Nursing homes, assisted living, and home care: Can we have reliable quality?

Getting older is unavoidable (until the end); I myself have been doing it all my life. When I was a child and getting older (being a teenager! Or an adult!), it was an entirely positive aspiration. Now, not so much. We know that we will die, and as we grow old, if we are lucky enough to not die young, we know that are going to meet that end sooner rather than later.

As I have grown past “Medicare age”, I have personally experienced many of the issues that I have worked through with patients over the decades, and am also experiencing (vicariously, but closer) the travails of my much-older parent. While not everything that happens with aging is negative (retirement, not going to work every day, is a major positive, provided you can afford it!), the body and the mind can’t do what they once did and often really start to fall apart. Those of us who are lucky enough to avoid dementia, from Alzheimer’s disease or another cause, still find ourselves with memory lapses. And hopefully, we can continue to find ourselves, and our keys, and remember the word or name that we know so well but just is evading us, or the reason we came into this room. A colleague of mine calls this “benign senile forgetfulness”, and I guess it is benign, as long as it doesn’t progress too fast.

Aging is a process of the body falling apart. Different pieces fall apart in different people at different rates, and some folks overall do better for longer than others, but there is an inexorable downward progression. There are things that we can do to help, to slow it, to lessen the risks we face (see, for example, Jane Brody’s article on How to Prevent Falls); among the most important is continued physical activity, as vigorous as we are able to do. I tell people, with a straight face because I am serious, that when I was young I worked out to get fitter and stronger, but now I work out to just fall apart a little more slowly.

As we age we are more likely to acquire disease. These include both the diseases associated with aging (although they can occur younger ages) like Alzheimer’s and arthritis, as well as almost all other diseases that become more common and often more serious: heart disease, most cancers, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, influenza, etc. The real question becomes when and even whether to treat them. In youth and well into (and past) middle age we are conditioned to think of illness as curable, or at least significantly treatable. This attitude is enabled by the medical profession, that can do so much more than it used to be able to, and the health care industry, which makes money on it. And we tend to take these views into older age, even when the treatment is worse than the disease, as it often is, or there is no demonstrated benefit, and sometimes definite evidence of harm, both in treatment and even in “preventive” screening (see the CDC and USPSTF recommendations for age-appropriate screening).

Aging and its accompanying diseases and infirmities may require a change in our living situation. Options can include living with family members, or having a health aide (living in or commuting, see below), or a variety of institutional settings ranging from “independent living” (your own place, but some easily accessible help, such as available meals and nurse visits), to “assisted living” (regular meals, more nursing and cleaning help, more protected environment) to full-on nursing home (skilled) care. Given the variety of options, both in terms of “level” of care and in terms of quality and cost of provider, we should be able to depend on licensing, legal standards, and ratings. Unfortunately, we are not always able to do so.

“Care Suffers as More Nursing Homes Feed Money Into Corporate Webs”, in the NY Times on January 2, 2018, documents just what the title says. Most nursing homes are owned by for-profit companies, often very large regional or national corporations, and thus there can be cuts in the quality of care (the service ostensibly being rendered) in order to increase profits. Or, looking at it the other way, every dollar spent on actually delivering care is a dollar lost to profit. The insurance industry has a cute term for this, “medical loss ratio”, which is the money lost to the bottom line by paying health insurance claims. In addition, nursing homes contract “out” for many services (food, cleaning, etc.), and management of the homes, and rent for the buildings. The companies that they contract with are often owned by the same people, but through this trick these costs now become fixed expenses, not covered by regulations governing the nursing home itself. Voilà! Instant profit!

Similar problems abound in other levels of care. “U.S. Pays Billions for ‘Assisted Living,’ but What Does It Get?”, NY Times February 3, 2018, documents the low quality of care often provided to people in assisted living for whom Medicaid is paying as much as $30,000 a year (for assisted living, mind you, not even for skilled nursing services). Part of the problem in this case is that, because Medicaid is a joint state-federal program, they operate “…under a patchwork of vague standards and limited supervision by federal and state authorities.” And, again the people being cared for are the ones who suffer.

So there is good reason to be concerned about these institutions. What about home care? At least that is in your own house, right? On January 31, 2018, the Times had two articles about it. One was from Britain, although it is actually describing institutions, “home care” settings that are like small private assisted living facilities. “Britain Was a Pioneer in Outsourcing Services. Now, the Model Is ‘Broken,” discusses serious adverse health outcomes for people in “home care” there. This could be seen as a ‘gotcha’ for those of us who advocate a national health system, which Britain has, but there are some important caveats. One, of course, is that these are not “home care” in the US sense, and a second is that the fault is clearly not with having a national health system, but rather the efforts to privatize aspects of it (“outsourcing”) which has failed because – surprise – these private sector companies make more profit if they provide cheaper, read “worse”, care! The less national, government involvement, the worse the care.

The other important point is to remember the difference between how much money is spent and how it is distributed. The US spends a lot of money, but it is incredibly unequally distributed among the population. Britain distributes it much more equitably, but has (particularly under Tory governments) underfunded it, including the efforts to privatize aspects of it described in this article. Now, if the US distributed its health care funds in a manner similar to the British NHS, it could spend a lot less and the people would get a lot more!

The other article, from the US, is about what we truly understand to be home care, but its focus is not on the quality of care for patients but the difficulties confronted by the home care workers. Titled “For Health Care Workers, the Worst Commutes in New York City,” it specifically addresses the commutes (from poorer neighborhoods where the mostly-minority mostly-female home care workers live to where they work). But these workers are also poorly paid and lack benefits, often including paid time off, and ironic but true, health coverage! They are, of course, employed by for-profit companies. We depend on these people to care for our parents, or us, but like many involved in the doing-actually-important-things-that-make-a-real-difference-in-people’s-lives industries (e.g., teaching, social work, etc.) they are underpaid and undervalued in comparison to those in the let’s-make-a-lot-of-money-for-ourselves-and-the-heck-with-them industries.

Those who advocate a for-profit capitalist market as the solution to all problems, and particularly the privatization of currently government-run activities, claim that the private sector can operate more efficiently and more cost-effectively, and provide better service than a government bureaucracy. This claim usually turns out to be untrue. Such companies, particularly when gifted with government contracts, are better at making profit, especially by keeping down workers’ wages and cutting back services. When we talk about the care of our seniors, our parents, ourselves, the tradeoff between adequate care and profit is not one any of us would want to make; we want the best quality of care, period. So whether this is compromised by inadequate funding, as in the case of British home care, or (almost worse) adequate funding but excessive profit-taking by the private sector, it is unacceptable.

There is an answer. Have the structure of our society reflect the things that most people actually value. Have a well-funded national health system or a well-regulated private one, that ensures quality of care for its clients and living wages for its workers. The elimination of excessive profits (or all profit in a government-run system) would make it not only better, but still cheaper than the way we do it now, where the “care” is the “medical loss” to profit.

“Good enough for Government Work”: Quality, cost, and gaming the system, Part 1 (of 4 parts)

This is part one of the Charles Odegaard Lecture, delivered at the 27th National Conference on Primary Health Care Access, April 6, 2016

“The dream of reason did not take power into account”.

--Paul Starr, "The Social Transformation of American Medicine", 1982

In 2008, the British Healthcare Commission began an investigation into conditions at Stafford Hospital, run by the Mid-Staffordshire Health Trust.[1] The investigation was prompted by patient complaints and a higher-than-expected death rate, and it and subsequent[2] investigations uncovered a pattern of both poor quality care and cover-ups by those running the hospital. It became a major national scandal. In 2014, whistleblowers began to reveal the extent of problems in the Phoenix Veterans Administration system, with long delays for appointments, inadequate care, and even excess deaths. The investigation revealed enormous cuts in services, as well as efforts to cover up the problems, similar to those in Stafford. Moreover, it turned out that the problem was far more extensive across the VA than just Phoenix.

These two events are discussed by M. Gregg Bloche in his NEJM Perspective “Scandal as a Sentinel Event — Recognizing Hidden Cost–Quality Trade-offs”[3]. The details of the two scandals differ, as do the health systems of the two countries in which they occurred, but there are disturbing similarities.

“As with the VA scandal,” Bloche writes, talking about Staffordshire, “politicians blamed individual perpetrators and one another, and the prevailing narrative highlighted lapses of character and culture…In both cases, performance standards often proved incompatible with resource constraints….The fakery was discovered, and perpetrators were punished. But the truth that trade-offs between quality and cost were embedded in budget constraints remained submerged.”

So, while more rigorous standards were being set for performance, budgets were being cut. These cuts made it difficult or impossible to meet those standards, and administrators in both systems covered up the problems. They lied about their compliance with the standards -- and, not coincidentally, often got financial bonuses for doing so (or at least got to keep their jobs). In addition to the probably unnecessary deaths, outcomes were more generally poor care for all patients. In the British case, the excess deaths were pretty well documented, as were the stories of patients lying in urine and excrement, inadequate food, and unavailable nursing care. In the US, at the VA, proving excess deaths was more difficult, but excessively long waits, particularly for specialty services, may well have contributed to unnecessary or premature mortality, and falsifications by the administrators were very clear.

In both cases, heads rolled – local administrators, the head of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, and in the US eventually the head of the VA.  The politicians, in the US Congress and the British Parliament, who had been responsible for the funding cuts in the first place, took no responsibility and indeed used these scandals to act in a self-righteous manner, denouncing “those responsible”, while being clear that this did not include themselves. Nowhere in the discourse in the media are the budget constraints and cutbacks acknowledged as a major cause of the problem.

And, yet, the politicians were surely responsible, because it was the budget cuts that they imposed, along with the potential they built in to these systems for financial gain on the part of those directly tasked with running the operations, that led to these problems, certainly along with the collusion of the people directly in charge. The process has had two steps  – first, we are going to cut your funding and you are going to have to figure out how to cut in a way that doesn’t, at least obviously and in a manner that reflects on us, cut services. Second, we are going to tie rewards – institutional and personal (direct financial bonuses, or at least keeping your jobs) – to the degree that you can cut costs. We are also going, to a greater or lesser degree, “privatize” operations on the assumption that this will, with the motivation of profit, increase the efficiency (and lower the cost). And if we cannot privatize them, we will use “motivators” characteristic of private enterprise – again see financial bonuses. And now a right-wing group of Koch-funded consultants and legislators is creating a proposal to essentially privatize the VHA, covered by Suzanne Gordon,

“The proposal they have crafted is an exercise in incoherence, denial, and magical thinking. he group believes that private sector hospitals would be willing and able to recreate VHA Centers of Excellence and other programs like the San Francisco VAHCS’s Center of Excellence in Epilepsy or Primary Care Education or Palo Alto’s polytrauma, blind or spinal cord injury rehabilitation programs. It also believes the private sector could fulfill the VHA’s research and teaching missions. As one San Francisco VAHCS researcher told me, “Can you see my eyes rolling?”’ http://suzannecgordon.com/the-plot-thickens/

It is of more than passing interest that both of these events occurred in government agencies that were established to provide necessary care to people. In Britain, the National Health Service, established in 1948 to expand upon the National Health Insurance program that had existed since prior to WW I, is enormously popular because it provides care to everyone. Let’s think about this for a minute. 1948 was soon after the war. Britain, as most of Europe (but not the US) was in shambles, its population of young men decimated, its economy and industrial capacity largely destroyed, its streets covered with rubble from the Blitz (think the street scenes of East London in Call the Midwife from over a decade later), and the last thing that they had was “extra money”.

 
 But the National Health Service was established, not as largesse in a time of plenty, but as a way of meeting the needs of the British people. In the US, a different story unfolded; with its industrial capacity intact and the need to shift from war to consumer production, the demand for labor exceeded the number of workers. Prevented from increasing wages because of wage and price controls, large companies found offering health insurance (non-taxable) a significant inducement, and found common cause with labor unions who could then offer these benefits to their members; a win-win that led to the employer-based health system that has characterized the US since.

In Britain, the Mid-Staffordshire scandal broke under a Labor government, but the seeds were sown when the Conservatives were in control. Recognizing that the NHS was far too popular to be dismantled, the Tories, seeking to emulate the US, both cut funding and established “NHS Foundation Trusts”, like Mid-Staffordshire, which were in a sense semi-privatized and incented to save money by being offered an opportunity to keep some of the savings, which could be used both for reinvestment in the hospitals and health system and to bonus those in charge. In the US, our services to veterans have almost never (as documented by Bloche) kept up with our rhetoric about the heroism of the men and women who serve in our military, and the VA scandal was tightly linked to cuts in funding. Indeed, some of the “solutions” offered by the same Congressmen who were responsible for the cuts involved privatization; this is often proposed as a solution to not having enough money, and almost never works, at least if the goal is improving quality.

As Suzanne Gordon says in her piece on the growing efforts in Washington to privatize the VA:

‘In their document, the Strawmen [the group working on this] justify their position on total privatization by pointing to the fact that the VHA is having trouble hiring new recruits to fill many staff vacancies because of the “stigma” attached to working at the VHA.  They also argue that the current VHA workforce suffers from “poor morale” and a “culture of fear.” Of course, VHA management practices could be significantly improved.  But if there is now a “stigma” attached to working at the VHA, a “culture of fear” within it, or demoralization among its current employees, that is, in great part, due to the bashing conservatives have unleashed in the media and Congress.’

But we’ll get back to that.

(to be continued)

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[1] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110504135228/http://www.cqc.org.uk/_db/_documents/Investigation_into_Mid_Staffordshire_NHS_Foundation_Trust.pdf

[2] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20150407084003/http://www.midstaffspublicinquiry.com/report

[3] N Engl J Med 374;11 nejm.org March 17, 2016, pp 1001-3

"Call the Midwife": If Britain could afford to create a National Health Service after WWII, we can now!

The main argument against not cutting (not to mention expanding) social services, including health care, for the most needy, is that we “cannot afford it”. This is the argument of the governors and legislatures in states that have refused to expand Medicaid, despite clear and convincing evidence that it will cost states much more to not do so (see Medicaid expansion will leave out many of the poorest: What is wrong with this picture?, May 26, 2013). This is portrayed in a very funny – except it’s really not -- “Daily Show” segment, cited by Dr. Allen Perkins in his blog, “Training Family Doctors”, Medicaid Expansion by the Numbers. Not being able to “afford” it is the mantra not only in the US, but also across Europe as those austerity hawks have been cutting off their people’s noses – and their election chances – in thrall to a false god.

So it was very interesting for me to watch the first episode of the British (BBC One) television series (now in its second season) “Call the Midwife”. Set in a poverty-stricken area of East London in 1957, midwives pedal their bicycles around the crowds of people and rubble that still covers the streets more than a decade after the end of World War II to attend to

pregnant women in their homes, delivering prenatal care and babies and even caring for the babies afterward. It is a not a beautiful scenario; the young midwife, Jenny Lee (based on the real life midwife Jennifer Worth, whose memoirs form the basis for the series and who died in 2011) has never seen such poverty, such crowding, such filth, so many children. It is the height of the “baby boom”, attributed initially to returning GIs who had to wait to start their families, but continuing with no end in sight; the women portrayed are having their fourth or fifth baby in their early 20s and many far more. In fact, of course, the end of this “boom” was not the aging out of the reproductive population but the introduction of effective and widely available contraception (especially birth control pills) in the 1960s.

The midwives, all nurses and many Anglican nuns, set up clinics in a gym in the interval between the pensioners’ breakfast and the evening dance classes, as well as attending women at home. They practice an obstetrics that is quaintly anachronistic, both in its tools (the wooden “fetoscope” to amplify the fetus’ heart sounds, and the glass rectal tube), and in practice (shaving the pubic area and administering enemas – “high, hot, and a helluva lot!”) but they provide much safer pregnancies and deliveries than had ever been available to this population in the past. At one point, a woman in her 23^rd (!!) pregnancy (already with 24 children, because of two sets of twins) goes into premature labor and the midwife is there to deliver what seems to be a stillbirth and begin care for the hemorrhaging mother while awaiting the arrival of the “obstetrics flying squad” with its ambulance, obstetrician, and pediatrician to continue to care, including blood transfusion in the home. When, miraculously, the baby comes to life, the mother refuses to send it to the hospital, feeding it milk with a dropper. The senior midwife tells Jenny that “we don’t ever care for these babies anymore; in the old days they died; now they go to the hospital.” When asked what they will do, she tells her they will visit three times a day until the baby is stable, and then at least once a day thereafter. In the home.

It is a dramatic and engaging story, but what fascinates me is that these services were available to these poor women. Home visits for prenatal care and delivery. Visits from nurses three times a day. An obstetrics “flying squad” to come to the homes of women who would otherwise die in childbirth. Where did the money for these services come from? Who paid these midwives, and these flying squad doctors? Well, the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS, established after the war, in 1948, to provide health care to all people in the UK. Not established at a time of prosperity, when we could “afford” it, but right after World War II, with both the nation’s economy and its literal infrastructure in shambles, with the piles of rubble still on the streets of London in 1957, 15 years after the Blitz. The National Health Service was not founded as a gesture of magnanimity from the wealthy, but as but as an explicit and well-thought out policy to provide one of the most basic of needs, health care, to all of the British people even though there was not much money; it was seen as a priority. In the second episode of "Call the Midwife", a woman who has lost 4 babies because of a pelvis contracted from rickets (vitamin D deficiency in childhood) is delivered of a healthy baby by Caesarean section. Rickets itself, the senior midwife says, is a disease of poverty and malnutrition eliminated by the NHS.

From the time I went to college and met upper-middle-class people, through my career as a doctor when I know lots of them, I have heard “horror stories” about the NHS, about the waits for things “we” never have to wait for, like elective surgeries. “My cousin says”, or “the people we had visiting from England told us”. But it was always apparent to me that this was a skewed group; the folks visiting from Britain on holiday were not the poor, were not the Welsh coalminers who had never had health care before. It is hard, I guess, when you have always been at the front of the queue, when the queue has always been so short for you that you didn’t even know there was one, to have to take your place in it; to wait in line with the hoi polloi. But ask those who never had had care, ask the poor, ask the women having babies in the Docklands.

My point here is not to romanticize poverty, or to suggest that things have always been perfect with the British NHS. It is, rather, to say that the provision of basic health care to all people is not and never has been a question of economics, it has always been a question of will. We can afford do it; indeed we cannot afford not to. Not only is it a “good investment”, it is essential humanity. Paul Krugman calls the group of health care expansion opponents “The Spite Club”, (June 7, 2013), arguing convincingly that their opposition is ideological, not fiscal. It is doubly sad to see this ideology acting in Europe, cutting the social safety net that has been in place there for decades.

When you think about what we can “afford” in health care, think about midwives making home visits to premature infants three times a day in the poorest areas of London in 1957. The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) may not be the best vehicle to bring care to the poorest (I still argue for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all, system), but opposing it is not fiscally responsible; it is both fiscally and morally reprehensible.

Calcium, Heart Attack and Osteoporosis

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A recent meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal by Bolland, et. al., finds that there is a 30% increase in the risk of myocardial infarction (MI) in women taking calcium supplements for osteoporosis (“Effect of calcium supplements on risk of myocardial infarction and cardiovascular events: meta-analysis”, BMJ 2010;341:c3691). If supported by other research, this could be big news, as millions of women are doing just that. A few “bullets”:

· 15 studies were reviewed by the meta-analysis comprising comparisons of 12,000 women either taking or not taking calcium supplementation for osteoporosis. For some of these studies results were available for individual women, and some for just the group as a whole, but the results were similar.

· Women receiving calcium had 30% more MIs than those who were not. Other end points: stroke, death from cardiovascular disease, and death overall, did not show significant differences, although they did show trends toward reduction in the non-calcium groups.

· The studies reviewed in the meta-analysis were all of women taking calcium but not taking vitamin D supplementation with it.

· The studies were not done for the purpose of looking at cardiovascular mortality; the data were re-analyzed and other sources of data were used to look at the outcome events.

The authors recommend that women who are taking calcium without vitamin D for osteoporosis stop doing so unless they are also taking a drug that treats osteoporosis, such as a bisphosphonate (which have their own risks, although in women with osteoporosis these are usually outweighed by the benefits) or selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) like raloxifene, usually used for breast cancer treatment (links are to a few different websites, including WebMD, FDA, and BreastCancer.org; they are representative although not definitive, and there are, of course, other sites). They note that their results are similar to other studies of women taking calcium alone, although a Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study on women taking both calcium and vitamin D did not show any effect on the incidence of coronary artery disease. The authors suggest possible reasons for the difference, including protective effects of vitamin D, the younger age of the WHI participants (mean of 62 vs. 75 for the meta-analysis), and the interesting, but slightly confusing fact, that the WHI study had a much higher percent of women who were taking calcium before the study began (“non-protocol”): 54% vs. 1.2%. If taking calcium is associated with more MIs, why would women who were taking more calcium before the study have lower rates? And yet, the authors note that “Interestingly, the only study in our analysis that reported a relative risk of less than 1.0 for myocardial infarction with calcium also had high non-protocol use of calcium supplements.”

In their accompanying editorial, “Calcium supplements in people with osteoporosis”, BMJ 2010;341:c3856), JGF Cleland, K Witte and S Steel go farther than the authors of the meta-analysis, saying clearly in their sub-head “Should not be given without concomitant treatment for osteoporosis”, even when given with vitamin D. Their justification is the lack of good evidence for improved outcomes, including pathologic fractures, with the use of calcium and vitamin D. “Calcium supplements, given alone, improve bone mineral density, but they are ineffective in reducing the risk of fractures and might even increase risk, they might increase the risk of cardiovascular events and they do not reduce mortality. They seem to be unnecessary in adults with an adequate diet. Given the uncertain benefits of calcium supplements, any level of risk is unwarranted.” With regard to vitamin D, they say “Vitamin D supplements might reduce the risk of falls, might have important clinical effects on cardiovascular function, do not increase mortality, and may mitigate the trend to excess mortality seen with calcium supplements alone. However, no conclusive data are available to show that current doses of vitamin D supplements with or without calcium supplements reduce the rates of fracture, and meta-analyses found evidence of substantial reporting bias.”

The editorialists emphasize that while calcium does increase bone density, this is a surrogate variable while the issues of fractures and mortality are the true outcomes, an issue I have addressed several times recently (Rosiglitazone and the "Holy Grail", July 16, 2010; Statins and scientific integrity, July 6, 2010 ). They say “Surrogate measures may be useful in pilot studies but become problematic when they become the goal of treatment.” They are quite rigorous in looking and risk and benefit, noting even that exercise, while perhaps a good way to increase bone strength, “also carries risk”. They cite Kanis, et. al., from 2002[1], but it should be obvious that exercise can have risk.

The last part of the editorial is, however, more concerning to me. The authors call for greater demonstration that drugs will have positive effects on important outcome variables (a good thing) but they then worry that such requirements will be so burdensome as to stifle research: “Requiring companies to show before licensing that treatments for chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, diabetes, and hypertension reduce long term disability and death could lead to a cessation of research in these areas. The cost and commercial risk would be too high.” They then call for an extension of patents on these drugs to 50 years, similar to the Berne convention for copyrights on a song. The presumption is that this would be long enough for the companies to make back their money. Obviously, however, this also means that consumers would have to pay the higher costs for patent, rather than generic-equivalent drugs, for much longer.

Amazingly these authors, despite citing no conflicts of interests (which might explain such a position if they in fact held patents or were being paid honoraria by pharmaceutical manufacturers) dispense with such concerns in a single sentence “Lower prices for innovative drugs could be negotiated.” By whom? How? What would be the effect on the consumer? All I can imagine is that because they are British, and in Britain there is a National Health Service which charges a fixed fee to patients for all drugs, that they are thinking only of cost to the NHS and have no idea how much the cost of patented drugs is to Americans. Which, as Americans know, can be phenomenally high. (Example: generic alendronate, the oldest bisphosphonate, costs roughly $40 a month for either 35mg [recommended for prevention of osteoporosis] or 70mg [recommended for treatment of osteoporosis] per week doses, while the brand name, Fosamax ® costs about twice that; for those not available generically, risendronate (Actonel ®) costs 3 times as much, and ibandronate (Boniva ®) costs about $350 a month; all prices wholesale from ePocrates and www.drugstore.com.) Taking drugs that you need for a chronic disease is very different from downloading a song!

Of course, this is another strong argument for having a national health insurance plan that covers everyone. In the meantime, while we will wait for the certain flurry of responses and comments, not taking calcium unless one is also taking a bisphosphonate or similar osteoporosis treatment drug, seems prudent; taking vitamin D, without calcium, for its other benefits, is probably still a good idea.

[1] Kanis JA, Brazier JE, Stevenson M, Calvert NW, Lloyd JM. Treatment of established osteoporosis: a systematic review and cost-utility analysis. Health Technol Assess 2002;6:1-146.
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