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Big Brother Taken To Another Level: Physician Movements Tracked With RFID Tags At Medical Conferences

May 2nd, 2011 by DrWes in Opinion, True Stories

Tags: American College of Cardiology, Big Brother, CME, Heart Rhythm Society, Intrusive Technology, Meaningful Use, Medical Conferences, P4P, Privacy, RFID, RFID Tags, Tags

Not everything that counts can be measured.
Not everything that can be measured counts.
-Albert Einstein

Recently, a disturbing trend of monitoring physician quality and accountability has taken another ominous turn: tracking physician’s movements at scientific conferences (so called “tag and release”) using RFID tags imbedded in attendees name badges at national scientific sessions. Having had personal experience with the recent American College of Cardiology meeting, this technology will also be imbedded in the name badges for attendees at the upcoming Heart Rhythm Society meeting to be held in San Francisco in May.

On first blush, it shouldn’t be such a big deal, right? It was all just a great way for companies to obtain, for a fee, the names and institutions of people who visited their display booths and for the conference organizers to track the movements of attendees. (Heck, maybe they can partner with an industry sponsor to pick up our traffic tolls on the way to the conference hall or arrange other exciting activities for us! [Said tongue-in-cheek, of course])

Instead of “opting in” for tracking at scientific meetings, doctors must “opt out” from the use of tracking technology when registering for scientific meetings. At the upcoming Heart Rhythm Society meeting for instance, doctors had to “opt out” from the use of RFID technology tracking by checking a box that says:

Badge scanning technology will be utilized at this event in order to better understand attendee/delegate interests and preferences. The information collected will be used to improve future events to better address your preferences. No personal information is stored in the RFID badge, only an ID number. We encourage all participants to take part in this process to ensure the most accurate data is obtained. You may check this box to opt-out of the RFID data collection.

There’s full disclosure, doctor.

But to me, the default tracking of doctors is disturbing on several levels.

First, tracking was approved by our professional society organizers upon their own members. It is no secret that these societies make a significant portion of their operating revenues from industry sponsors at these meetings. By instituting tracking, the value of their membership’s privacy has taken a back seat to the income generated from tracking revenues. By NOT checking a box, we have implicitly “agreed” to this tracking. (Realize we MUST wear our badge to attend these conferences where we gain our REQUIRED continuing education credits.) Because we have “agreed” in this manner, the tracking data are now legally “discoverable.” At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it is not too hard to imagine one’s credentials being called into question in court because a doctor did not demonstrate enough time in CME activities at the scientific sessions to quality for credit or because these data implicate a doctor in a purchasing agreement between a vendor and hospital system simply because a doctor visited a display booth.

Doctors have seen this sort of activity before when “only” our license and demographic information was sold by the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA currently “licenses” physician state medical license numbers and demographic information to health care information organizations (HIOs), HIOs then collect and compile this information with prescribing data that contains the doctors’ license numbers (no names, mind you) and then sell the lists to pharmaceutical companies. The AMA tells its members it does “not collect, license, sell or have access to physician prescribing data” and this is true. But the AMA facilitates an intermediary’s ability to pair doctors’ license information to a their prescribing habits via a third party. One can only speculate how out prescribing and practice profiles are being developed by other similar health information companies with the use of our RFID tracking data.

Behind all of this is a bigger issue: doctors are frustrated by the increasing intrusion into our day-to-day practice of medicine to measure things. Take, as one example, our “quality performance measures” that have done little to facilitate patients office visits, but rather add burdonsome documentation requirements in the interest of government payments. A number of hospital administrators have confided in me that it costs more to collect this data than they make in government payments. In fact, whether these programs are ultimately are found to be cost-effective or improve the quality of care has been brought into question in our literature. Yet we continue to collect these measures and expand them. We are now dispatching legions of people to collect and compile data to “prove” that Electronic Medical Records are used in a “meaningful” way. But an honest appraisal of this policy discloses the reality: these measures permit health care systems to collect another $40,000 per doctor from the government because they are using computers, not because it improves patients’ care in any “meaningful” way. As proof of the overburdensome nature of all this data collection for the physician, doctors (or their health care systems) are increasingly employing “scribes” to relieve them of the data-entry burdens in the name of “efficiency.” How much, exactly, do these scribes cost our health care system? Few dare to ask the question since no one wants to deny themselves of that juicy $40,000 pot of gold being paid per doctor.

Adding insult to injury, all doctors will soon be required to disclose if we receive anything over $100 from industry representatives. Like the public, most of us recognize the pernicious nature of industry influence upon our profession. Yet we now find we are being used. Should our professional organizations be any less forthright with their industry dealings and the use of our demographic data at national scientific sessions? How much is at stake?

Finally, we see more and more onerous licensure requirements and fees paid to the same tag-and-release operatives at considerable cost to ourselves. We now spend thousands of dollars to remain “credentialed.” We wonder how much the RFID “return on investment” to industry sponsors adds to our annual membership fees. Could it reduces them? Who knows? Maybe, like other IT models, we should insist our membership fees be waived if we agree to being RFID tagged and released because most of us realize someone’s making money on this deal.

In summary, doctors increasingly find the imperative to guard the privacy of our patients without regard to our own personal and professional privacy with the very same patients disturbing. Everything about doctors is being measured these days and it’s taking its toll on patient care. We are frustrated with the governmental bureaucratic standards that threaten our time with patients. But time with patients does not pay bills. Meeting data-collection milestones do. Our government and employers have lost sight of the main issue here: improving and expanding our contact with (and the ability to do good for) our patients.

But as long as there is money to be made with our personal information, it is clear that there will be those that will try to capitalize upon it, whether we realize it or not. Only by demanding constant accountability and transparency from the collectors of this information be they government bureaucrats or our professional society appointees, can we hope to maintain any modicum of professionalism in our tenuous doctor-patient relationships of the future.

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

Judging Illness Severity And The Financial Implications Of Dialing 911

May 1st, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Tips, True Stories

Tags: 911, Calling 911, Dialing 911, ED, Emergency Department, Emergency Medicine, Financial Implications, LinkedIn, Patient-Centered Care, Urgent Care, When to Call 911

Nora misjudged the height of the stair outside the restaurant, stepped down too hard, jammed her knee and tore her meniscus.  Not that we knew this at the time.  All we knew then was that she was howling from the pain.

There we were on a dark, empty, wet street in lower Manhattan, not a cab in sight, with a wailing, immobile woman.  What to do?  Call 911? Find a cab to take her home and contact her primary care doctor for advice?  Take her home, put ice on her knee, feed her Advil and call her doctor in the morning?

Sometimes it is clear that the only response to a health crisis is to call 911 and head for the emergency department (ED).  But in this case – and in so many others we encounter with our kids, our parents, our co-workers and on the street – the course of action is less obvious, while the demand for some action is urgent.

The question “which action?” has become more complicated of late because:

• In some communities, there are alternatives to an ambulance or a drive to the nearest ED, such as Urgent Care centers.
• Disincentives exist for going the route of the ED: in many cash-strapped municipalities we are charged for the cost of ambulance ride; we risk not having our ED visit covered by insurance if we make the wrong decision or fail to notify our health plan in a timely manner.  Or we don’t have insurance and the ED care is expensive.
• Some of us have a number of clinicians who could guide us about ED versus self care on any urgent health matter, plus our health plan may have a nurse advice line that could do the same.  Which among them to call?  How long will it take to get an answer in the middle of a busy workday or a late night?
• Many of us have no primary care clinician to call. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*

A Physician With Neck Cancer: Just As Frightened As Any Other Patient

April 30th, 2011 by DavedeBronkart in True Stories

Tags: d-Patient, E-Patient, ENT, Head and Neck Cancer, Oncology, Patient Empowerment, Patient Participation, Patient Story, Physician-As-Patient, When The Physician Is The Patient

Two years ago we wrote “Let’s hear it for the ‘d-patients’” — doctors who become e-patients themselves. We said “D-patients prove that patient empowerment is anything but anti-doctor. Heck, sometimes it’s a doctor preservation movement.”

A new article in our Journal of Participatory Medicine provides a compelling example: A Physician’s Experience as a Cancer of the Neck Patient: The Importance of Patient Participation. The author, Itzhak Brook MD, makes our point:

I am telling my personal story in the hope that health care providers will realize the difficult challenges faced by a patient diagnosed with cancer and undergoing extensive surgeries. I am also discussing the importance of active participation of the patient and their family members in all phases of care.

JoPM co-editor Charlie Smith adds, in his introductory note: (emphasis added)

You may wonder why a physician’s account of his illness and the frustrations he experienced merit publication in this journal. But, if a doctor has this degree of anxiety, this much difficulty getting information about his care and this degree of struggle making good decisions, then patients can easily understand why they feel so overwhelmed and incapable, at times, of truly “participating” in their own care. What we are advocating for is difficult in the best of circumstances and requires all hands on deck for the task! Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Death Threats For Hospital Pecking-Order Violations

April 29th, 2011 by Bongi in True Stories

Tags: Attendings, Breaking Rank, Disobeying Orders, Internal Medicine, Kalafong, Lung Biopsy, Pecking Order, Physicians In Training, Residents, South Africa, Thoracic Surgery, Thoracotomy

The consultants didn’t always need to know what was happening on the floor. But sometimes keeping things away from them became downright clandestine.

I was a senior registrar at Kalafong (hell). An old friend of mine had just taken up a post as consultant in the department of Internal Medicine. One day he approached me.

“Bongi, what are the chances you can do the occasional open lung biopsy for me?” Now there was no thoracic department in Kalafong so it seemed to me to be a reasonable request. In fact I was quite excited. It would give me a chance to do a few thoracotomies, something us general surgeons don’t do all that regularly.

“Sure! Anytime. Just let me know and I’ll book them on my list.”

“Uhmmm, there is just one small problem,” he continued, “I’ve already asked your consultant when the previous registrar was here and he bluntly refused, so I suppose you would need to convince him.” Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at other things amanzi*

When Husbands Gain Weight And Physicians Wimp Out

April 27th, 2011 by Dr. Val Jones in Opinion, Primary Care Wednesdays, True Stories

Tags: High Cholesterol, Hypercholesterolemia, Internal Medicine, Obesity, Obesity Counseling, Primary Care, Weight Loss

A friend of mine is in great physical shape but her husband (we’ll call him “Mr. B”)  has gained 40 pounds since they were married five years ago. He also has familial hypercholesterolemia, and several of his relatives have had heart attacks at young ages. Mrs. B is distraught – she is worried about her husband’s health, and has tried to gently nudge him towards healthier eating habits and regular exercise (as well as taking a statin for his cholesterol). Unfortunately, the nudges were received as nagging, and a wedge has formed between them in their relationship.

Last week my friend planned a trip to a primary care physician in the hopes that he would educate Mr. B about the dangers of being overweight and not treating his high cholesterol. “Surely Mr. B will listen to an expert” she thought, “then perhaps he’ll realize that he has to change his behavior.”

Unfortunately, the primary care physician didn’t offer any health counseling to Mr. B. Not only did he not mention that Mr. B should lose weight, but he didn’t provide any warnings about the dangers of untreated, very high cholesterol levels. He merely reported that Mr. B’s total cholesterol was 300, and that a statin was indicated.

Mrs. B was crestfallen. She was depending on the physician’s authoritative input to help her come up with a strategy to steer her husband towards better health. Now Mr. B was left with the impression that things were more-or-less ok, and that his wife’s concerns were exaggerated.   Read more »