Doctors' incomes and patient coverage: both need to be more equal

On Sunday, January 18, 2014, the New York Times ran another stellar front-page piece by Elisabeth Rosenthal addressing the fact that, as the title states clearly, Patients’ Costs Skyrocket; Specialists’ Incomes Soar. It continues, with detailed documentation, her explanation of how providers – in this case doctors, and in particular the most highly paid subspecialists -- game the system of insurance reimbursement to maximize their income, and how patients pay the price. She focuses particularly on dermatologists, whose combination of high income and low workload makes them the exemplar of what medical students call the “ROAD”, the specialties of radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology, and dermatology, all of which are known for having high income/work-hours ratios.

Rosenthal addresses in particular a kind of dermatologic surgery called Mohs surgery, which commands a high price. Mohs surgery is very good for its ability to identify margins of a skin cancer and leave less of a scar, but it can be, and often is, overused at high cost. She cites a particular case of a woman who had a small basal cell cancer (the kind that almost never metastasizes and is often simply excised) removed from over her cheekbone and had a bill of over $25,000. “Her bills included $1,833 for the Mohs surgery, $14,407 for the plastic surgeon, $1,000 for the anesthesiologist, and $8,774 for the hospital charges.” The plastic surgeon, by the way, was called in – along with the anesthesiologist – to close the small lesion from the excision that the dermatologist was unwilling to do.

The cases that Rosenthal documents are typical enough that they cannot be  called “abuses” because they are the norm; it is, of course, the entire system that is the abuse. It would be absurd if it were not so real, if it didn’t skew the entire health care system away from primary care and toward specialties where enormous incomes are made by billing – and collecting – for each single activity. Rosenthal describes the RUC, the AMA-convened body that makes “recommendations” to Medicare about the relative value (and thus payment) for procedures, as well as for other forms of patient care -- such as listening to you, examining you, thinking about your problem, making a diagnosis, and recommending treatment -- which are well undervalued compared to procedures. I discussed the RUC, and what I consider its outrageous behavior, in Changes in the RUC: None.. How come we let a bunch of self-interested doctors decide what they get paid?, July 21, 2013, and earlier in  Outing the RUC: Medicare reimbursement and Primary Care, February 2, 2011, but Rosenthal does an excellent job of describing its perverse incentives. Given that Medicare takes the RUC’s recommendations 95% of the time, and that most insurers base their payments on Medicare’s, the RUC, which is heavily stacked against primary care, essentially sets doctors’ reimbursement. And this is not to the benefit of patients, either financially or medically.

In another article, Rules for Equal Coverage by Employers Remain Elusive Under Health Law, buried much farther inside the paper but also very important, Robert Pear describes the fact that the Obama administration has chosen to not (yet) enforce rules which allow companies to offer discriminatory levels of coverage to some employees than to others; generally, “better” coverage to executives than to line workers. There is already a ban on such discrimination in companies that are self-insured, but the Affordable Care Act (ACA) extended this to those who purchase coverage from insurance companies. The possibilities for discrimination are illustrated by the things that are forbidden; for example, covering only executives and not others, paying the full cost of executives’ premiums while making lower-paid workers pay for a portion of their benefits, or offering different terms for coverage of the dependents of executives and other workers.

Of course, the companies (read: the executives who run the companies and stand to benefit from discriminatory practices) disagree. Pear quotes Kathryn Wilber, from the American Benefits Council “which represents many Fortune 500 companies” as saying “Employers should be permitted to provide lower-cost coverage to employees who may not be able to afford the comprehensive coverage being provided to other employee groups,” which, of course, would not be an issue if the company paid for comprehensive coverage for all employees. The one “benefit” that may be excluded from the non-discrimination rules are “certain types of executive physicals”, which is ironic because there is no data that these benefit most people, including executives, but rather increase both the cost of care and the risk (in follow-up tests for false positives) to the patient. Certainly there are some occupations where the risk of something going wrong is high enough that it exceeds the risk of harm, changing the harm/benefit ratio -- airplane pilots for example, or possibly those who drive buses full of school children. But virtually no corporate executives are in this group.

The reason companies want differential benefits is primarily to save money by not offering good coverage to the majority of their employees, and also as a “perk” that they can offer to their executives. It is presented as parallel to other market goods, the difference between “serviceable” and “excellent”. This is even carried over in the metaphor to describe the low-copay plans that the ACA was going to tax, “Cadillac” plans, when everyone knows that a Chevy is just as good at getting you where you want to go, just not in such luxurious circumstances. But this is a lousy metaphor for health care, and confuses two benefits. One, which is the intent of the “Cadillac policy” tax, is whether individuals have to make co-pays or have co-insurance, or have limits on their benefits, or not. This is financial, and is very important. The other, however, is whether some people have coverage that gets them better health care. This is not OK. Obviously, they come together at some point since health care that is unaffordable to a person is unavailable to them, even when it is necessary. Conversely, for those executive physicals, providing a “benefit” that the individual does not have to pay for encourages them to seek unnecessary, and sometimes potentially harmful, care.

It may be that there are certain kinds of “health care” that are in fact reasonable to treat as elective consumer goods which a company might offer to some employees and not others; cosmetic surgery is the classic example (or non-medically-necessary contact lenses or radial keratotomy [Lasik®]; see Rand Paul on health policy: small brain and no heart, September 1, 2013). There also may be some employees for whom the harm/benefit ratio makes certain services of value when it does not for others (the comprehensive exams, “physicals”, for pilots, or Pap smears for women but not men). But, overall, coverage that does not include all necessary care for everyone is inappropriate. In addition, coverage of unnecessary care is as well. It is not Cadillacs vs. Chevies, or Volkwagens vs. Mercedes; it is making sure that everyone is covered for their health care needs. Like every other OECD country does. Like we could do if everyone was in Medicare.

Then instead of buying their executives “Cadillac health plans” to demonstrate how important they are, these companies can just buy them Cadillacs. 

More guns and less education is a prescription for poor health

Within the span of one week, my state of Kansas was headlined in two pieces in the New York Times, unusual for a small state. Unfortunately, neither was meant to be complimentary. “What’s the matter with Kansas Schools?” by David Sciarra and Wade Henderson appeared as an op-ed on January 8, 2014, and “Keeping Public Buildings Free of Guns Proves Too Costly for Kansas Towns”, by Steve Yaccino, was a news article (middle of the main section but top of the web page!) on January 12. Both are political and social issues; for example, the thrust of the “guns” article is that Kansas municipalities (like Wichita) that want to keep guns out of public buildings (like the library) are financially stymied by the cost of the security requirements the legislature has put in place in areas where carrying guns is not permitted. Like abortion (and neither of these pieces addresses Kansas’ virulent anti-abortion laws), guns are a very hot-button issue that inflames deep-seated passion in places like Kansas, and so is (sometimes) education. I will, however, focus my comments on the health impacts of these laws.

First, guns. Guns are, very simply, bad for people’s health. (Obviously, even when used as “intended”, for hunting, they are bad for some animals’ health, but this is not my focus.) Having guns around increases the risk of death or injury from them. Having guns intended for hunting stored locked and unloaded is the safest, but this doesn’t work for guns intended for self-defense since that renders them less available for that purpose. Carrying guns on your person, in your car, in public, on the street, and into businesses, public buildings, schools, and health care settings increases the risk. This is not what gun advocates, and concealed-carry advocates believe. Their idea is that there are bad guys out there carrying guns, either criminals who might want to rob you or crazy people who might want to shoot up your school or post office, and that carrying a gun allows one to protect oneself, and possibly others, by shooting down the perpetrator before more damage can be done. Thus, it protects your health, and that of others.

Nice idea, but completely unsupported by the facts.  Guns kill lots of people, injure many more, and virtually never save lives. This is the case even when used by police, and even more true when use of guns by police officers is excluded. It is true despite the widely-publicized, often repeated on the internet, and frequently invented stories about a virtuous homeowner shooting an armed robber. I have no doubt that such cases occur, but with such rarity as to be smaller than rounding error on the number of deaths and serious injuries inflicted by guns.  Suicides and homicides are among the leading causes of death in the US, most are caused by guns, and almost none of the homicides are “justifiable manslaughter” from a person protecting him/herself from an armed invader. The mere presence of easy-to-access guns in the environment increases dramatically the risk of successful suicide (see my blog, Suicide: What can we say?, December 12, 2013, with data from David Hemenway’s “Private Guns, Public Health”[1]). In addition, the number of “accidental” deaths (where someone other than the intended victim was shot, or someone was shot when the intent was “just” to threaten or show off, or by complete accident, sometimes when an unintended user – say a child – gets hold of a loaded gun) from guns is way ahead of any other method of harm (knives, bats, etc.)

When we go beyond having guns to carrying guns in public places, the data is less well collected. However, the trope of the heroic law-abiding, gun-carrying citizen drawing down on the evildoer in a public place, like say a movie theater or the waiting room of your clinic, is a terrifying thought. First of all, almost none of them are Bat Masterson or Wyatt Earp or Annie Oakley (except maybe in their own minds) and the idea that they will hit who they are aiming at is wishful thinking; the rest of the folks are caught in a gunfight. It is scary enough when this involves police officers, but if half the waiting room pulls out pieces, the results will be, um, chaotic. Harmful. Not to mention what happens when the police show and don’t know who to shoot at (maybe if you are a gun-toting good guy you can wear a white hat…).

So, having guns around, and the more easily they are available, is absolutely harmful to the health of the population, and generally you as an individual. If people, including legislators, and Kansas legislators in particular, want to encourage gun carrying for other reasons, they should at least be aware of and acknowledge the health risks. But what about education? The cuts in state education will, quite likely, harm the education of children (or if, as the article notes, the state Supreme Court forces the legislature to fund K-12, the education of young adults since the money will likely come from higher education), but what about health?

There is a remarkable relationship. More education leads to better health. Better educated people are healthier. The relationship is undoubtedly complex, because better educated people also have better jobs and higher incomes, which is also associated with health. This is addressed with great force in a recent policy brief “Education: It Matters More to Health than Ever Before”, by the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Society and Health sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; for example, while lifespan overall in the US continues to increase, for white women with less than 12 years of education, it is currently decreasing! The RWJ site also includes an important interview with Steven Woolf, MD MPH, Director of the Center. “I don’t think most Americans know that children with less education are destined to live sicker and die sooner,” Dr. Woolf says. He discusses both the “downstream” benefits of education: “getting good jobs, jobs that have better benefits including health insurance coverage, and higher earnings that allow people to afford a healthier lifestyle and to live in healthier neighborhood,” and the “upstream” issues, “factors before children ever reach school age, which may be important root causes for the relationship between education and health. Imagine a child growing up in a stressful environment,” that increase the risk of unhealthy habits, poor coping skills and violent injuries.

In several previous blogs I have cited earlier work by Dr. Woolf, one of the nation’s most important researchers on society and health, notably in "Health in All" policies to eliminate health disparities are a real answer, August 18, 2011. I included this graph, in which the small blue bars indicate the deaths averted by medical advances (liberally interpreted) and the purple bars represent the potential deaths that could be averted if all Americans had the death rates of the most educated. I also included a link to the incredible County Health Calculator (http://chc.humanneeds.vcu.edu) which allows you to look at any state or county, find out how the education or income level compares to others, and use an interactive slider to find out how mortality and other health indicators would change if the income or education level were higher or lower.

In the US, the quality of one’s education is very much tied to the neighborhood you live in, since much of school funding is from local tax districts and wealthier communities have, simply, better schools. (This last is completely obvious to Americans, but not necessarily to foreigners. A friend from Taiwan was looking at houses and was told by the realtor that a particular house was a good value because it was in a good school district. She called us an asked what that meant; “In Taiwan, all schools are the same; they are funded by the government. No one would choose where to live based on the school.”) This difference could be partially compensated for by state funding for education, which is why cuts in this area are particularly harmful, including to our people’s health. In fact the most effective investment that a society can make in the health of its people is in the education of its young.

An educated population is healthier. Wide availability and carrying of guns decreases a population’s health. Unfortunately, the public’s health seems to carry little weight in these political decisions.

---

[1] Hemenway, David. Private Guns, Public Health. University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor. 2007.

Changing the structure of health care delivery systems: to benefit the patient, the providers, or the insurers?

In an important series of 3 articles beginning on the Sunday before the New Year, “Doctors Inc.”, Alan Bavley of the Kansas City Star looked at the increasing acquisition of physician practices by hospitals, and the impact this has on access to, quality of, and cost of health care for patients. The first article, “Medicine goes corporate as more physicians join hospital payrolls”, describes the “what”, that:

“Since 2000, the number of doctors on hospital payrolls nationwide has risen by one-third, according to the American Hospital Association. In the Kansas City area, fully 55 percent of physicians are now employed by hospitals, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City estimates. That includes virtually all cardiologists and most cancer specialists.” 

These changes are not limited to the KC area; he cites both national data and that from disparate regions such as Spartanburg, SC and Phoenix, AZ. Part of the reason, the "financial model", which is described in this first article, is that such “integrated” practices generate internal referrals, keeping patients within the system, as well as generating lucrative procedures. Physicians get a piece of the action; they get guaranteed salaries paid in part by the hospital or health system which is getting downstream revenue for their referrals.

And it makes these hospitals and health systems a lot of money, because they can now charge a lot more money. Bavley quotes “Robert Zirkelbach, vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s trade association. ‘When a hospital buys a practice, its rates will increase in the following year’s contract. Increases of 20, 30 or 40 percent are not uncommon. It’s not 3 or 4 percent, that is for sure.’” 

It is also not always good for patients, as Bavley illustrates with examples of people who were referred internally and had delayed diagnosis. (One story discusses a woman discouraged from going to the academic medical center at which I work – full disclosure – for a second opinion regarding her lung cancer; the "reasons" given were both that she “didn’t have time”, and because she would see “young doctors still in training”.) Sometimes it is fine to see doctors within the system, and certainly this can be, and is, encouraged, but discouraging people from seeking outside referrals can also be hazardous to their health.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) encourages the creation of “Accountable Care Organizations” (ACOs), which would be responsible (at least hopefully, in the best of scenarios) for the health of a population. At a minimum, they would seek to decrease the degree to which the delivery of health care is a series of episodic events paid for individually, instead taking on a global responsibility including inpatient, outpatient, and long-term care. This would, in theory, change the usual patient experience from seeing one (or many) doctors or having one (or many) ER visits, each charged and paid separately, culminating in a hospitalization, and then discharge to one (or many) doctors, or a long-term care facility (paid separately), and failure of care resulting in readmission to the hospital (paid again). The idea is that all levels would be coordinated to provide the best care at the most appropriate (inpatient, outpatient, long-term, home based) level.  In some settings, particularly for fully-integrated plans (where the providers of care are also the insurers) such as Kaiser, this works relatively well.

However, as Bavley makes clear in his series, written as part of a yearlong Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance sponsored by the Association of Health Care Journalists and supported by The Commonwealth Fund, particularly in the second article, “’Facility fees’ add billions to medical bills”, there is often a great cost to those who are paying, the patient and their insurer (including Medicare and Medicaid). This is because Medicare (and, following their lead, private insurers) pays an additional fee (the "facility fee") for services, and especially procedures, done in a hospital outpatient facility beyond what they would pay for it to be done in a doctor’s office. (This is also addressed in the series by Elisabeth Rosenthal, "The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill" in the New York Times.) 

Why? The original intent (as is often the case) was good, intended to both save money and improve care, by having many procedures done in outpatient rather than inpatient settings, where the cost would be even higher. And (as also so often is the case) the providers realized that this system could be gamed as well. The physician fee for a visit or procedure done in an office is greater than that done in a hospital clinic, but is expected to include all the overhead. In a hospital-based clinic (which just has to be owned by the hospital or health system; it doesn’t have to be on the campus and can be in the same doctor’s office that used to be separate) there is a somewhat lower doctor's fee, but there is also a facility fee that, together with the doctor’s fee, is much higher in total than the office-based reimbursement; indeed, the facility fee can be far higher than the physician fee. Thus, the hospital makes money, and can share some of that with the physician, allowing the physician to make a lot more money without the overhead and risk. Voilà! Physicians are incented to become employed by hospitals!

I am a doctor and work in a medical center, so I understand the impetus for this from the point of view of providers, both doctors and hospitals. Medicare is ratcheting down its reimbursement, and a particular form of support for hospitals caring for a disproportionate share of uninsured is being cut back, and operating margins for many hospitals are getting thin or negative. Doctors are making less money (arguably some of them were making far too much, but they still don’t like making less) and will thus endorse efforts to have hospitals support them and maintain their incomes. The problem is that the cost to consumers goes up, especially when co-pays and co-insurances that come out of patients’ pockets, even when they are insured, go ever upward. 

Medicare is, sadly, responsible for much of this situation, as illustrated by the following: seeking to reduce costs for unnecessary admissions, Medicare has empowered bounty hunters (called “RACs”) to go after Medicare “fraud” by reviewing admissions to hospitals for patients who could have been care for in the hospital on “observation” status, which will save Medicare money. Hospitals are thus very careful to only officially “admit” people who meet very strict criteria. However, because “observation” status is officially “outpatient”, while Medicare saves money the patient pays more out of pocket, because this is under Medicare Part B, not the Part A that covers hospitalization. Complicated, but what it comes down to is what is financially good for Medicare is financially bad for the patient. Is this what we want?

I hope not. Yes, some of the fault is Medicare, and the fault is also providers (hospitals and doctors) seeking to maximize profit (even if “not-for-profit”) by manipulating the rules of the system. The fault is that we have Rube Goldberg-type complex constructs put in place to encourage behavior by providers, and providers are figuring out ways to work the system to their benefit. The real problem is that we do not have a straightforward system to deliver the highest-quality, necessary, health care to all people but a mess of conflicting incentives where gain to one component (i.e., insurers) is a loss to another (i.e., providers) and that they then take actions that benefit them and the overall loser is the patient. Bavley quotes an email from a board member of a hospital system to the Chief Financial Officer that said “Let’s be realistic. Employing physicians is not achieving better cost, it’s achieving better profit.”

That is not what our national health policy should be doing. A health system that did not permit gaming but straightforwardly paid for health care,  and eliminated the profit motive, would solve these problems. The answer is to put everyone in Medicare, in a single-payer system, so some patients are not “more desirable” than others. And to have Medicare, which is now covering everyone, pay for the appropriate level of care for every patient, where doctors and hospitals have no incentive to label a person’s hospitalization as “admission” or “observation”, or an outpatient visit as “hospital based” or “office based” because there is a difference in the reimbursement.

It can be done. It is done in Canada. It is done in some fashion in every other developed country. If we decide that the health of our people is more important than the profit of the health care industry, we can do it also. 

Medical schools are no place to train physicians

Doctors have to go to medical school. That makes sense. They have to learn their craft, master skills, and gain an enormous amount of knowledge. They also, and this is at least as important, need to learn how to think and how to solve problems. And they need to learn how to be life-long learners because new knowledge is constantly being discovered, and old truths are being debunked. Therefore, they must learn to un-learn, and not to stay attached to what they once knew to be true but no longer is. They also need, in the face of drinking from this fire-hose of new information and new skills, to retain their core humanity and their caring, the reasons that (hopefully) most of them went into medicine.

Medical students struggle to acculturate to the profession, to learn the new language replete with eponyms, abbreviations, and long abstruse names for diseases (many are from Latin, and while they are impressive and complicated, they are also sometimes trite in translation, e.g., “itchy red rash”). They have to learn to speak “medical” as a way to be accepted into the guild by their seniors, but must be careful that it does not block their ability to communicate with their patients; they also need to continue to speak English (or whatever the language is that their patients speak). “Medical” may also offer a convenient way of obscuring and temporizing and avoiding difficult conversations (“the biopsy indicates a malignant neoplasm” instead of “you have cancer”).  But there needs to be a place for them to learn.

So what is wrong with the places that we are teaching them now? Most often, allopathic (i.e., “MD”) medical schools are part of an “academic health center” (AHC), combined with a teaching hospital. They have large biomedical research enterprises, with many PhD faculty who are, if they are good and lucky, are externally funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Some or many of them spend some of their time teaching the “basic science” material (biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, pathology) that medical students need to learn. By “need to learn” we usually mean “what we have always taught them” or “what they need to pass the national examination (USMLE Step 1) that covers that material”. This history goes back 100 years, to the Flexner Report of 1910. Contracted by the AMA, educator Abraham Flexner evaluated the multitude of medical schools, recommended closing many which were little more than apprenticeship programs without a scientific basis, and recommended that medical schools be based upon the model of Johns Hopkins: part of a university (from the German tradition), grounded in science, and based in a core curriculum of the sciences. This has been the model ever since.

However, 100 years later, these medical schools and the AHCs of which they are a part have grown to enormous size, concentrating huge basic research facilities (Johns Hopkins alone receives over $300 million a year in NIH grants) and tertiary and quarternary medical services – high tech, high complexity  treatment for rare diseases or complex manifestations of more common ones. They have often lost their focus on the health of the actual community of which they are a part. This was a reason for two rounds of creating “community-based” medical schools, which use non-university, or “community”, hospitals: the first in the 1970s and the second in the 2000s. Some of these schools have maintained a focus on community health, to a greater or lesser degree, but many have largely abandoned those missions as they have sought to replicate the Hopkins model and become major research centers. The move of many schools away from community was the impetus for the “Beyond Flexner” conference held in Tulsa in 2012 (see Beyond Flexner: Taking the Social Mission of Medical Schools to the next level, June 16, 2012) and for a number of research studies focused on the “social mission” of medical schools.

The fact is that most doctors who graduate from medical school will not practice in a tertiary AHC, but rather in the community, although the other fact is that a disproportionate number of them will choose specialties that are of little or no use in many communities that need doctors. They will, if they can (i.e., if their grades are high enough) often choose subspecialties that can only be practiced in the high-tech setting of the AHC or the other relatively small number of very large metropolitan hospitals, often with large residency training programs. As they look around at the institution in which they are being educated, they see an enormously skewed mix of specialties. For example, 10% of doctors may be anesthesiologists and there well may be more cardiologists than primary care physicians. While this is not the mix in world of practice, and still less the mix that we need to have for an effectively functioning health system, it is the world in which they are being trained.

The extremely atypical mix of medical specialties in the AHC is not “wrong”; it reflects the atypical mix of patients who are hospitalized there. It is time for another look at the studies that have been done on the “ecology of medical care”, first by Kerr White in 1961 and replicated by the Robert Graham Center of the American Academy of Family Physicians in 2003 (see The role of Primary Care in improving health: In the US and around the world, October 13, 2013), and represented by the graphic reproduced here. The biggest box (1000) is a community of adults at risk, the second biggest (800) is those who have symptoms in a given month, and the tiny one, representing less than 0.1%,  is those hospitalized at an academic teaching hospital.  Thus, the population that students mostly learn on is atypical, heaving skewed to the uncommon; it is not representative of even all hospitalized people, not to mention the non-hospitalized ill (and still less the healthy-but-needing-preventive care) in the community.

Another aspect of educating students in the AHC is that much of the medical curriculum is determined by those non-physician scientists who are primarily researchers. They not only teach medical students, they (or their colleagues at other institutions) write the questions for USMLE Step 1. They are often working at the cutting edge of scientific discovery, but the knowledge that medical students need in their education is much more basic, much more about understanding the scientific method, and what constitutes valid evidence. There is relatively little need, at this stage, for students to learn about the current research that these scientists are doing. Even the traditional memorization of lots of details about basic cell structure and function is probably unnecessary; after 5 years of non-use students likely retain only 10% of what they learn; even if they need 10% -- or more – in their future careers, there is no likelihood that it will be the same 10%. We have to do a better job has of determining what portion of the information currently taught in the “basic sciences” is crucial for all future doctors to know and memorize, and we also need to broaden the definition of “basic science” to include the key social sciences of anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication, and even many areas of the humanities such as ethics. This is not likely to happen in a curriculum controlled by molecular biologists.

Medical students need a clinical education in which the most common clinical conditions are the most common ones they see, the most common presentations of those conditions are the most common ones they see, and the most common treatments are the ones they see implemented. They need to work with doctors who are representative, in skills and focus, of the doctors they will be (and need to be) in practice. Clinical medical education seems to work on the implicit belief that ability to take care of patients in an intensive care unit necessarily means one is competent to take care of those in the hospital, or that the ability to care for people in the hospital means one can care for ambulatory patients, when in fact these are dramatically different skills sets.

This is not to say that we do not need hospitals and health centers that can care for people with rare, complicated, end stage, tertiary and quarternary disease. We do, and they should have the mix of specialists appropriate to them, more or less the mix we currently have in AHCs. And it is certainly not to say that we do not need basic research that may someday come up with better treatments for disease. We do, and those research centers should be generously supported. But their existence need not be tied to the teaching of medical students. The basic science, and social science, and humanities that every future doctor needs to learn can be taught by a small number of faculty members focused on teaching, and does not need to be tied to a major biomedical research enterprise. Our current system is not working; we produce too many doctors who do narrow rescue care, and not enough who provide general care. We spend too much money on high-tech care and not enough on addressing the core causes of disease.

If we trained doctors in the right way in the right place we might have a better shot at getting the health system, and even the health, our country needs.

How can a health care system lead not to ruin but to, actually, health?

After a year of reporting in a series of articles in the New York Times (several of which I have commented on in this blog) on the crisis in health care, Elisabeth Rosenthal summarized her conclusions in a Times piece on December 22, 2013, “Health Care’s Road to Ruin”. As the title makes clear, those conclusions are not positive. She summarizes highlights from her investigations that look at the extremely high cost of health care in the US compared to other countries, the extreme variability in pricing depending upon where you are in the US, and the opaque and incomprehensible methods of coming up with pricing and the regulatory incentives that are continually gamed by providers. On the other end of the spectrum, she summarizes both the poor health outcomes at a population level in the US compared to other countries, and the more personal, poignant and dispiriting stories of individuals who die, are bankrupted, or both by our health “system”.

As Ms. Rosenthal notes, the stories that she tells could be “Extreme anecdotes, perhaps. But the series has prompted more than 10,000 comments of outrage and frustration — from patients, doctors, politicians, even hospital and insurance executives.”  She goes on to discuss the potential solutions that those commenters, and others, have suggested, including regulating prices, making medical schools cheaper or free, not paying fee-for-service that rewards volume rather than quality. But, she says, “the nation is fundamentally handicapped in its quest for cheaper health care: All other developed countries rely on a large degree of direct government intervention, negotiation or rate-setting to achieve lower-priced medical treatment for all citizens. That is not politically acceptable here.”

In reality, however, the idea that the health industry is somehow, before or after the ACA (“Obamacare”) an exemplar of the free market and the success (or not) of private enterprise, is entirely a myth, a facile construct that is used by those making lots of money on the current system to block change. Medicare, as I have discussed (e.g., Outing the RUC: Medicare reimbursement and Primary Care, February 2, 2011), sets the rates that they will pay for Medicare patients, and private insurers pay multiples of Medicare rates. Services as mostly fee-for-service, except in HMOs, and integrated health systems (such as Kaiser), and for Medicare inpatient admissions which are paid at set fees based on the diagnosis (through a system called Diagnosis-Related Groups, or DRGs). The entire system of what is profitable for a health care provider (meaning a hospital or other health care facility or a doctor or group) is based on this policy; it is profitable to provide cancer care because Medicare (and thus other health insurers) pay an enormous amount to administer chemotherapy drugs. Cardiac care, orthopedics and neurosurgical interventions are also very profitable. (Oh! Is that why my hospital chooses to focus on these areas instead of psychiatry, obstetrics and pediatrics?!) The doctors who do all these things want you to think (and think themselves) that it is because what they do is so hard or that they work so hard; it is in fact a regulatory policy glitch. In addition, a majority of the money spent on “health care” is public funds, not private, if you add Medicare, Medicaid, federal, state and local government employees and retirees, and add in the tax break for employer contributions to health insurance (i.e., taxes forgone because this employee reimbursement is not counted as regular income).

So the majority of the money being spent on health care is public money, and the system is already highly government influenced with government policies setting reimbursement rates. The only thing “private” about it is the ownership and profit, both by providers and insurance companies. In other words, it is a parallel to our financial services industry: private enterprise is given a license to make money from everyone, and the government finances it. The only difference is that for financial services, the government steps in to bail them out only after they have already stolen all our money, while in health services the profit margin is built in from the start. Thus, Rosenthal’s comments, and quotations from others such as Dr. Steven Schroeder of the University of California at San Francisco: “People in fee-for-service are very clever — they stay one step ahead of the formulas to maximize revenue.” But, of course, we the people, through our elected representatives and regulators, allow them to do so. And, therefore, the arcane network of incentives and disincentives built into the ACA to try to get reasonable results at reasonable cost – and still ensure insurance companies make lots of profit.

The solution is very simple; emulating one or the other systems in place in every other Western democracy. The simplest is closest to us is Canada, and a single-payer system, essentially putting everyone into Medicare. Voilá! We are all covered by the same system, providers can provide care to people based upon their disease, not their insurance status, and rates can be set at the level that we as a people are able to tolerate, or willing to pay, for the health care we want and need. The clout of the empowered will bring along benefit for everyone. There will be no more gaming the system, trying to attract certain patients with certain insurance rather than other. Or, in a more complex fashion, we could follow the example of other countries; Switzerland, for example, has multiple private insurance companies rather than a single payer, but they are highly regulated and non-profit; they are told by the government what they can charge and what they must cover.

The argument that Americans will not accept major government involvement and regulation is pretty flawed, both because of the involvement of the government in regulating the health system already (mostly to ensure profit for providers and insurers) and because regular people see the advantage of universal health care. Rosenthal writes that “All other developed countries rely on a large degree of direct government intervention, negotiation or rate-setting to achieve lower-priced medical treatment for all citizens. That is not politically acceptable here.” Study after study has shown strong support for a universal health care system from the American people; however, certain very powerful vested interests would likely lose out:  “’A lot of the complexity of the Affordable Care Act arises from the political need in the U.S. to rely on the private market to provide health care access,’ said Dr. David Blumenthal, a former adviser to President Obama and president of the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care.“

The political need is for the wealthy and powerful. This is why ACA ensured that insurance companies would get their cut. Elisabeth Rosenthal does not say so in so many words, but she does say that “…after a year spent hearing from hundreds of patients like Mr. Abrahams, Mr. Landman and Mr. Miller, I know, too, that reforming the nation’s $2.9 trillion health system is urgent, and will not be accomplished with delicate maneuvers at the margins. There are many further interventions that we know will help contain costs and rein in prices. And we’d better start making choices fast.”

A universal health care program, Medicare for all, in which everyone was automatically enrolled just as current Medicare recipients are now, would be just fine.

Roosevelt University: A commitment to diversity and social justice

On December 13, 2013, I attended the winter Commencement ceremonies at Roosevelt University in Chicago. As a new member of the University’s Board of Trustees, it was my first such event at Roosevelt; the Board had met the day before. I have, of course, been to other graduations. Some have been of family and friends, but most have been as a faculty member in medical school. I have sat on the stage looking out at the assembled graduates and families before, but never in the role of a Trustee, and never at Roosevelt.

Graduations are pretty special events. At the medical school graduation ceremony, we look on as our future colleagues march across the stage, many of them people we know and have taught, while their families watch and clap and sometimes cheer. We have pride in them, and also wonder how fast the time goes, remembering when they were just starting a few short years earlier. But the Roosevelt graduation was different, and not just because it was not a medical school and not just because I was there as a Trustee.

For starters, it was in Chicago’s beautiful Auditorium Theater, in the Auditorium Building designed by Louis Sullivan, opened in 1889 and about to celebrate its 125^th anniversary next year. I have been there before but only in the audience; sitting on the stage looking out at this gorgeous auditorium whose balconies soar 6 or 7 stories, filled with 4,000 people, was amazing. Roosevelt owns the Auditorium, and the building has long been its home, but recently the 40-story Wabash Building has been built next to it, rising 40 stories, the top 27 dorms with priceless views, its own architectural splendor complementing in a very different way that of Sullivan.

There were also some special events during the graduation. The honorary degree recipient was Joe Segal, a Roosevelt alumnus who for 60 years has run Chicago’s Jazz Showcase, bringing all of the great jazz artists of those years to perform at a series of venues; I began attending his shows in the 1970s. Danielle Smith, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Special Education (and a minor in Spanish) was the first-ever current student to be commencement speaker. She was joined on the stage by Sheree Williams, receiving a Master’s in Early Childhood Education, who was the 85,000^th graduate of the school (it took 60 years to get to 65,000 and only 6 for the next 20,000).

Those of you who read my last post, Suicide: What can we say?, know that the date, December 13, was also the 11^th anniversary of my son Matt’s suicide. While the two facts are coincidental, they are not unrelated; my presence on the Board and thus at the graduation was entirely about Matt. A few years after leaving his first (quite elite) college and then obtaining an associate’s degree, Matt moved back to Chicago and enrolled at Roosevelt. He loved it. It was, and is, a school, originally established to focus on returning GIs and people of color, that both educates young (and older) people from all backgrounds and prides itself on its diversity, and its explicit commitment to social justice. This resonated with Matt, and does with me. I later met President Charles Middleton through the sponsorship that Matt’s mother and I do of the annual Matthew Freeman Lecture in Social Justice (see, most recently, Matthew Freeman Lecture and Awards, 2013, April 26, 2013), and later when he hosted my group of American Council on Education fellows at the university. Dr. Middleton calls Roosevelt the “most diverse private university in the Midwest”, and sitting there as the graduates cross the stage it is not hard to believe. Virtually every race and ethnicity was represented by the graduating students, many obviously first-generation Americans, and the pride in their faces was unmistakable.

 

In her speech, Ms. Smith spoke about coming to Roosevelt from an all-white, middle-class, suburb, in large part to play tennis – which she did. She also, however, learned about diversity, and met fellow students from all races, religions, ethnicities, and socioeconomic groups, and made them her friends. She talked about a concept that she had never heard of before but was omnipresent at Roosevelt, social justice, which she says will guide the rest of her life. Ms. Williams’ presence on the stage, as 85,000^th graduate, may seem like a quirk, but she also is “typical” of Roosevelt; an African-American woman who received her bachelor’s in education there and now her Master’s, and will be teaching second grade in Chicago, before, she plans, to get her doctorate. Wow.

President Middleton, in his closing address, asked several groups to stand. They included the international students, who had to add learning English in addition to their studies, and the families, friends and other supporters who jammed the Auditorium. Most impressive, to me, however, was when he asked all the graduates who were the first members of their families to get a degree at their level to stand. Some were getting doctorates and master’s degrees, but the large majority of the graduates were receiving bachelors. Two-thirds of the graduates stood, to rousing cheers.

There are plenty of colleges that offer the opportunity for students from working-class and poorer backgrounds to get an education, for first-generation students to learn. They include the our community colleges (I still remember a talk at the 2008 ACE Conference by the president of LaGuardia College in NYC, where she said -- as I remember it -- “there are two kinds of colleges; those that try to select the students who will be the best fit at their institutions, and community colleges, that welcome students”), and our state universities. And some are private schools, like Roosevelt. And others may have the explicit commitment to social justice that Roosevelt does.

But I am proud to be associated with one that so overtly and clearly demonstrates it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cross-posted to "Life, the Universe, and a Few Things"

Suicide: What can we say?

On Sunday, September 8, 2013, we participated in the annual Suicide Remembrance Walk in Kansas City’s Loose Park, organized by Suicide Awareness Survivor Support of Missouri and Kansas (SASS/Mo-Kan). An article previewing the walk and interviewing Bonnie and Mickey Swade, our friends who established SASS/Mo-Kan, ran in the Kansas City Star on September 7: “What to say, and not, to those left behind by suicide”. Bonnie and Mickey became our friends because we are members of a club none of us would wish to be in: suicide survivors. Their son Brett completed suicide about a year after our son Matt did, and we were in a support group together before the Swades started their own. Matt’s suicide was on December 13, 2002, which I never thought of as being “Friday the 13^th” until I realized that because of the vagaries of leap years, this year, 11 years later, is the first Friday December 13^th since then. Thus, this post several months later.

The Remembrance Walk around Loose Park in Kansas City was well-attended on a hot morning, and culminated in all of us standing in a very large circle holding long-stemmed flowers as a distressingly long list of names was read. We counted 7 times when two (and in one case 3) last names were repeated; the list was not in alphabetical order, so this was not coincidence. As much pain it is to have one person you love having committed suicide, two or more is unfathomable. Finally, white doves were released, and the ceremony ended to the strains of “Somewhere over the rainbow”.

I have written about suicide before (July 29, 2009, “Prevention and the “Trap of Meaning”), in which I discussed an article that had recently appeared in JAMA by by Constantine Lyketsos and Margaret Chisholm titled “The trap of meaning: a public health tragedy”[1] ). The thrust of that piece was that people -- families, lay persons, psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, and others -- search for “meaning”, “reasons” for suicide, and that this is, essentially, pointless at best and, devastating at worst. Suicide is the fatal result of the disease of depression, a disease which is very common and not usually fatal, but can be. It may often be precipitated by a specific event or set of events (as the final episode of chronic heart or lung disease is often preceded by a viral infection) but those are not the cause. The strongest prima facie evidence is that most people in the same circumstances (whether victims or perpetrators of bad things) do not kill themselves. But enough do to have made a long list to have read at the ceremony in Loose Park.

Like everyone else, each person who kills themselves is unique, and their histories differ. Some have made previous attempts, often many times; others gave no clue. Some have been hospitalized, often many times; others never. Some have family who were sitting on the edge, awaiting the suicidal act, trying their best to help to prevent it but helpless to really do so. The families and friends of others had no idea it might happen. While those who attempt or complete suicide are depressed, some very overtly manifest that depression and some not so much. While many people who have depression never attempt suicide, some complete suicide when things are looking, to others, good. Overall, access to effective weapons increases the probability of “success”; the “lethality” (the probability that you will die from an attempt) is about 95% from guns, and only 3% from pills. Therefore, easy access to guns is associated with a higher successful suicide rate; in young men 16-24 the success rate is nearly 10 times higher in low gun control states than in high. I doubt these young men are more depressed, but they have quick and effective methods of turning what may have been relatively transient suicidal thoughts into permanent death. Of course, not all suicides are classified as such; while it is often obvious, sometime it is not: how many one-car accidents, for example, are really suicides? And, because “unsuccessful” suicide attempts are grossly under-reported, the lack of an accurate denominator makes “success” rates very hard pin down.

On one hand, the fact that most suicide attempts are not hospitalized and given intensive treatment seems to me to be a bad idea. Since the greatest predictor of a suicide attempt is a previous suicide attempt, if there is any likelihood that a suicide can be prevented it would be best to intervene at that time and try to treat the depression. On the other hand, I am not sure that there is any good evidence that treatment is terribly effective in preventing suicide. Yes, there are many people who have attempted suicide once and never again, but this may be a result of treatment or the natural history of their disease. There are people who are under intensive treatment when they complete suicide, often when least expected. Indeed, there is evidence that treatment of depression may sometimes paradoxically increase the risk of suicide by getting a person whose depression was so severe that they were unable to act better enough that they can. And, conversely, there is no way of knowing how many times, before a suicide is completed, a planned attempt was put off by an intervention that may not have even been intended, by demonstrating love and letting the person know they were needed.

It doesn’t always work. If the person is unwilling to share their symptoms and is determined to complete suicide, there is no prevention that is effective. My son was 24, deeply loved, lived in a state with strict gun control laws and probably never held a gun before. But he was able to drive to a low gun-control state, buy a carbine and bullets, and complete his suicide. He took his time and planned it, and it is unlikely to have been preventable. But many suicide attempts are not as well planned, are more impulsive, and efforts to prevent these might be successful in many cases. In a classic 1975 article in the Western Journal of Medicine[2] David Rosen interviewed 6 survivors of jumps from the Golden Gate bridge. The emphasis in these interviews is on transcendence and “spiritual rebirth”, but all agreed that putting a “suicide fence” in place might have deterred them and might deter others.

For all of us who wish mightily to prevent disease and death, suicide may be seen as the greatest affront because the death is seen as “unnecessary” and often involves people who were “healthy” (except for their depression), young, and had a future before them – sometimes (as I like to think of Matt’s) a truly promising future. But too often we, in our desire to prevent death and disease, choose to focus on the least effective interventions to do so. We will take unproven drugs (especially if they are “natural” or non-prescription), and clamor for our “right” to have marginally useful or even ineffective screening tests, but there is a vocal movement against immunizations, one of the few preventive interventions that are known to be effective. We decry mass murders in school after school, and bemoan the loss of our young people to both suicide and homicide, but resist regulation of the most effective instruments of death, guns. We all take our shoes off each time we fly because of one failed “shoe-bomber”, but ignore the thousands of deaths on our city streets.

I wish my son had not killed himself. I wish I knew how to have prevented it. I wish I could tell those of you who worry about a loved one how you can prevent it. I wish even more that I could tell those of you who don’t suspect it that you can be secure because in the absence of definite warning signs you can feel safe. I can’t do that. When there are warning signs, take whatever action you can, but the reality is that it may not be effective. When there are no signs, hope that it is because there is no risk.

As individuals, we hope and do what we can. As a society, we should decide on our priorities, and we should be guided by the evidence, not by our fantasies, hopes, or magical thinking.

---

[1] Lyketsos CG, Chishom MS, “The Trap of Meaning: A Public Health Tragedy”, JAMA. 2009;302(4):432-433. doi:10.1001/jama.2009.1059.

[2] Rosen DH, “Suicide Survivors: A Follow-up Study of Persons Who Survived Jumping from the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges, West J Med. 1975 April; 122(4): 289–294. PMCID: PMC1129714

Medicaid expansion or not: everyone needs coverage

In an echo of my blog post of November 17, 2013, “Dead Man Walking: People still die from lack of health insurance”, the New York Times’ lead article on November 29, 2013 was “Medicaid growth could aggravate doctor shortage”. The main point in my blog was that, to the degree that there is a doctor shortage exacerbated by increasing the number of people who have health insurance (from Medicaid expansion or insurance exchanges or any other reason), the shortage was already there. If the reason that it was not felt earlier was because people, not having health insurance, did not seek care, does not change the fact that these people were here and were as sick as they were or are. To the extent that they were not getting health care because they were uninsured is a scandal. If anything, that people will now have coverage and thus seek care is an unmasking of an extant but unmet need.

The Times article looks particularly at Medicaid because many doctors will not see Medicaid patients since the payments do not cover their costs (or, in many cases, because they can fill their schedules with people who have better-paying health insurance). Those physicians who do accept Medicaid often feel that they will not be able to take more Medicaid patients for the same reason, and it is unlikely that those who are already not accepting Medicaid will begin to. The problem is significant for primary care, even for institutions like Los Angeles’ White Memorial Hospital that already care for large numbers of Medicaid patients. In the NY Times article, my friend Dr. Hector Flores, Chair of the Family Medicine Department at White Memorial, notes that his group’s practice already has 26,000 Medicaid patients and simply does not have capacity to absorb a potential 10,000 more that they anticipate will obtain coverage in their area.

The problem for access to specialists may be even greater. There are already limited numbers of specialists caring for Medicaid patients in California and elsewhere, for the reasons described above: they have enough well-insured patients, and Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California) pays poorly. It is also possible that some specialists have less of a sense of social responsibility (even to care for a small proportion of patients who have Medicaid or are uninsured), and their expectations for income are may be higher. The San Diego ENT physician featured at the start of the Times article, Dr. Ted Mazer, is one of the relatively small number of subspecialists who do take Medicaid, but indicates that he will not be able to take more because of the low reimbursement.

Clearly, Dr. Mazer and Dr. Flores’ group are not the problem, although it is likely that they will bear a great deal of the pressure under Medicaid expansion; if their practices have been accepting of Medicaid up until now, they are likely to get more people coming. The Beverly Hills subspecialists (see: ads in any airline magazine!) who have never seen Medicaid, uninsured, or poor people up until now are unlikely to find them walking into their offices. And, if they call, will not schedule them. So what, in fact, is the real problem?

That depends a bit upon where you sit and how narrow or holistic your viewpoint is. From the point of view of doctors, or the health systems in which they work, the problem is inadequate reimbursement. As a director of a family medicine practice, I know that you have to pay the physicians and the staff. For providers working for salaries, it is the system they work for that needs to make money to pay them. The article notes that community clinics may be able to provide primary care, but does not note that many of them are Federally-Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) which receive much higher reimbursement for Medicaid and Medicare patients than do other providers. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will reimburse primary care providers an enhanced amount for Medicaid for two years, through 2014, and yet not only is there no assurance that this will continue, but in many cases has yet to be put into place. And the specialists are not receiving this enhanced reimbursement (although the truth is that many of them already received significantly higher reimbursement for their work than primary care physicians).

From a larger system point of view, Medicaid pays poorly because the federal and state governments that pay for it (although the federal government will pay 100% of the expansion for 4 years and 90% after that) want to spend less. However, they do not want to be perceived as allowing lower quality of care for the patients covered by Medicaid, so they often put in requirements for quality that increase costs to providers which increases the resistance of those already reluctant to accept it. Another factor to be considered is that Medicaid has historically not covered all poor people; rather it mainly covers young children and their mothers, a generally low-risk group. (It also covers nursing home expenses for poor people, which generally consumes a higher percent of the budget.) Expansion of Medicaid to everyone who makes 133% of poverty means that childless adults, including middle-aged people under 65 who have chronic diseases but have been uninsured, will now have coverage.

While the main impact of Medicaid expansion is in states like California that actually have expanded the program, even in states like mine (Kansas), which have not, Medicaid enrollment has gone up because of all the publicity, which has led people already eligible but not enrolled to become aware of their eligibility (called, by experts, the “woodwork effect”). The Kansas Hospital Association has lobbied very hard for Medicaid expansion, but this has not occurred because the state has prioritized its political opposition to “Obamacare”. The problem for hospitals is that the structure of ACA relies on the concurrent implementation of a number of different programs. Medicare reimbursements have been cut, as have “disproportionate share” (DSH) payments to hospitals providing a larger than average portion of unreimbursed care. This was supposed to have been made up for because now formerly uninsured people would be covered by Medicaid (that is hospitals would get something); however, with the requirement that piece removed (thanks to the Supreme Court decision and the political beliefs of governors and state legislatures), the whole operation is unstable. That is, the Medicare and DSH payments are down without increases in Medicaid.

From a larger point of view, of course, the problem is that the whole system is flawed, and while the ACA will help a lot more people, it is incomplete and is dependent on a lot of parts to work correctly and complementarily – and this does not always happen, as with lack of Medicaid expansion. A rational system would be one in which everyone was covered, and at the same rates, so that lower reimbursement for some patients did not discourage their being seen. These are not innovative ideas; these systems exist, in one form or another in every developed country (single payer in Canada, National Health Service in Britain, multi-payer private insurance with set costs and benefits provided by private non-profit insurance companies in Switzerland, and a variety of others in France, Germany, Taiwan, Scandanavia, etc.). If payment were the same for everyone, empowered people would ensure that it was adequate. Payment should be either averaged over the population or tied to the complexity of disease and treatment (rather than what you could do, helpful or not). We would have doctors putting most of their work into the people whose needs were greatest, rather than those whose reimbursement/difficulty of care ratio was highest. There are other alternatives coming from what is often called “the right”, but as summarized in a recent blog post (“You think Obamacare is bad…”) by my colleague Dr. Allen Perkins, they are mostly, on their face, absurd.

Our country can act nobly and often has. ACA was a nice start, but now we need to move to a system that treats people, not “insurees”.

Outliers, Hotspotting, and the Social Determinants of Health

We all have, or will have, our personal health problems, and the health problems that confront those close to us in our family and among our friends. Some are relatively minor like colds, or are temporary like injuries from which we will heal. Some are big but acute and will eventually get all better, like emergency surgery for appendicitis, and others are big and may kill us or leave us debilitated and suffering from chronic disease. Some of us have more resources to help us deal with these problems and others fewer. Those resources obviously include things like how much money we have and how good our health insurance is, but also a variety of other things that have a great impact in our ability to cope with illness, survive when survival is possible, and make the most of our lives even when afflicted with chronic disease. 

These other things are often grouped under the heading of “social determinants of health”. They include factors clearly related to money, such as having safe, stable and warm housing, having enough to eat, and otherwise having our basic needs met. They also include support systems – having a family and friends that is supportive and helpful, or alternatively not having one or having family and friends whose influence is destructive. It includes having a community that is safe and livable and nurtures and protects us and insulates us from some potential harm. This concept, “social capital”, is most well-described in Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”[1] and its health consequences in Eric Klinenberg’s “Heat Wave”[2], discussed in my post “Capability: understanding why people may not adopt healthful behaviors”, September 14, 2010.

How this affects communities is a focus of the work of Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a family physician who practiced in one of the nation’s poorest, sickest, and most dangerous cities, Camden, NJ, and is a founder of the “Camden Coalition”. I have written about him and his work before (“Camden and you: the cost of health care to communities”, February 18, 2012); his work drew national attention in the New Yorker article by Dr. Atul Gawande in January, 2011, “The Hot Spotters”. Brenner and his colleagues have taken on that name to describe the work that they do, and have collaborated with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) to focus on “hotspotting” (www.aamc.org/hotspotter) and produce a downloadable guide to help health professionals become “hot spotters” in their own communities in ten not-easy steps. The focus of this work is on identifying outliers, people who stand out by their exceptionally high use of health care services, and develop systems for intervening by identifying the causes of their high use and addressing them to the extent possible, activities for which traditional medical providers are often ill-suited and health care systems are ill-designed.

The essential starting point in this process, emphasized by Brenner in two talks that he gave at the recent Annual Meeting of the AAMC in Philadelphia (his home town) in early November, 2013, is identifying “outliers”.  The concept of recognizing outliers was the topic of a major best seller by Malcolm Gladwell a few years ago (called “Outliers”[3]), and Brenner notes that they are the “gems” that help us figure out where the flaws, and the costs, in our system are. As described in Gawande’s article, Brenner was stimulated by looking at work done by the NYC Police Department to identify which communities, which street corners, and which individuals were centers of crime; rather than developing a police presence (and, hopefully, pro-active community intervention) for the “average” community, they were able to concentrate their work on “hot spots”. Moving out of a crime-prevention and policing model, Brenner and his colleagues were able to link to hospital admissions data that was tied to people and performed a “utilization EKG” of their community, looking at who had the highest rates of admissions, ER visits, 911 calls and sought to determine what the reasons were.

Unsurprisingly, the individuals identified most often had the combination of multiple chronic diseases, poverty, and a lack of social supports – pictures of the impact of poor social determinants of health. Sometimes there were individual, specific issues – like the person who called 911 multiple times a day and was found to both live alone and have early Alzheimer’s so that he couldn’t remember that he already had called. Often, there were predictable community and poverty related issues, related to inadequate housing , food, transportation, and poor understanding of the instructions given them by the health care providers that they had seen.

One example of such an effort is “medicine reconciliation”, in which (usually) pharmacists review the medications that a patient entering the hospital, clinic or ER is supposed to be on (per their records) and what they say they are taking. It sounds like a good idea, and it has received a great deal of emphasis in the last several years, but it is one that Brenner calls a “fantasy” because it doesn’t involve going into people’s homes and (with them) searching through their medicine cabinets and drawers to find the piles of medications they have, and often have no idea of how to take, which ones are expired, which ones have been replaced by others, which ones are duplicated (maybe brand vs. generic names or from samples). He showed a slide of a kitchen table piled high with medicines found in one house, and says that his group has collected $50,000 in medicines found in people’s houses that their current providers did not know they were taking or wanted them to take.

Brenner notes that continuous ongoing stress weakens the body and the immune system, enhancing production of cortisol (a stress hormone) that has effects like taking long-term steroids, increasing the probability of developing “metabolic syndrome” and a variety of other physical conditions. He also cites the work of Vincent Felitti[4] and his colleagues that have identified Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs), such as abuse, neglect, etc., being associated with the presence of being a high-utilizer sick person in middle age (and, if they reach it, old age). This is, he indicates, exactly what they have found doing life histories of these “outliers”. It suggests that while interventions at the time of being identified as a high utilizer can be helpful for the individual patient, for the cost to the health system, and even to the community; but it also reinforces what we should already know – that the interventions need to occur much earlier and be community-wide, ensuring safe housing and streets, effective education, and adequate nurturance for our children and their families.

We need, Brenner says, half as many doctors, twice as many nurses, and three times as many health coaches, the intensively trained community-based workers who do go out and visit and work with people at home. I do not know if those numbers are true, but it is clear that we need to have comprehensive interventions, both to meet the needs of those who are sickest now and to prevent them from developing in the future. We are not doing it now; Brenner says “Like any market system, if you pay too much for something you’ll get too much of it, and if you pay too little you’ll get too little.”

We need to have a system that pays the right amount for what it is that we need.

---

[1] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.Simon & Schuster, New York, NY. 2000.

[2] Klinenberg, Eric. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of a Disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 2002.

[3] Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: the story of success. Little Brown. New York. 2008.

[4] Felitti, V et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study”, Am J Prev Med 1998;14(4) (and many subsequent publications).