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Tag: Quality

Providers Are Held Accountable. Why Aren’t Technology Vendors?

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By Jordan Dolin

As healthcare shifts from fee-for-service to fee-for-value, hospitals and physicians are increasingly being held accountable for outcomes by the government, payers and patients. Historically, provider organizations only had to meet performance criteria to earn a pay-for-performance bonuses or hospital certification, but with the arrival of Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), Meaningful Use and other programs, payment is now based on to quality of care rather than quantity of services.

Health information technology (HIT) systems are able to track physician actions and measure outcomes down to the individual patient level and allow organizations to closely monitor the quality levels of a given physician. These same tools should be able to monitor the performance of the vendors who are there to support these clinicians. With patient engagement solutions, for example, vendors claim they can help improve HCAHPS scores, treatment adherence, patient outcomes, and reduce costs, but have no evidence to back it up.

Vendors should be willing to commit to their patient engagement promises, present proof showing improved outcomes and face some financial risk for failing to deliver.

Global accountability

Since patient engagement was included in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Solutions’ Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records program, it has become a popular buzzword. Every HIT vendor claims to offer tools to assist providers with this important clinical quality issue, but no one is holding anyone accountable.

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Making Sense of Geographic Variations in Health Care: the New IOM Report

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By Elliot Fisher, MD & Jonathan Skinner

Since 1973, when Jack Wennberg published his first paper describing geographic variations in health care, researchers have argued about both the magnitude and the causes of variation.  The argument gained greater policy relevance as U.S. health care spending reached 18 percent of GDP and as evidence mounted, largely from researchers at Dartmouth, that higher spending regions were failing to achieve better outcomes.   The possibility of substantial savings not only helped to motivate reform but also raised the stakes in what had been largely an academic argument.   Some began to raise questions about the Dartmouth research.

Today, the prestigious Institute of Medicine released a committee report, led by Harvard’s Professor Joseph Newhouse and Provost Alan Garber, that weighs in on these issues.

The report, called for by the Affordable Care Act and entitled “Variation in Health Care Spending: Target Decision Making, Not Geography,” deserves a careful read. The committee of 19 distinguished academics and policy experts spent several years documenting the causes and consequences of regional variations and developing solid policy recommendations on what to do about them.  (Disclosure: We helped write a background study for the committee).

But for those trying to make health care better and more affordable, whether in Washington or in communities around the country, there are a few areas where the headlines are likely to gloss over important details in the report.

And we believe that the Committee risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater by appearing, through its choice of title, to turn its back on regional initiatives to improve both health and health care.

What the committee found

The report confirmed three core findings of Dartmouth’s research.

First, geographic variations in spending are substantial, pervasive and persistent over time — the variations are not just random noise. Second, adjusting for individuals’ age, sex, income, race, and health status attenuates these variations, but there’s still plenty that remain. Third, there is little or no correlation between spending and health care quality. The report also effectively identifies the puzzling empirical patterns that don’t fit conveniently into the Dartmouth framework, such as a lack of association between spending in commercial insurance and Medicare populations.

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More Work Is Needed on the Safety and Efficacy of Healthcare Information Technology

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By Stephen Soumerai & Ross Koppel

If one were writing about the improvement of gastronomy in America, one would probably not celebrate “over 300 billion hamburgers served.”  But that’s very much the type of success Dr. Ashish Jha is celebrating in last week’s piece on recent US healthcare IT sales. Unfortunately, the proliferation of Big Macs does not reflect superior cuisine, and healthcare IT (HIT) sales do not equate with better healthcare or with better health. Quantity does not equal quality of care.

To be sure, Dr. Jha acknowledges the challenges of rolling out HIT throughout US hospitals. And he should be strongly commended for his admission that HIT doesn’t capture care by many specialists and doesn’t save money. In addition, Dr. Jha points to the general inability of hospitals, outpatient physicians and laboratories to transfer data among themselves as a reason for HIT’s meager results.

But this is a circular argument and not an excuse. It is the vendors’ insistence on isolated proprietary systems (and the government’s acquiescence to the vendors) that created this lack of communication (non-interoperability) which so limits one of HIT’s most valuable benefits.

In our opinion, the major concern is that the blog post fails to answer the question we ask our PhD students:

So what? What is the outcome?

This entire effort is fueled by $29 billion in government subsidies and incentives, and by trillions of dollars spent and to be spent by hospitals, doctors and others [1].

So where is the evidence to back up the government’s and industry’s promises of lower mortality, improved health and lower health care costs?

Single studies tell us little. Sadly, as many as 90% of health IT studies fail the minimal criteria of the respected international literature syntheses conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration.

In other words, studies with weak methodology or sweetheart evaluation arrangements just don’t count as evidence.
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Paying Physicians for Quality: Lessons from Employers

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By Bill Kramer

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health recently held hearings on how to replace the broken sustainable growth rate (SGR) tool for controlling Medicare spending on physician services. I was asked to speak for major employers about their efforts to improve health care quality while containing cost.

Why did the subcommittee invite a business group representative to testify? And why should businesses care about how Medicare pays physicians?

The answer is that employers and the federal government are both major purchasers of health care, and we want government to look to the private sector for ideas to accelerate innovation in how we pay for care. Both public and private purchasers have a stake in building a system based on innovation, value, and measuring what matters.

The Pacific Business Group on Health’s (PBGH) 60 member companies provide health care to 10 million employees and their dependents in all 50 states. For decades, large and small employers alike have been frustrated by the rising costs and inconsistent quality of health care. A major reason for these problems is that the current payment system rewards physicians for more office visits, tests, and procedures, regardless of whether they are needed or result in better health. We need a better, more effective method of physician payment. PBGH members have real-world experience designing and implementing innovations in how providers deliver care and how they are paid for it. Medicare can learn from these efforts to improve quality and control costs.
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A Time of Change at the American Board of Internal Medicine

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By Bob Wachter, MD

Yesterday was my last day as chair of the ABIM, and the end of my eight-year tenure on the Board. In this blog – a bookend to the one I wrote at the start of the year, which went near-viral – I’ll describe some of our accomplishments this year and a few of the challenges that I leave my talented successors to grapple with.

I had two very tangible tasks to accomplish during my chairmanship. First, after a decade-long tenure as CEO and President of ABIM, Chris Cassel announced her intention to step down. (Chris is now CEO of the National Quality Forum, which is increasingly crucial in a world looking for robust measures of quality, safety, and value.) After an extensive search, we selected Richard Baron to become ABIM’s new CEO, and Rich began earlier this month. Rich is one of the most impressive people I’ve met in healthcare, and a perfect choice to lead ABIM into the future. As someone who practiced general internal medicine for nearly three decades in a mid-sized Philadelphia office, he is a “doctor’s doctor.”

He is intimately familiar with the work of the Board, having served on the boards of both ABIM and the ABIM Foundation for over a decade (including a year as ABIM chair). He also has extensive policy experience, most recently as director for Seamless Care Models for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), where he was responsible for putting meat on the bones of concepts like the “Medical Home” and “Accountable Care Organization.” Rich is wickedly smart, a superb communicator, and a great listener with impeccable values and an unerring ethical compass. He’ll be splendid.

The second area may be a bit more Inside Baseball, but will ultimately be just as important. A couple of years ago, we began a process to redesign the ABIM’s governance. Our 28-person board was both too large and had too much on its plate for effective decision making. In work that was superbly led by then-chair Catherine Lucey, assisted by a crack committee, staff and governance expert Jamie Orlikoff, we decided to transform our governance structure. As of tomorrow, the ABIM board shrinks to 15 members – chosen for their experiences and competencies rather than because they represent a given medical subspecialty – and a new group, the ABIM Council, is formed.Continue reading…

Healthcare Lands: Announcing the Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation

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By Ashish Jha, MD

There is an old saying that every unsustainable trend, by definition, comes to an end.  The U.S. healthcare system has been on an unsustainable trajectory, consuming more and more of our national income while failing to deliver the kind of care that Americans need and deserve.  But although every unsustainable trend eventually ends, how it ends is up to us.

The healthcare system has the potential to collapse under its own weight, requiring Americans to pay even more for healthcare, forcing draconian and blunt cuts in the kinds of services available, and putting high quality healthcare out of reach for the poor and the sick.

An alternative future is one in which payers pay for value, providers become more efficient and patient centered, and consumers become increasingly engaged in caring for themselves.  In this future, healthcare becomes an important force for improving the health of the American public.

What will determine which path our healthcare system will take?  While the fate of our healthcare system will be influenced by policymakers in Washington DC and the state capitals, it will ultimately be decided by each of us – providers and patients who are involved in the daily work of delivering and engaging in healthcare.

The journal Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation is an effort to nudge us toward a better, sustainable path for our healthcare system.  The mission of the journal is simple:  to play a meaningful role in fostering real change in the healthcare delivery system.  The journal wants to be a venue for sharing the best ideas for delivery science, payment innovation and smart use of health information technologies.  The journal was conceived by Amol Navathe and Sachin Jain, who have been thinking long and hard about compelling new approaches to bring about change in the healthcare system.  It took years of persistence to line up a terrific publisher, put together a top notch editorial board and recruit some of the nation’s best minds to lead individual theme areas.  And it paid off handsomely.  Today, June 26th, Healthcare officially launches with its premier issue, and what an issue it is.

The two introductions are short, pithy and worth reading over and over again.  The first is by Don Berwick, the former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services but even more importantly (at least to me), the man who has done more to promote quality and safety than anyone in recent memory.  Don frames the issues in ways that only he can, reminding us that we can have the best healthcare system in the world – we have all the pieces – but we have to learn how to put it together.

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Building Cost and Quality Into the Electronic Medical Record

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By Hayward K. Zwerling, MD

Trends in US healthcare expenditures are financially unsustainable (1). I would like to propose two tweaks of the healthcare delivery process that may, in a small way, help rectify this problem.

Although there is a widespread impression that health information technology (HIT) will eventually “bend” the cost curve and put healthcare spending on a sustainable course, there is, as of yet, little data that convincingly supports this hypothesis (2).

Kaiser Permanente is a large, integrated healthcare delivery system which has invested heavily in HIT. George C. Halvorson, the chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente appears to have concluded that this investment will not solve the healthcare cost issue, when he was quoted in the New York Times (3/20/13) as stating “We think the future of health care is going to be rationing or re-engineering.”

Because HIT, as currently implemented, will probably not solve the healthcare cost problem, I would like to suggest a minor “re-engineering” of the electronic health record user interface which may help bend the cost curve.

At every office visit, the physician must make a myriad of decisions which incrementally effect the nation’s total healthcare expenditures. For example, the physician will have to decide which medicine to prescribe, and which radiology study or laboratory test to order.

In many situations, there is more than one acceptable choice. The physician’s ultimate decision will integrate their understanding of the disease process, the treatment’s side effect profile, their familiarity with the treatment options, patient preferences and many other variables.

I would suggest that every time a physician is about to order a test or a prescription, the cost of the test or prescription should be displayed to the physician. In the same vein, whenever a computer displays a test result, the cost of the test is immediately available to the reader. This information could then become an additional factor that the physician may choose to integrate (or ignore) at the moment when he/she is about to commit the patient and society (which is now paying >50% of all healthcare bills) to another healthcare expenditure. In terms of a risk/benefit analysis, I can see little downside to providing this cost information to physicians.

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What is the Future State Vision for Health Care Delivery System Transformation?

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By Jim Hansen

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.”

– Yogi Berra

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” said Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where —” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“— so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The country is in the midst of an unprecedented transformation of the health care system and may even be at a ‘tipping point’, yet many of us find it astounding that we have no official (or unofficial for that matter) collective vision of where we are headed, thus how the heck do we know if we are on the right path to get there? Given the very high stakes and costs that extend far beyond financial ones, why is it acceptable to not have a future state in mind so that the current state can be quantified and a gap analysis roadmap can be created to address it? Sure, we have the Triple Aim as the overall goal but what are the ‘guardrails’ that help build the road to it?

The truly great news is that we actually have those ‘guardrails’, and in fact have had them for over a dozen years. It is just that most people have not been aware of this hidden time-tested gem, created by incredibly thoughtful health system transformation forefathers and foremothers back in 2001. This visionary team has overwhelmingly been praised for creating the powerful and gutsy call to action in their Crossing the Quality Chasm Institute of Medicine (IOM) report. What many have missed is that in addition to all the highly visible work, the group created a set of 10 key new rules to inform a future state for the health care system (see figure 1).

Figure 1 Source: Institute of Medicine, “Crossing the Quality Chasm,” p. 67, 2001.

Twelve years later, the chart in Figure 1 strikes many of us in two powerful ways: 1) How the ‘New Rule’ column has stood the test of time for the vast majority of its intended direction and spirit, and 2) how sad and disappointing that many of the 2001 ‘Current Approach’ column items are still entrenched even today.

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A SEC for Health Care?

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By Peter Pronovost, MD

If you have ever tried to choose a physician or hospital based on publicly available performance measures, you may have felt overwhelmed and confused by what you found online. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Joint Commission, the Leapfrog Group, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, as well as most states and for-profit companies such as Healthgrades and U.S. News and World Report, all offer various measures, ratings, rankings and report cards. Hospitals are even generating their own measures and posting their performance on their websites, typically without validation of their methodology or data.

The value and validity of these measures varies greatly, though their accuracy is rarely publically reported.  Even when methodologies are transparent, clinicians, insurers, government agencies and others frequently disagree on whether a measure accurately indicates the quality of care. Some companies’ methods are proprietary and, unlike many other publicly available measures, have not been reviewed by the National Quality Forum, a public-private organization that endorses quality measures.

Depending where you look, you often get a different story about the quality of care at a given institution. For example, none of the 17 hospitals listed in U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Hospitals Honor Roll” were identified by the Joint Commission as top performers in its 2010 list of institutions that received a composite score of at least 95 percent on key process measures. In a recent policy paper, Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute, Harlan Krumholz, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and I called for dramatic change in measurement.  (Thanks to The Health Care Blog for highlighting this analysis recently.)

We made several recommendations, including focusing more on measuring outcomes such as mortality and infections rather than processes (e.g. whether patients received the recommended treatment) or structures of care (e.g. whether ICUs are staffed around the clock with critical care specialists). We urged that measures be at the organization level rather than clinician level, to reflect the fact that safety and quality are as much products of care delivery systems as of individual clinicians. We propose investments in the “basic science” of measurement so that we better understand how to design good measures. You can read these and other recommendations in the analysis.

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Seven Policy Recommendations for Healthcare’s New Era

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Berenson, Pronovost & Krumholz

There is a consensus that measuring performance can be instrumental in improving value in U.S. health care. In particular clinical areas, such as cardiac and intensive care, measurement has been associated with important improvements in providers’ use of evidence-based strategies and patients’ health outcomes over the past two decades. Perhaps most important, measures have altered the culture of health care delivery for the better, with a growing acceptance that clinical practice can and should be objectively assessed.

Nevertheless, as we argue in the full-length version of this paper, substantial shortcomings in the quality of U.S. health care persist. Furthermore, the growth of performance measurement has been accompanied by increasing concerns about the scientific rigor, transparency, and limitations of available measure sets, and how measures should be used to provide proper incentives to improve performance.

The challenge is to recognize current limitations in how measures are used in order to build a much stronger infrastructure to support the goals of increased accountability, more informed patient choice, and quality improvement. In the following paper, we offer seven policy recommendations for achieving the potential of performance measurement.

1. Decisively move from measuring processes to outcomes.

There is growing interest in relying more on outcome measures and less on process measures, since outcome measures better reflect what patients and providers are interested in. Yet establishing valid outcome measures poses substantial challenges—including the need to riskadjust results to account for patients’ baseline health status and risk factors, assure data validity, recognize surveillance bias, and use sufficiently large sample sizes to permit correct inferences about performance.

Read more.

2. Use quality measures strategically, adopting other quality improvement approaches where measures fall short.

While working to develop a broad set of outcome measures that can be the basis for attaining the goals of public accountability and information for consumer choice, Medicare should ensure that the use of performance measures supports quality improvement efforts to address important deficiencies in how care is provided, not only to Medicare beneficiaries but to all Americans. CMS’ current focus on reducing preventable rehospitalizations within 30 days of discharge represents a timely, strategic use of performance measurement to address an evident problem where there are demonstrated approaches to achieve successful improvement [6]. Read more.

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