously advised:

“Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.”

Being able to dedicate your undivided attention to anything these days is a rarity, but in healthcare, it is a crucial but frequently missing element. The last thing you want to feel when you are at your most vulnerable is that your physician is multi-tasking. Patient satisfaction scores will suffer, but more concerning are the clinical risks and missed opportunities of distracted physicians.

Distracted clinicians are the result of what Dr. Steven Stack of the American Medical Association refers to as an “over-designed” health IT system.” In a recent discussion with industry leaders, he explained that we seem to have become victims of our own ambition. We have devised structures that don’t work for everyone and policies that create very real, very expensive consequences for those who don’t abide. And this has left physicians stretched too thin, trying to do more in less time without any direct impact on improving their ability to care for their patients.

So, maybe it’s time we scale back. Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and co-chair of the nation HIT Standards Committee, noted that while we are in this period of transition and growth, we need to focus on parsimony, or determining the smallest number of moving parts that need to be adjusted in order to create seamlessness in HIT. Quite simply put, while the cart has been upset, there is no reason to trample all over the apples.

The MIT Technology Review recently interviewed Sarah Lewis, a doctoral candidate at Yale, about her recent book that explores how different unlikely circumstances or paths, like failure, have often spurred innovation. Citing creative geniuses such as Cezanne and Beethoven to Nobel laureates, she defines failure as the gap between where one is and where one would like to be. Confronting this gap, she asserts, is important because it “lets people go deep with their failure while letting it be an entrepreneurial endeavor if they like, or an innovative discovery.” We, in health IT, are currently at that gap where there is a disparity between where we are and where we would like to be.

The recent ICD-10 delay has provided the perfect opportunity for us to find Halamka’s parsimony, leveraging solutions that work for physicians and creating consistency and impact wherever possible. Like medicine itself, there will be no one perfect solution for every physician or organization, but we need to begin finding things that work – from re-skinning EHRs with easy to use tools like single sign-on or mobility to systems that respond to voice, touch or swipe to improve the experience for clinicians and patients. We need to start thinking of health IT more like headphones, coming in different styles to suit preferences, but providing the same function of reducing distraction and enabling the clinician to focus on the inflections in their patients’ voices, and truly hearing what is being said.

As Mick Jagger poignantly remarked, “The past is a great place and I don’t want to erase it … but I don’t want to be its prisoner, either.” We have accomplished a lot, but it is time to learn from the past and break free from what isn’t working. I think we can get health IT satisfaction (despite what the song says), but to do so we must all be engaged in the design, delivery, and re-imagination of healthcare and its intersection with technology. This truly is the art of medicine and we are all virtuosos contributing to the next masterpiece of healthcare.

Giving Personal Health Advice to Family and Friends

In an interesting post on the medscape site (subscription/registration probably required): The Pitfalls of Giving Free Advice to Family and Friends Shelly Reese described some of the challenges of giving medical advice

to friends and family (even if you are a wannabe Dr Phil).

As she puts it the path can sometimes lead to challenging areas of ethics and professional boundaries.

How do you address or deflect such requests? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. It depends a lot on you, your boundaries, and the situation.

And she links to the AMA Guidelines

The American Medical Association (AMA) Code of Medical Ethics is clear, however: "Physicians generally should not treat themselves or members of their immediate families."[1] The statement goes on to provide an extensive list of good reasons why, including personal feelings that may unduly influence medical judgment, difficulty discussing sensitive topics during a medical history, and concerns over patient autonomy (Ref: American Medical Association. Code of Medical Ethics Opinion 8.19: Self-treatment or treatment of immediate family members. Issued June 1993.)

Some of the challenges of simple advice include

• Escalation to more complex or persistent advice 
• Long distance diagnosis with missing data
• Lack of Doctor/Patient relationship and documentation
• Litigation
• Impaired judgement 
• Changing and coloring of relationships

In one section she describes the challenges of dealing with family members and says

"I try not to give too much medical advice, even to my parents. I see my role as an advocate: to help them synthesize information when they have questions. When my mother calls and says, 'I'm short of breath and I don't know what to do,' I walk her through all the things her doctor has talked to her about: Have you taken your blood pressure and pulse? Do you know how many times you're breathing per minute?"

Good advice on being the patient advocate and healthcare manager for your family members (which many already are)
In the end it boils down to personal judgement and your own boundaries.

Questions are appropriate and to be expected, Caplan says, but doctors have to wrestle with themselves in determining how to respond if they're to act responsibly and ethically. "When close friends and family ask for medical advice, that's always a matter for introspection, and at the end of the day, it's not resolved by codes of ethics but by considered individual judgments."

It used to be as the trusted source of knowledge where access to information was limited this was a significant responsibility but with the age of

and medical applications like
AskMD, iTriage and HealthTap to mention a few you might find there is fewer and fewer requests. So for those of you that like the opportunity to help others out...enjoy it while you can mHealth and Telemedicine may be changing the landscape and soon!

23 and Me and

The FDA issued a warning letter to 23andMe on Nov 22, 2013. There followed a slew of articles, posts, tweets and commentary - amongst the many

there's also more reason for concern .... Class Action Law Suit Filed Against @23andMe http://t.co/4pYhZGaaE0 via @forbes @danmunro
— Gregg Masters (@2healthguru) December 3, 2013

And this piece on Forbes on the class action suit and this older piece that talked about the service before this news hit and then followed up with this piece "23andMe Saga Doesn’t Bode Well for EMR Genetics Integration" and David Katz: Return to Sender, Genome Unknown: Seven Reasons I Will Return My Personal Genome Kit

Declaration: I am a 23andMe customer - I liked the concept and was excited by the price point that made the service accessible and cost effective...so maybe that explains my quick reaction (per the Kübler-Ross model of grief of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) to many of the posts and negative feedback pushing back.

I am still processing the news and not sure exactly where I sit - personally I am glad I got in before the health information was blocked. Maybe this is a purely personal position coming from the privilege of being a physician. In fact this piece on Forbes/Quora: What Do Doctors Think About 23andme?
probably captures the viewpoint I have different from others. In fact the images summarize how many people might approach this

Hmmm - you can see the logic and while the point made that not all information is relevant or important my view is firmly on the side of the patient being allowed to make that decision themselves.  It is always worrying to me that someone else is filtering information and making decisions as to what they consider to be important to me - how can they know?

The example cited is one of a fit healthy individual making a decision based on genetic testing that suggests they might be at increased risk of cardiac disease that needs to be put int he context of them being fit and healthy

In fact they state

This is why every ethical healthcare provider follows this mantra: do not order a test or perform a procedure if it will not change your management of the patient, because doing so may cause needless harm/risk to the patient and will cause needless damage to the patient’s finances.

A reasonable position and one perhaps we might expect the FDA to support.....yet the FDA allows for direct to consumer advertising in the US.....? That seems at odds with the stance taken on genetic testing. There is no doubting that extra testing can cause additional stress and concern - putting everyone into an MRI is a bad idea since we identify around 20% "findings" many (may even be most) of which are incidental. I personally am delighted with my 23andMe results that include genetic details and insights that help me make my own personal health decisions.

I gave up personal genetic information to 23andMe who like any other cooperation could misuse it, may not protect it sufficiently or may share it with insufficient privacy protections to shield me from being identified. But that was my choice and in this instance I felt the risks outweighed the benefits.

But the cynic in me can't help but think that this may all be money related especially given the recent spat over the BRCA gene testing that was recently struck down but remains the tip of the patent iceberg.

This piece on KevinMD: 23andMe and the FDA: Did the government overreach? probably captures my basic views on the subject. As Dr Marroquin states

One worry is that people might undergo unnecessary tests and procedures based on the information 23andMe provides.  For example, critics worry that a woman who is found to have a false-positive BRCA mutation might have a prophylactic mastectomy inappropriately.  This seems to me to be an impractical concern.  It is difficult imagine a surgeon operating in such a situation without first verifying the genetic testing through another lab and extensively discussing the benefits and risks of such an approach with the patient.

Quite - it might create a worthwhile discussion between a patient and their healthcare provider. In another example the risk of Alzheimer's which a customer might feel powerless to prevent but I would suggest that this may not be true in the future and as one friend and colleague told me when he shared his results that showed an increase risk of Alzheimer's:

It just means I am going to play more sudoku as I get older

That seemed like a good strategy and attitude. It is also important to note:

It turns out, however, that people seem to be less psychologically devastated by adverse genetic test results than many of the experts anticipated.  For instance, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that “in sample of subjects who completed follow-up after undergoing consumer genomewide testing, such testing did not result in any measurable short-term changes in psychological health, diet or exercise behavior, or use of screening tests.

On balance I'd rather have the choice than have the government make decisions about what data I can access. I say this with all due respect to my clinical colleagues who may disagree and the many that had exchanges with me in other social media forums.

I would also explicitly state that this is a personal view and does not represent that of my employer nor does it represent clinical guidance.

Thanksgiving, Decency and End of Life - Be Thankful you had the conversation now #health

Patients deserve the same standard and car that doctors receive when they need treatment. But as I have said before (Doctors Die Differently and more recently Treatment Creep in Medicine - sucking Decency out of Patients) we remain challenged especially when it comes to dying.

This piece by Dan Gorenstein, How Doctors Die: Showing Others the Way touched on these issues in a moving a thoughtful way.

Dr. Elizabeth D. McKinley’s battled breast cancer for 17 years but this past spring discovered the cancer had spread to her liver, lungs and brain. Her choice was to undergo more treatment that would have potentially debilitating and mind altering effects on her or change course, accept death and work on getting the best out of what was left of her life...as she put it

..time with her husband, a radiologist, and their two college-age children, and another summer to soak her feet in the Atlantic Ocean...“a little more time being me and not being somebody else.” 

And some of her fight was with her own family - the non-medical members

clinging to the promise of medicine as limitless

And the medical members of her family (her husband is a radiologist)

looking at her disease as doctors, who know the limits of medicine

Its not a difference in the effects of disease and death but rather an advantage of knowledge and information that lead to truly informed decisions "doctors have control over their quality of life before they die and this sadly is control that eludes most other members of society" and it would appear especially try here in the USA. More than half of deaths take place in hospital and not at home surrounded by people we love which is the way most say they want to "go".

So if you do nothing else this Thanksgiving - take the time to talk about the subject with the people you love and create and advance directive or living will. In many respects no better way to be thankful than to set out what is important and let everyone know, now when you are fit and healthy.

Wishing you all a very happy family and friend fill Thanksgiving

Treatment Creep in Medicine - sucking Decency out of Patients

This recent post on the Atlantic: How CPR Became So Popular reminded me of a piece I wrote some time back - Doctors Die Differently. As I said then:

Its not that doctors don't want to die, its just that they knwo they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits, importantly they have talked about this with their families as they want to be sure that no heroic measures will be used during their last moments in this reality

And the chart demonstrating the big discrepancy between what doctors want in life saving measures vs the general public pretty much said it all

So this piece in the Atlantic took it a step further - tracing the history of CPR from the 1960 at Johns Hopkins where the surgeons had

...successfully resuscitated every one of the first 20 patients they treated, 14 of whom (70 percent) survived without brain damage or other ill effects

But their source patients were not typical (young and mostly healthy) and when you extrapolate that out to an elderly population survival can fall to as low as 0% a variation in the effectiveness when performed in the real world
But it was Hollywood adn the media that pushed these procedures into the general awareness suggesting

...that two-thirds of all (fictional) cardiac arrests portrayed on ER (and other doctor shows) involved young patients who had suffered rare events like drowning or lightning strikes, rather than old people with heart disease (who account for 90 percent of cardiac arrests in real-life settings.....most of these fictional TV patients did well, unlike the vast majority of CPR recipients in real life

Dr Peter Benton was well known as all in life saving heroics



In fairness Hollywood was dramatizing some real life events - and they applied their pixie dust to this as they have to many other things.

But the problem remains and health care professionals need to help their patients understand their disease and make good choices, bearing in mind that heroics and life saving may well be a significant driver as it was for Stephen Jay Gould who was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer with a median survival of eight months...but as he said in his essay "The Median Isn't the Message".

this median survival means that one-half of patients die within eight months but the other half live longer. Most important, because the mesothelioma survival curve has a very long “tail,” a few lucky patients will live a lot longer

In his case his experimental treatment may have contributed to his 20 year survival past the original diagnosis...leaving a legacy of hope.

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):

Science, Evidence and Clinical Practice

A recent article on the The Difference between Science and Technology in Birth on the AMA site demonstrates the challenges we still face in getting clicnal practice influenced by science and data. Studies and data may show the path for best clinical practice but as the authors note there are multiple instances of the clinical community - in this case the OBGYN - either knowingly or unknowingly failing to follow the best practices

For deliveries in the US evidence tells us that fetal monitoring in low risk pregnancies has a deleterious effect - yet it remains standard practice in most settings to place external scalp electrodes and intrauterine pressure catheters

Although we still see external continuous fetal monitoring employed in many low-risk pregnancies, “as a routine practice [it] does not decrease neonatal morbidity or mortality compared with intermittent auscultation…. Despite an absence of clinical trial evidence, it is standard practice in most settings to place internal scalp electrodes and intrauterine pressure catheters when there is concern for fetal well-being demonstrated on external monitoring” [3].

 

They list several other standard practices including

• routing episitomy
• Use of Doula's
• Challenges with Epidurals

Reasons for these behaviors are varied but as the authors state:

Many well-intentioned obstetricians still employ technological interventions that are scientifically unsupported or that run counter to the evidence of what is safest for mother and child. They do so not because a well-informed pregnant woman has indicated that her values contradict what is scientifically supported, a situation that might justify a failure to follow the evidence. They do so out of tradition, fear, and the (false) assumption that doing something is usually better than doing nothing

Until we fix these basic issues there seems limited opportunity to implement intelligent medicine and real evidence or science based practices.

 

Doctors Die Differently

It was this podcast, "The Bitter End"

From the awesome radio show radiolab that covered a topic that people are often reluctant to discuss but is an important part of our reality...as they say there are few things in life but birth death (and taxes) are at the top of the list.

The piece included a review from the Johns Hopkins (Study of a LifeTime) of people's desires when it comes to life saving treatments especially as it relates to end of life:

Preferences of physician-participants for treatment given a scenario of irreversible brain injury without terminal illness. Percentage of physicians shown on the vertical axis. For cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), surgery, and invasive diagnostic testing, no choice for a trial of treatment was given. Data from the Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, 1998. Courtesy of Joseph Gallo, "Life-Sustaining Treatments: What Do Physicians Want and Do They Express Their Wishes to Others?"

For some simple questions such as:

• Would you want CPR administered
• Would you want Artifical Ventilation administered
• Would you want Dialysis administered
• Would you want a Feeding Tube used

Physicians were fairly uniform with 80% declining all of the above therapies. The only question that physicians were uniformly in favor of was the administration of pain medication.

But ask the same question of the general public and the numbers are reversed on every therapy (except pain management where there is agreement)

Its not that doctors don't want to die, its just that they knwo they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits, importantly they have talked about this with their families as they want to be sure that no heroic measures will be used during their last moments in this reality.

In this excellent piece: "How Doctors Die; It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be" Ken Murray elegantly discusses this discrepancy

The challenge is clear and effective communication on a topic that we are reluctant to take on:

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

My personal technique when I was practicing was to use the benchmark of my own family. Depending on the age fo the patient I would ask myself the questions:

What would I do if this was my <insert name of close family relative>

So:

What would I do if this was my son/daughter
What would I do if this was my spouse
What would I do if this was my mother/father/brother/sister
What would I do if this was my grandfather/grandmother

It may seem simple but it worked for me, and still does. The principle applies with general discussions between family members and realtives.

I knwo this seems morose and depressing but remember death is not alwasy the worst case scenario.

Posted via email from drnic's posterous

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

Posted via email from drnic's posterous

Brain imaging, behavior research reveals physicians learn more by paying attention to failure

ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2011) — Research on physicians' decision-making processes has revealed that those who pay attention to failures as well as successes become more adept at selecting the correct treatment. The researchers also found that all the physicians in the study included irrelevant criteria in their decisions about treatment.

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When seeking a physician, you should look for one with experience. Right? Maybe not. Research on physicians' decision-making processes has revealed that those who pay attention to failures as well as successes become more adept at selecting the correct treatment.

"We found that all the physicians in the study included irrelevant criteria in their decisions," said Read Montague, Ph.D., director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. "Notably, however, the most experienced doctors were the poorest learners."

The research is published in the Nov. 23 issue of PLoS One, the Public Library of Science open-access journal, in the article, "Neural correlates of effective learning in experienced medical decision-makers," by Jonathan Downar, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and Toronto Western Hospital; Meghana Bhatt, Ph.D., assistant research professor at Beckman Research Institute, the City of Hope Hospital, Duarte, Calif.; and Montague, who is also a professor of physics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brain activity of 35 experienced physicians in a range of non-surgical specialties as they made decisions.

The doctors were instructed to select between two treatments for a series of simulated patients in an emergency room setting. "First they had a chance to learn by experience which of two medications worked better in a series of 64 simulated heart-attack patients, based on a simplified history with just six factors," said Bhatt.

Unknown to the test subjects, of the six factors, only one was actually relevant to the decision: diabetes status. One medication had a 75 percent success rate in patients with diabetes, but only a 25 percent success rate in patients without diabetes. The other had the opposite profile. The physicians had 10 seconds to select a treatment. Then they were briefly presented with an outcome of "SUCCESS: (heart attack) aborted" or "FAILURE: No response."

"After the training, we tested the physicians to see how often they were able to pick the better drug in a second series of 64 simulated patients," said Bhatt. "When we looked at their performance, the doctors separated into two distinct groups. One group learned very effectively from experience, and chose the better drug more than 75 percent of the time. The other group was terrible; they chose the better drug only at coin-flipping levels of accuracy, or half the time, and they also came up with inaccurate systems for deciding how to prescribe the medications, based on factors that didn't matter at all."

In fact, all the doctors reported including at least one of the five irrelevant factors, such as age or previous heart attack, in their decision process.

"The brain imaging showed us a clear difference in the mental processes of the two groups," said Montague. "The high performers activated their frontal lobes when things didn't go as expected and the treatments failed." Such activity showed that the doctors learned from their failures, he said. These physicians gradually improved their performance.

In contrast, the low performers activated their frontal lobes when things did go as expected, said Bhatt. "In other words, they succumbed to 'confirmation bias,' ignoring failures and learning only from the successful cases. Each success confirmed what the low performers falsely thought they already knew about which treatment was better." The researchers termed this counterproductive learning pattern "success-chasing."

"The problem with remembering successes and ignoring failures is that it doesn't leave us any way to abandon our faulty ideas. Instead, the ideas gain strength from each chance success, until they evolve into something like a superstition," said Downar.

The fMRI showed that a portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens "showed significant anticipatory activation well before the outcome of the trial was revealed, and this anticipatory activation was significantly greater prior to successful outcomes," Montague said. "Based on the outcome of the training phase, we were actually able to predict results in the testing phase for each low-performing subject's final set of spurious treatment rules."

The authors state in the article that the formation of spurious beliefs is universal, such as an athlete's belief in a lucky hat. "But the good news is that physicians can probably be trained to think more like the high performers," said Downar. "I tell my students to remember three things: First, when you're trying to work out a diagnosis, remember to also ask the questions that would prove your hunches wrong. Second, when you think you have the answer, think again and go through the possible alternatives. Third, if the treatment isn't going as expected, don't just brush it off -- ask yourself what you could have missed."

"These findings underscore the dangers of disregarding past failures when making high-stakes decisions," said Montague. "'Success-chasing' not only can lead doctors to make flawed decisions in diagnosing and treating patients, but it can also distort the thinking of other high-stakes decision-makers, such as military and political strategists, stock market investors, and venture capitalists."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Virginia Tech, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

1. Jonathan Downar, Meghana Bhatt, P. Read Montague. Neural Correlates of Effective Learning in Experienced Medical Decision-Makers. PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (11): e27768 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027768

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

via sciencedaily.com

Selecting the right treatment is a tricky business and this paper reveals some interesting results on physicians' decision-making processes
>>>Clinicians who pay attention to failures as well as successes become more adept at selecting the correct treatment.

These findings underscore the dangers of disregarding past failures when making high-stakes decisions," said Montague. "'Success-chasing' not only can lead doctors to make flawed decisions in diagnosing and treating patients, but it can also distort the thinking of other high-stakes decision-makers, such as military and political strategists, stock market investors, and venture capitalists

So when looking for a physicians maybe looking for the more experienced one if not the main characteristic to focus on.

Interesting ideas and helpful in understanding the clinical decision making process

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