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Jun 23 2013

Stetho-Snopes: Time for some rigorous myth-busting in healthcare?

By admin healthcare industry, politics, technology

It was recently revealed that an Excel error contributed to the European fiscal crisis, and a continuing global economic recession/depression. Paul Krugman called the revelation the Excel Depression in the NY Times. Certainly lives are at stake when the success or failure of large economies are at risk, but not nearly as many lives as are at stake every day given the lack of transparency (and even, in some cases, plain truth) in bioscience research and medical outcomes reporting. Ben Goldacre gave a barn-burning TED talk, “Battling Bad Science,” in 2011. He gave another one in 2012 in which he called the data manipulation in scientific research the “cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.” His point? We cannot make a meaningful decision in the absence of ALL the data. Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the actually-useful-to-humans WWW part of the Internet, has consistently called for raw data – ALL the raw data – NOW. Paul Levy, the former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, recently blogged about the failure of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery to reveal, in a report on a surgery for sunken-chest deformity, a widely-reported death of a teenage boy after said surgery, even though that boy’s case is used as an example of avoidable medical error in safety bootcamps for medical interns and residents. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Even if the data is fully reported, the PR geeks who write up the announcement of results might get that report 100% wrong. Witness the recent contretemps over a University of Chicago study on patient engagement, shared decision-making, and healthcare cost control. A full outline of that mess, by ePatient Dave deBronkart in Forbes, will give you 411 on that story. The Cliff’s Notes: it was a post-discharge survey, not a full study; it measured attitudes, not outcomes; and the press release was sent out on…

Jun 11 2013

Did someone say “palooza”?

By admin healthcare industry, politics, technology

I’m still recovering from the month of May. I was all up in the healthcare, pretty much 24/7, which differs not-much from my usual roll, other than that in the period of three weeks, I was in DC for eight of 21 days, May 14 through June 5, attending HM13 (the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine, which I covered for The Hospitalist magazine podcasts) and Health Data Palooza IV as just-me on a Consumer Circle scholarship. What I saw and heard at both conferences made me hopeful for the future of healthcare … sort of. As inspiring as both of them were, I found the SHM conference more of a hope engine for just-e-patient me than the rah-rah tech-fest that was #hdpalooza. Granted, HM13 was organized and run by the medical society that has a big upward swing on its membership, and on the income of said members, which means that there was a breadth and depth of content that wouldn’t be available at non-clinical conferences. I got plenty of mental floss out of both of them. Here are the high (and low) lights: Still glaringly missing from all of this rah-rah is the actual, real-world voice of the patient – HM13 can be (somewhat) forgiven for that, since it’s a medical society annual conference. I will note that, in all my interviews for HM13 podcasts, the question, “How can patients help?” was warmly welcomed by everyone asked, and answered with enthusiasm and insight. Figuring out how to break the walls down between clinicians and patients – “gimme my damn data,” two-way edition – using health IT systems as the wedge seems to be a place to start. But letting patients help there is utterly crucial. Speaking of sitting too long … time for a bike ride to my…

Apr 11 2013

Firehose of healthcare cost resources for #billesq

By admin e-patients, healthcare industry, healthcare price transparency, participatory medicine

I attended the 2nd edition of the bill conference in Richmond VA today (for the record, that’s Saturday, April 6, 2013), and wound up kicking off the talks with what’s become my core topic: #howmuchisthat, healthcare edition. That link goes to the hashtag’s home on Symplur, the healthcare hashtag registry that’s also a veritable time-sink of terrific healthcare thought leadership. Including healthcare data visualization. You’re welcome. Why is this a topic I care so much, and know so much, about? I believe that in all the hot air that’s been expended in the discussion about healthcare and healthcare reform in the US – and boy, howdy, is that some hot air! – very little shrift is given to how consumers (commonly called “patients”) can effect grassroots change themselves. The firehose below takes a wander through the history of US healthcare, particularly from the cost angle, and resources that the average human can use to start figuring out, ahead of time, how to assess the value (medical and fiscal) of their healthcare options. Here’s the firehose. Steve Brill’s epic TIME piece, Bitter Pill pack a lunch, it’s the longest article TIME has ever published My take on where Brill missed the mark on his “fix this mess” recommendations A Feb. 12 post that raises Brill’s issue in what I think of as a great-minds-thinking-alike synergy My health econ guru Uwe Reinhardt’s Chaos Behind a Veil of Secrecy article in January 2006 edition of Health Affairs A post that includes intel on the RUC and the LA Times piece – both of which I mentioned in my verbal firehose A NY Times story on the unintentionally hilarious 2013 report in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Assn.) on the wide disparity in pricing for hip replacements in the US – the RUC is an AMA committee! Society…

Apr 05 2013

Medicine has a major image problem

By admin cancer, healthcare industry, healthcare price transparency

When you hear the word “monopoly,” does it fill you with a warm and fuzzy feeling? (Unless you’re Hasbro, you really should say no, unless you’re a cyborg.) Healthcare is a monopoly. We can’t DIY cancer treatment, or surgically repair a broken hip for ourselves, so we have to go to the medical-industrial complex to regain our health if we wander into the weeds, health-wise. We also have deep difficulty accessing pricing information. I’ve talked about that hereand in even more depth on the Cancer for Christmas blog over the last few years. This “chaos behind a veil of secrecy” (all credit for that phrase belongs to healthcare economist Uwe Reinhart) has created the impression in healthcare customers that there’s no way to tell what something will cost before you buy it. You checks the box and takes yer chances. That’s a rotten way to run a railroad (one of the original monopoly industries in modern history), and an even worse way to run a hospital. Dan Munro wrote about this, and the star-chamber cabal that actually sets the prices in healthcare, the RUC, on Forbes.com yesterday. I’ve talked about the RUC myself. And the search for price transparency, which seemed such an outlier activity just a couple of years ago, is now popping up in the Well blog on the New York Times site, as well as on Reuters. The Reuters piece has the addition bonus of quotes from my buddy Jeanne Pinder, founder of ClearHealthCosts.com. (Yesterday was a big day in medical price transparency.) This is the central reason I registered the hashtag #howmuchisthat with Symplur, the healthcare hashtag registry. We all have to start demanding that prices be visible, and that the RUC stop cabal-ing around with our lives and our wallets. As more and more people are finding themselves with high-deductible health insurance, asking how much things cost before you…

Mar 23 2013

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO GET IRRETRIEVABLY PISSED OFF?

By admin healthcare industry, healthcare price transparency, participatory medicine

Nothing. It’s free. Just costs a little of your time. First, a piece from the New York Times magazine on the science of making addictive foods. Second, a post on the TIME Healthland blog about the insanity that is medical billing. Go ahead. Read, get angry, get engaged, DO SOMETHING. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Mar 08 2013

Snowflakes and bitch-slaps at the ePharma Summit

By admin healthcare industry, technology

I had the great good fortune of being asked (by WEGO Health) to participate on a panel titled Social Media for Pharma: A Match Made in Heaven or Hell?at the ePharma Summit in New York (#epharma) earlier this week. When the opportunity presented itself, I asked to be registered for the whole event so I could do my fly-on-the-wall thing by attending some sessions and schmoozing in the exhibit hall. What did I learn? I learned something I already knew: pharma, and healthcare in general, talks a good game at the corporate level about “engagement” when it comes to patients. However, their use of the word tends to run along engagement-as-shiny-object-syndrome lines; in other words, passive message consumption is the desired model, since two-way dialogues are problematic, with pharma afraid of FDA bitch-slaps in the form of warning letters and healthcare in general sweating bullets about the powerful bitch-slap known as the HIPAA violation, given the $1.5M fine potential. I understand their aversion to drawing the gimlet eye, and the ire, of the feds when they’re considering how to communicate with their marketplace. Pharma is a conservative, slow-to-innovate business that’s focused on shareholder value and ROI for said investors, given that they can spend billions developing a new drug for market before they can sell the first pill of said wonder drug. At least, that’s what pharma balance sheets and annual reports tell us. Pharma is anxious to open dialogues with its customers – the real customers, patients – but isn’t sure how to go about doing that without winding up in deep kimchee with federal regulators. That was the purpose of the panel I was on: to let pharma know what kind of conversation patients were looking for, and what we’d like to hear from the pharma industry. Our…

Feb 28 2013

More medical Monopoly: How Steve Brill got it wrong

By admin healthcare industry, healthcare price transparency

I talked about Steve Brill’s epic TIMEpiece Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us last week. I’m still absorbing the cost data he uncovered in that piece, and the graphics and images alone are worth the $5.99 cover price to get a physical copy of the magazine. The stories he shares about the healthcare industry’s Great & Powerful Oz – the hospital chargemaster price list – do reveal a big reason for the out-of-control price spikes in US healthcare. As brilliant, informative, and galvanizing as Brill’s piece is, I believe he dropped the ball just short of the goal line when, in his wrap-up recommendations, he talks up solutions that nibble around the edges of the cost problem, but don’t address its core cause: our crazy 3rd-party payer system. Take a walk with me through the hallways of US healthcare history. Here’s the timeline: 1880s: Chloroform in use as surgical anesthesia (thank GAWD). 1900s: The American Medical Association (AMA) becomes a big player. 1900s: Doctors no longer work fee-free in US hospitals (see bullet #2). 1910s: America lagging behind European nations on health insurance (already?). 1920s: Political complacency (must have been all the bathtub gin) leads to a “what, me worry?” attitude toward rising medical costs. 1930s: Oops, we broke the stock market. Blue Cross, against insurance industry advice, starts offering hospital insurance coverage. 1940s: Stiff wage controls in WWII defense plants lead to employers offering health insurance to their factory workers. President Truman draws up national health insurance plan, gets beat up on the White House lawn by Congress. 1950s: Pharma industry becomes big player via antibiotic and vaccine development, along with meds for a variety of illnesses. Lots of proposals for national health plan, all get beaten up in public and sent home. Employer-based group insurance plans, offering coverage for “major…

Feb 23 2013

Medical Error: Numbers Don’t Lie

By admin e-patients, healthcare industry, participatory medicine

Res ipsa loquitor:

Feb 21 2013

More Medical Monopoly [hotels everywhere!]

By admin healthcare industry, media commentary

Last week’s post called medicine in the U.S. a monopoly. I took some heat for using that metaphor from some of my economist and journo colleagues, and realized that I needed to make a clarification: Medicine is a game of Monopoly, not a true economic monopoly. My very-snark-infested point was, and always is, that the pricing model in healthcare in this country is about as fair as a crap game or, perhaps, a round of Monopoly. More grist for my point arrived this week in the form of a TIME special feature, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. In it, reporter Steven Brill walks the reader through the chaos behind a veil of secrecy in healthcare pricing, starting with an under-insured man’s treatment at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, which involved waiting – while wracked with the chills and fever caused by his non-Hodkin’s lymphoma – in a crowded hospital reception area until the check for his treatment cleared. He wound up having to use a credit card to pay $7,500 toward his medical costs before they’d initiate his chemotherapy. By the way, MD Anderson is a non-profit hospital. A close review of that man’s hospital bills revealed a 400% markup on many of the cancer drugs in his chemo treatments. Another example in the TIME feature is one involving a $21,000 false alarm – a woman was having chest pain, and was taken by ambulance to a local hospital. After testing, it was discovered that she was suffering from indigestion. The Medicare billing for the trip would have been around 80% less than what the woman – who didn’t have insurance – was billed for the hospital visit. However, since she was 64, and not eligible for Medicare, she was billed $21,000. Yikes. At the root…

Feb 12 2013

Medical Monopoly: Medicine has a major image problem

By admin healthcare industry, media commentary, politics, technology

When you hear the word “monopoly,” does it fill you with a warm and fuzzy feeling? (Unless you’re Hasbro, you really should say no, unless you’re a cyborg.) Healthcare is a monopoly. We can’t DIY cancer treatment, or surgically repair a broken hip for ourselves, so we have to go to the medical-industrial complex to regain our health if we wander into the weeds, health-wise. We also have deep difficulty accessing pricing information. I’ve talked about that here over the last few years. Maybe not a monopoly in the financial-reg sense of the word, but it sure is mighty like a game of Monopoly. This “chaos behind a veil of secrecy” (all credit for that phrase belongs to healthcare economist Uwe Reinhart) has created the impression in healthcare customers that there’s no way to tell what something will cost before you buy it. You checks the box and takes yer chances. No Get Out of the Hospital Free cards. No pass-the-admissions-counter-collect-$200 option. That’s a rotten way to run a railroad (one of the original monopoly industries in US history), and an even worse way to run a hospital. Dan Munro wrote about this, and the star-chamber cabal that actually sets the prices in healthcare, the RUC, on Forbes.com yesterday. I’ve talked about the RUC myself. And the search for price transparency, which seemed such an outlier activity just a couple of years ago, is now popping up in the Well blog on the New York Times site, as well as on Reuters. The Reuters piece has the addition bonus of quotes from my buddy Jeanne Pinder, founder of ClearHealthCosts.com. (Yesterday was a big day in medical price transparency.) This is the central reason I registered the hashtag #howmuchisthat with Symplur, the healthcare hashtag registry. We all have to start demanding that prices be visible, and that the RUC stop cabal-ing…