Working in the health care space has forced me to give up many hopes and expectations that I had a few years ago. Forgive me for being cynical (it’s an easy feeling to have following the country’s largest health IT conference, as I reported a month ago), and indeed some positive trends do step in to shore up hope. I’ll go over the redeeming factors after listing the five tough lessons.
1. The health care field will not adopt a Silicon Valley mentality
Wild, willful, ego-driven experimentation–a zeal for throwing money after intriguing ideas with minimal business plans–has seemed work for the computer field, and much of the world is trying to adopt a “California optimism.” A lot of venture capitalists and technology fans deem this attitude the way to redeem health care from its morass of expensive solutions that don’t lead to cures. But it won’t happen, at least not the way they paint it.
Health care is one of the most regulated fields in public life, and we want it that way. From the moment we walk into a health facility, we expect the staff to be following rigorous policies to avoid infections. (They don’t, but we expect them to.) And not just anybody can set up a shield outside the door and call themselves a doctor. In the nineteenth century it was easier, but we don’t consider that a golden age of medicine.
Instead, doctors go through some of the longest and most demanding training that exists in the world today. And even after they’re licensed, they have to regularly sign up for continuing education to keep practicing. Other fields in medicine are similar. The whole industry is constrained by endless requirements that make sure the insiders remain in their seats and no “disruptive technologies” raise surprises. Just ask a legal expert about the complex mesh of Federal and state regulations that a health care provider has to navigate to protect patient privacy–and you do want your medical records to be private, don’t you?–before you rave about the Silicon Valley mentality. Also read the O’Reilly book by Fred Trotter and David Uhlman about the health care system as it really is.
Nor can patients change treatments with the ease of closing down a Facebook account. Once a patient has established a trust relationship with a doctor and obtained a treatment plan, he or she won’t say, “I think I’ll go down the road to another center that charges $100 less for this procedure.” And indeed, health reform doesn’t prosper from breaking down treatments into individual chunks. Progress lies in the opposite direction: the redemptive potential of long-term relationships.
2. Regulations can’t force change
I am very impressed with the HITECH act (a product of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more than the Affordable Care Act) that set modern health reform in motion, as well as the efforts of the Department of Health and Human Services to push institutions forward. But change in health care, like education, boils down to the interaction in a room between a professional and a client. Just as lesson plans and tests can’t ensure that a teacher inspires a child to learn, regulations can’t keep a doctor from ordering an unnecessary test to placate an anxious patient.
We can offer clinical decision support to suggest what has worked for other patients, but we can’t keep a patient from asking for a expensive procedure that has a 10% chance of making him better (and a 20% chance of making him worse), nor can we make the moral decision about what treatment to pursue, for the patient or the doctor. Each patient is different, anyway. No one wants to be a statistic.
3. The insurance companies are not the locus of cost and treatment problems
Health insurers are a favorite target of hatred by Americans, exemplified by Michael Moore’s 2007 movie Sicko and more surprisingly in the 1997 romantic comedy As Good as it Gets, where I saw an audience applaud as Helen Hunt delivered a rant against health maintenance organizations. A lot of activists, looking at other countries, declare that our problems would be solved (well, would improve a lot) if we got private insurers out of the picture.
Sure, there’s a lot of waste in the current insurance system, which deliberately stretches out the task of payment and makes it take up the days of full-time staff in each doctor’s office. But that’s not the cause of the main problems in either costs or treatment failures. The problems lie with the beloved treatment staff. We can respect their hard work and the lives they save, but we don’t have to respect them for releasing patients from hospitals without adequate follow-up, or for ordering unnecessary radiation that creates harm for patients, or for the preventable errors that still (after years of publicity) kill 90,000 to 100,000 patients a year.
4. Doctors don’t want to be care managers
The premise of health reform is to integrate patients into a larger plan for managing a population. A doctor is supposed to manage a case load and keep his or her pipeline full while not spending too much. The thrust of various remuneration schemes, old and new, that go beyond fee for service (capitation, global payment systems) is to reward a doctor for handling patients of a particular type (for instance, elderly people with hypertension) at a particular cost. But doctors aren’t trained for this. They want to fix the immediate, presenting complaint and send the patient home until they’re needed again. Some think longitudinally, and diligently try to treat the whole person rather than a symptom. But managing their treatment options as a finite resource is just not in their skill set.
The United Kingdom–host of one of the world’s great national care systems–is about to launch a bold new program where doctors have to do case management. The doctors are rebelling. If this is the future of medicine, we’ll have to find new medical personnel to do it.
5. Patients don’t want to be care managers
Now that the medical field has responded superbly to acute health problems, we are left with long-term problems that require lifestyle and environmental changes. The patient is even more important than the doctor in these modern ills. But the patients who cost the most and need to make the most far-ranging changes are demonstrating an immunity to good advice. They didn’t get emphysema or Type 2 diabetes by acting healthily in the first place, and they aren’t about to climb out of their condition voluntarily either.
You know what the problem with chronic disease is? Its worst effects are not likely to show up early in life when lifestyle change could make the most difference. (Serious pain can come quickly from some chronic illnesses, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease, but these are also hard to fix through lifestyle changes, if by “lifestyle change” you mean breathing clean air.) The changes a patient would have to make to prevent smoking-related lung disease or obesity-related problems would require a piercing re-evaluation of his course of life, which few can do. And incidentally, they are neither motivated nor trained to store their own personal health records.
Hope for the future
Despite the disappointments I’ve undergone in learning about health care, I expect the system to change for the better. It has to, because the public just won’t tolerate more precipitous price hikes and sub-standard care.
There’s a paucity of citations in my five lessons because they tend not to be laid out bluntly in research or opinion pieces; for the most part, they emerged gradually over many hallway conversations I had. Each of the five lessons contain a “not,” indicating that they attack common myths. Myths (in the traditional sense) in fact are very useful constructs, because they organize the understanding of the world that societies have trouble articulating in other ways. We can realize that myths are historically inaccurate while finding positive steps forward in them.
The Silicon Valley mentality will have some effect through new devices and mobile phone apps that promote healthy activity. They can help with everything from basic compliance–remembering to take prescribed meds–to promoting fitness crazes and keeping disabled people in their homes. Lectures given once in a year in the doctor’s office don’t lead to deep personal change, but having a helper nearby (even a digital one) can impel a person to act better, hour by hour and day by day. This has been proven by psychologists over and over: motivation is best delivered in small, regular doses (a theme found in my posting from HIMSS).
Because the most needy patients are often the most recalcitrant ones, personal responsibility has to intersect with professional guidance. A doctor has to work the patient, and other staff can shore up good habits as well. This requires the doctors’ electronic record systems to accept patient data, such as weight and mood. Projects such as Indivo X support these enhancements, which traditional electronic record systems are ill-prepared for.
Although doctors eschew case management, there are plenty of other professionals who can help them with it, and forming Accountable Care Organizations gives the treatment staff access to such help. Tons of potential savings lie in the data that clinicians could collect and aggregate. Still more data is being loaded by the federal government regularly at Health.Data.Gov. ACOs and other large institutions can hire people who love to crunch big data (if such staff can be found, because they’re in extremely high demand now in almost every industry) to create systems that slide seamlessly into clinical decision support and provide guidelines for better treatment, as well as handle the clinic’s logistics better. So what we need to do is train a lot more experts in big data to understand the health care field and crunch its numbers.
Change will be disruptive, and will not be welcomed with open arms. Those who want a better system need to look at the areas where change is most likely to make a difference.
Andy Oram is an editor at O’Reilly Media. This post first appeared at O’Reilly Radar.
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