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Tag: Hospitals

Mrs. Verma Goes to Washington

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By ANISH KOKA MD 

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who runs Medicare, has had an active week. The problem facing much-beloved Medicare is one that faces every other government-funded healthcare extravaganza: it’s always projected to be running out of money. Medicare makes up 15% of the total federal budget. That’s almost $600 billion dollars out of a total federal outlay of $4 Trillion dollars. The only problem here is that revenues are around $3.6 trillion. We are spending money we don’t have, and thus there there is constant pressure to reduce federal outlays.

This is a feat that appears to be legislatively impossible.  The country barely is able to defund bridges to nowhere let alone try to reduce health care spending because, as everyone knows, any reduction in health care spending will spawn a death toll that would shame the black plague. The prior administration’s health policy wonk certified approach was to change the equation in health care from paying for volume to paying for value. This, we were assured, would allow us to get better healthcare for cheaper! And so we got MACRA, The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, that introduced penalties for doctors unable to provide ‘good’ care. Never mind that in some years good care means you treat everyone with a statin, and in others it means treat no one with a statin. When in Rome, live like the Romans. In 2018 parlance, that roughly translates to “check every box you can and everything will be all right.”Continue reading…

Life-Saving Data That Is Nowhere To Be Found: Hospitals’ C-section Rates

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By DANI BRADLEY MS, MPH 

The United States is the only developed nation in the world with a steadily increasing maternal mortality rate — and C-sections are to blame. Nearly 32% of babies are born via C-section in the United States, a rate of double or almost triple what the World Health Organization recommends. While C-sections are an incredibly important life-saving intervention when vaginal delivery is too dangerous, they are not devoid of risks for mom or for baby. Hospitals and doctors alike are aware, as it’s been widely reported that unnecessary C-sections are dangerous — and hospitals and doctors agree that the number one way to reduce this risk is to choose a delivery hospital with low a C-section rate. However, information on hospitals’ C-section rates is incredibly hard to find, which leaves women in the dark as they try to make this important choice.

In an effort to help women make informed decisions about where to deliver their babies, we set out to collect a comprehensive, nationwide database of hospitals’ C-section rates. Knowing that the federal government mandates surveillance and reporting of vital statistics through the National Vital Statistics System, we contacted all 50 states’ (+Washington D.C.) Departments of Public Health (DPH) asking for access to de-identified birth data from all of their hospitals. What we learned might not surprise you — the lack of transparency in the United States healthcare system extends to quality information, and specifically C-section data.
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Hospitals Can and Should Support Employees Who Are Victims of Domestic Violence: Here’s How

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By PATRICK HORINE

Every October we recognize Domestic Violence Awareness Month, an important opportunity to discuss this widespread social and public health problem and to take stock of what we can do better to protect victims of domestic abuse.

Unfortunately, the data shows us that health care is often a dangerous profession that is also rife with domestic abuse. Earlier this month a new poll of ER physicians revealed nearly half report having been physically assaulted at work (largely by patients and/or visitors in the ER). However, other data shows us that individuals in the health care professions – especially women—may be at greater risk of domestic abuse from a spouse or partner, while on the job as well. Data on domestic violence nationwide shows us one in four women are in a dangerous domestic situation, and one in four victims are harassed at work by perpetrators.  Women make up 80 percent of the healthcare workforce and an even greater percentage in most hospitals. When we do the math, this means one in 20 female healthcare workers are likely to be harassed or even assaulted on the job.

Furthermore, given that hospitals and most healthcare organizations are “open” facilities where anyone can walk onto the premises this further heightens the risk of a violent incident happening in the workplace. Over half of the homicides committed by intimate partners occur in parking lots and public buildings. News stories like the ones about a California healthcare worked stabbed in the hospital parking lot by her estranged husband while her co-workers looked on are all too tragic and common.

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Médecins sans Hôpitaux (Doctors without Hospitals)

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BY IAN MORRISON

There is lots of talk of disruption in healthcare particularly involving new entrants and weird combinations such as the CVS-Aetna merger, CIGNA and Express Scripts, Amazon Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan, and now Wal-Mart and Humana all claiming to transform healthcare. At the same time, we are seeing continued consolidation in the traditional healthcare industry with hospital systems merging at the local, regional and national level.

The rise of consumerism is affecting healthcare particularly the retail/primary care area where consumers are spending with their own money in a world of high-deductible healthcare.

The growth of digital health offers the opportunity to disrupt traditional care interactions in both the management of chronic conditions and in routine primary care. And there is a whole new set of patient decision-makers such as millennials who bringing with them different sensibilities in terms of access to services.Continue reading…

How Big Is Too Big?

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By MARC-DAVID MUNK, MD

Screen Shot 2016-05-20 at 8.38.33 AMWith healthcare mergers now announced seemingly every week, I’ve been giving some thought to scale:  How big can/ should health systems be?

Anecdotally, I’m struck that the most impressive healthcare companies in America are super- regional players:  Geissinger, Cleveland Clinic, UPMC, etc.  They seem to get a lot more attention than the national players with hundreds of facilities.

Leaving aside questions like strategy (e.g. is integration of payers/doctors/hospitals the key to these successes), I’ve wondered whether regional systems are simply the right size to thrive.  My suspicion is that even clever organizational structure (a topic which I wrote about last year) can’t overcome barriers that prevent large healthcare companies from innovating and thriving, particularly as companies move to risk and the business of healthcare becomes more complex. Like cellular organisms, large companies can outgrow their life support. (Interestingly, it’s actually the ratio of body volume to surface area [gas exchange, digestion, etc] that served as a constraint to organism size…)

I recently ran across a superb paper-  a doctoral thesis written by Staffan Canback.  Canback (who now leads the Economist Intelligence/ Canback predictive analytics consulting firm in Boston) wrote his thesis, called Limits of Firm Size: An Inquiry into Diseconomies of Scale in 2000, while a student in London. Canback argues, convincingly, that companies do become more efficient with scale, but reach a point where “diseconomies” begin to mitigate performance.  This may seem intuitive: (as Canback notes, if efficiency only improved with scale then we would buy everything from one company that produces everything with great levels of efficiency).  We don’t.

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The Transparency Trap

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By NIR J HARISH, MD

flying cadeuciiOn a recent shift in the Emergency Department, a resident boasted to me that she had convinced a patient to have an MRI done after discharge, rather than in the hospital. She was proud of this achievement because MRIs cost much more in the hospital than they do elsewhere – sometimes thousands of dollars more. To advocates of “cost-conscious care,” a new movement in medical education that aims to instill in young doctors a sense of responsibility for the financial consequences of their decisions, this story seems to belong in the ‘win’ column.

But this story also raises troubling questions: Why wasn’t the resident more concerned about how the hospital’s charging practices were leading her to delay care for her patient? What about the prolonged anxiety the patient would suffer? What about the extra day of work she would have to miss? And most importantly, why does an MRI cost thousands of dollars more in the hospital than it does across the street?

Like many doctors, she had fallen into the ‘transparency trap.’ This phenomenon is an unintended consequence of price transparency efforts that have come in response to patients and doctors being kept in the dark for decades about the prices of common services. Unfortunately, as the CEO of one large hospital put it, “the vast majority of [prices] have no relation to anything, and certainly not to cost.” In fact, studies have shown that in a functional market, MRIs would cost somewhere around $250, and we wouldn’t be nearly as concerned about doing too many of them.

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Why Prisons Should Try Readmissions Penalties

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By STUART M. BUTLER

Screen Shot 2015-08-21 at 12.53.18 PM

By the end of 2013 there were approximately 1.5 million people in state or federal prisons, and the U.S. incarceration rate is the highest in the world. And while there is debate about the relationship between this level of imprisonment and crime rates, there is considerable research to show that a spell of incarceration exacerbates economic and social conditions for families as well as former inmates, especially in low-income neighborhoods. That has led the Obama Administration and some interesting strange-bedfellow groups to call for alternatives to prison for some infractions.

The other side of the prison coin is recidivism. Prisons are often called “correctional facilities” but that is a cruel joke – they do a dismal job in turning lives around. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about two-thirds of released state prisoners were re-arrested within three years and three-quarters within five. Prison is a revolving door.Continue reading…

Dump the Business Model

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By JOE FLOWER

flying cadeuciiThere are no winners in the fee-for-service game.

It’s time to toss the whole business-as-usual model — for your own good and the good of your customers.

The emerging Default Model of health care — the “consumer-directed” insured fee-for-service model in which health plans compete to lower premiums by bargaining providers into narrow networks — not only does not work for health care’s customers, it cannot work. This is not because we are doing it wrong or being sloppy. By its very nature the Default Model must continually fail to bring our customers what they want and desperately need. Ultimately it cannot bring you, the providers, what you want and need.

Take a dive with me into the real-world game-theory mechanics of the health care economy, and you will see why. It’s time to rebuild the fundamental business models of health care.

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Surviving Healthcare

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Joe Flower 

Joe Flower

Health care is fragile. It survives in a much narrower band of circumstances than most of us realize. Right now many hospitals and systems are having a second down year in a row. They’re consolidating, laying off people, working through major shifts in strategy — all because of what we must admit (if we are honest) are relatively minor economic shifts, such as small reductions in utilization and Medicare payments, a blunting of accustomed price rises, and stronger bargaining from health plans.

If minor revenue stream problems put your entire institution in jeopardy of chaotic deconstruction, it cannot be called robust.

At the same time, an increasing number of vectors outside the sealed world of health care could overwhelm and kill your institution, from climate chaos to pollution disasters to epidemics and the loss of antibiotics.

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The Power of Small

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By David C. Kibbe, MD  & Vince Kuraitis

flying cadeuciiEverywhere we turn these days it seems “Big Data” is being touted as a solution for physicians and physician groups who want to participate in Accountable Care Organizations, (ACOs) and/or accountable care-like contracts with payers.

We disagree, and think the accumulated experience about what works and what doesn’t work for care management suggests that a “Small Data” approach might be good enough for many medical groups, while being more immediately implementable and a lot less costly. We’re not convinced, in other words, that the problem for ACOs is a scarcity of data or second rate analytics. Rather, the problem is that we are not taking advantage of, and using more intelligently, the data and analytics already in place, or nearly in place.

For those of you who are interested in the concept of Big Data, Steve Lohr recently wrote a good overview in his column in the New York Times, in which he said:

“Big Data is a shorthand label that typically means applying the tools of artificial intelligence, like machine learning, to vast new troves of data beyond that captured in standard databases. The new data sources include Web-browsing data trails, social network communications, sensor data and surveillance data.”

Applied to health care and ACOs, the proponents of Big Data suggest that some version of IBM’s now-famous Watson, teamed up with arrays of sensors and a very large clinical data repository containing virtually every known fact about all of the patients seen by the medical group, is a needed investment. Of course, many of these data are not currently available in structured, that is computable, format. So one of the costly requirements that Big Data may impose on us results from the need to convert large amounts of unstructured or poorly structured data to structured data. But when that is accomplished, so advocates tell us, Big Data is not only good for quality care, but is “absolutely essential” for attaining the cost efficiency needed by doctors and nurses to have a positive and money-making experience with accountable care shared-savings, gain-share, or risk contracts.

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