UPDATE: Don Johnson and I are having a friendly spat about the real cost of health care in Europe and another about the uninsured in the new comments section of The Business Word. I hope that Don keeps support for his comments section up and that you’ll join me in commenting there. (I’m barely able to keep my blogging up, so no comments here for a while yet).
I’ve been in the UK for a few days and thought that it would be appropriate to give you some impressions of what I’ve been hearing about the state of health care over here. One of the most noticeable factors is that we’re not in France. The BBC reported last night that the French health service was about to have a doctors’ and pharmacists’ strike because of threats to reduce government finance of the system there. The BBC reported with some incredulity that any French person can get any operation they like any time for free, but did point out that the French pay 30% more overall for their system, and that (stop me if you’ve heard this tune before) costs were going up faster than the economy can afford it, etc, etc.
The UK is also increasing its rate of health expenditure from what used to be a very miserly 5.5% of GDP on the way to 7-ish%. In some ways they are having capacity constraints, with the result that some GP positions in London are vacant, and some patients are being sent to France for surgery to reduce waiting lists. That’s possible because these days funding for primary (including Rx) and secondary care is organized via Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) which buy (or "commission" in New Labour-speak) hospital services from Trust Hospitals. Although this might seem like the basis of a competitive market, in fact a PCT tends to cover virtually all the residents of one town, and the hospitals they purchase from usually have a catchment area that’s about the same size as the PCT. In other words there’s more or less a single buyer (that looks something like a staff-model HMO) and a single seller (the local tertiary care hospital) — and there’s not real money flowing between them. Within the PCTs, the primary care is delivered by notionally independent GP practices, who behave much as they always did — although the minority which were "fundholders" under the previous reform environment probably have less control over hospital purchasing than the used to.
The most interesting development is the move towards what might be called intermediate risk sharing for chronic disease management. Starting in April 2004, GP practices will be putting up to one third of their revenues at risk, and be able to earn 1050 points by hitting a number of targets in certain therapeutic areas. Each point will start off being worth up to 75GBP but will go up to 120GBP. In other words each GP may have up to 120,000 GBP at risk for their practice, which may wind up to 30-40,000 GBP per doctor in real money. There are ten chronic disease states being targeted, many of them surrounding cardiac care, with some 75 metrics being measured. The measurement of the interventions, which are all the standard things of keeping the heart patients on the right drugs, making sure the diabetics get their eye exams, etc, etc, are being done from the information systems of the GPs themselves. But this isn’t the gong show it would be in the US as by now the vast majority of GP practices have got primary care EMRs, and most GPs are taking electronic notes during consultations.
To this point, many GPs have just been coding office visits with electronic diagnoses that are the easiest to input rather than the most accurate (i.e. coding all visits from diabetics the same). They don’t get paid any differently for different codes (unlike the US) so convenience had been the driving factor. Most of the GPs I talked with are fairly confident that the add-ons required, such as alerts to contact patients to make sure they’ve come in for an annual exam, or alerts to remind the GP in the middle of the consult that the hypertensive patient hasn’t had a blood pressure test, can be (or already have been) added to their systems – and that’s where they’re focusing the most effort. There’s also a presumption that some of the smaller one or two doctor GP practices with only a couple of thousand patients will merge to get better IT IT and admin support. Overall there’s some optimism about the system, as reflected in this American assesment from UCLA’s Paul Shekelle.
It’s also interesting to note that in the absence of the completion of the huge EMR in the sky projects that the government just awarded contracts for, the UK is already far ahead of the US in primary care IT. However, this doesn’t really spread over to the hospital side. In fact frequently the communication between GP and Hospital specialist breaks down (does this sound familiar?) and a patient may be put on a drug in the hospital and the GP either not be informed about it, or take them off it when they come for the follow up visit. As the GPs currently control their own drug budget they’ve been somewhat incented to under-prescribe – any savings there can be used in the rest of the practice to buy new computers, nicer chairs for the waiting room, etc. Additionally the end points that GPs are going to be rewarded on are based on intermediate outcomes, not on hospital measures. So for example, getting the % of at-risk patients on statins up above a certain number will be rewarded and it’s just assumed that this will reduce costs down the line and in the hospital. But at present no one’s counting and the information systems aren’t really able to talk to each other about it. However within the PCTs there are already guidelines that many GPs (are at least trying to) follow willingly, even though they’re paper based, and there is a system of clinical consultation over local guidelines at the PCT level itself. As well as the NICE (national institute for clinical excellence) which creates national guidelines for technology and drugs based on cost-effectiveness analysis.
Additionally there was great familiarity with the Kaiser system, and the NHS has done a series of comparisons between the two, which in part inspired the new contracting system by showing that the lower use of hospital care and greater emphasis on overall patient management at Kaiser led to better and more cost-effective care. But many people I talked to were aghast when I described the state of IT in the typical American doctors office – they just assumed that the rich Yanks must be well ahead of them!
