May 20th, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Health Policy, News, Research
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It was 1999 when the Federal government first acknowledged our nation had a problem with race and health care. That year, Congress tasked the Institute of Medicine to study the matter, and the resulting report was not good. Minorities were in poor health and receiving inferior care, the report said. They were less likely to receive bypass surgery, kidney transplants and dialysis. If they had diabetes, they were more likely to undergo amputations, meaning their disease had been poorly controlled. And there was a lot more where that came from.
The IOM report was a call to action. In subsequent years, lawmakers crafted policies and established goals for improvement. Federal and state governments and numerous foundations set aside billions to fund projects. Health services researchers expanded their efforts to study the problem.
Twelve years later, we have something to show for the effort. Steep declines in the prevalence of cigarette smoking among African Americans have narrowed the gap in lung cancer death rates between them and whites, for example. Inner city kids have better food choices at school. The 3-decade rise in obesity rates, steepest among minorities, has leveled off.
Nevertheless, racial disparities persist across the widest possible range of health services and disease states in our country. The overall death rate from cancer is 24% higher for African-Americans than white people. The racial gap in colorectal cancer mortality has widened since the 1980s. African Americans with diabetes experienced declines in recommended foot, eye, and blood glucose testing between 2002-2007. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
May 13th, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Health Policy, Health Tips
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Like everybody else, physicians are expanding their online personal identities. At the same time, they are trying to comply with codes of conduct that help consumers trust them and their profession.
There’s no problem so long as the personal online activities of physicians don’t jeopardize their obligations as professionals, which means that there is a problem, unfortunately.
In a recent study for example, 17% of all blogs authored by health professionals were found to include personally identifiable information about patients. Scores of physicians have been reprimanded for posting similar information on Twitter and Facebook, posting lewd pictures of themselves online, tweeting about late night escapades which ended hours before they performed surgery, and other unsavory behaviors.
As I mentioned Monday, medical students and younger physicians who grew up with the Internet have to be particularly careful, since they had established personal online identities before accepting the professional responsibilities that came with their medical degree. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
May 2nd, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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For the first time in 30 years, an expert panel has updated guidelines for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. The long overdue facelift should favorably impact care for millions and accelerate badly needed research on the disease.
The guidelines were produced by representatives from the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association. They portray Alzheimer’s for the first time as a three-stage disease. In addition to ‘Stage 3,’—the full-blown clinical syndrome that had been described in earlier versions of the guidelines—the new guidelines describe an earlier ‘Stage 2,’ of mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s, and a ‘Stage 1, or preclinical’ phase of the disease. The latter can only be detected with biochemical marker tests and brain scans.The guidelines legitimize years’ worth of observations by the family members of Alzheimer’s patients, who recognize in retrospect that Grandpa had a slowly progressive cognitive disorder long before he was diagnosed. The guidelines also reflect progress on the research front, where it has now been established that the disease begins years before patients become symptomatic.
Alzheimer’s patients and their families, and the teetering US health system that supports them, would have been better served by the publication of these guidelines 2-3 years ago. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
October 13th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Expert Interviews
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OptumHealth is one of the largest health and wellness companies in the United States, providing services to about 58 million people. It is the umbrella organization for 12 consumer-directed healthcare companies recently purchased by UnitedHealth Group. I caught up with the CEO of OptumHealth Care Solutions, Rob Webb, at Health 2.0 to find out what they’re up to and how they’re hoping to contribute to healthcare reform.
Dr. Val: What does Optum Health do?
Webb: We work with about 300,000 people a day. We’re focused on the consumer-provider interaction and we try to help consumers make better decisions in four key areas: 1) help them find the right provider for their needs, 2) to provide them with an unbiased set of information about what their treatment options are 3) optimize their pharmaceutical regimens and medication compliance and 4) help them improve their lifestyle choices. In the past we focused a lot of our efforts on #3 because it’s so tangible and there’s an entire PBM (pharmacy benefits management) industry to help. Read more »
February 25th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Health Policy, Opinion
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Pretty much everyone agrees that we need to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to patients. We’ve all heard the frightening statistics from the Institute of Medicine about medical error rates – that as many as 98,000 patients die each year as a result of them – and we also know that the US spends about 33% more than most industrialized country on healthcare, without substantial improvements in outcomes.
However, a large number of quality improvement initiatives rely on additional rules, regulations, and penalties to inspire change (for example, decreasing Medicare payments to hospitals with higher readmission rates, and decreasing provider compensation based on quality indicators). Not only am I skeptical about this stick vs. carrot strategy, but I think it will further demoralize providers, pit key stakeholders against one another, and cause people to spend their energy figuring out how to game the system than do the right thing for patients.
There is a carrot approach that could theoretically result in a $757 billion savings/year that has not been fully explored – and I suggest that we take a look at it before we “release the hounds” on hospitals and providers in an attempt to improve healthcare quality.
I attended the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on budget options for health care reform on February 25th. One of the potential areas of substantial cost savings identified by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is non evidence-based variations in practice patterns. In fact, at the recent Medicare Policy Summit, CBO staff identified this problem as one of the top three causes of rising healthcare costs. Just take a look at this map of variations of healthcare spending to get a feel for the local practice cultures that influence treatment choices and prices for those treatments. There seems to be no organizing principle at all.
Senator Baucus (Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee) appeared genuinely distressed about this situation and was unclear about the best way to incentivize (or penalize) doctors to make their care decisions more uniformly evidence-based. In my opinion, a “top down” approach will likely be received with mistrust and disgruntlement on the part of physicians. What the Senator needs to know is that there is a bottom up approach already in place that could provide a real win-win here.
Some 340 thousand physicians have access to a fully peer-reviewed, regularly updated decision-support tool (called “UpToDate“) online and on their PDAs. This virtual treatment guide has 3900 contributing authors and editors, and 120 million page views per year. The goal of the tool is to make specific recommendations for patient care based on the best available evidence. The content is monetized 100% through subscriptions – meaning there is no industry influence in the guidelines adopted. Science is carefully analyzed by the very top leaders in their respective fields, and care consensuses are reached – and updated as frequently as new evidence requires it.
Not only has this tool developed “cult status” among physicians – but some confess to being addicted to it, unwilling to practice medicine without it at their side for reference purposes. The brand is universally recognized for its quality and clinical excellence and is subscribed to by 88% of academic medical centers.
In addition, a recent study published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics found that there was a “dose response” relationship between use of the decision support tool and quality indicators, meaning that the more pages of the database that were accessed by physicians at participating hospitals, the better the patient outcomes (lower complication rates and better safety compliance), and shorter the lengths of stay.
So, we already have an online, evidence-based treatment support guide that many physicians know and respect. If improved quality measures are our goal, why not incentivize hospitals and providers to use UpToDate more regularly? A public-private partnership like this (where the government subsidizes subscriptions for hospitals, channels comparative clinical effectiveness research findings to UpToDate staff, and perhaps offers Medicare bonuses to hospitals and providers for UpToDate page views) could single handedly ensure that all clinicians are operating out of the same playbook (one that was created by a team of unbiased scientists in reviewing all available research). I believe that this might be the easiest, most palatable way to target the problem of inconsistent practice styles on a national level. And as Senator Baucus has noted – the potential savings associated with having all providers on the same practice “page” is on the order of $757 billion. And that’s real money.
I highly recommend a bottom up approach, not top down. That’s how you win docs and influence patients.
The IOM report was a call to action. In subsequent years, lawmakers crafted policies and established goals for improvement. Federal and state governments and numerous foundations set aside billions to fund projects. Health services researchers expanded their efforts to study the problem.
