In case you missed it, getting a Really Big Diagnosis like, say, cancer, is a big whack to the wallet. Even if you have titanium-plated insurance (spoiler: there is no such animal in the US healthcare payment system), there will be bills for many, many things.
If you have a deductible, be prepared to build a spreadsheet matrix with complex algebra to calculate how much of what care will be on you. If you have co-insurance – your spouse’s employer coverage, for instance – that’ll add complexity to your algebra.
It’s a lot.
In a piece on the Discover credit card and financial services blog, recent Cancer Club inductee Kris Blackmon lays out how unexpected medical expenses impact people dealing with a Really Big Diagnosis, or any ongoing health issue that requires lots of clinical care – and therefore medical bills – offering a solid strategy for dealing with those bills.
Do your research
Talk to your clinical team’s billing office in advance about what your options are under your coverage plan. You’ll have to do this with each provider and facility you’ll receive care in – Blackmon says she chose to be treated at a major academic medical center because of the one-stop care coordination available in a comprehensive care setting.
Ask all the questions
If you’ve been hanging around these parts for any length of time, you know I’m all about being your own best advocate when getting medical treatment. Kris Blackmon puts mustard on that ball by recommending that, even if you wind up in the emergency department (which can totally happen during cancer treatment), you ask to speak to the billing department rep in the ED before any treatment is ordered, or delivered, so you know what your options are, and what the bill might be for them.
Read the fine print
Yeah, yeah, “nobody reads the Terms and Conditions,” but when you’re getting medical treatment … YOU GOTTA READ ‘EM, KIDS. Reading all of each bill, and lining it up with your health plan coverage, can unearth errors and fact-check the bills you need to pay to meet your deductible. By the way, did you ask if all the clinicians delivering your care were in-network in the previous section? If not … SURPRISE! And not the fun kind with confetti and cake, the not-fun kind with you being on the hook for their charges, thanks to something called balance billing.
Think it’s just you? Nope. It’s all of us.
Social Workers and Other Organizations May Help You Manage Expenses
When I was dealing with my own Cancer Year, I not only served as my own care coordinator, I was also my own social worker – I was handed a resource sheet by my surgeon’s NP, and then worked the phones and web on my own behalf to find ways to pay the bills that were piling up, as well as the living expenses ditto. Cancer treatment is expensive, and it’s also exhausting – if you have to keep working (which I did) to keep the wheels on your life from falling off. Most hospitals and large health systems have social worker staff to help folks navigate resource options – use them!
What to do? Here’s how others managed.
There’s more!
I’ve shared the highlights of Kris Blackmon’s post on the Discover blog – read the whole thing here. Need some help? Reach out to me here. It takes a village to manage medical care – getting it AND paying for it. Happy to help if you need it.
I think I can call you Bill, since we’ve known each other since early 1989, the first time I actually met you, at the Democratic Governor’s Conference at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Oh, you don’t remember me?
No surprise, I was buried in the front row of the press gaggle, helping cover the meeting for the Today Show. I continued to cover you – on the campaign trail in ’92, at Madison Square Garden when you were nominated, and throughout your 8 years in office, including l’affaire Lewinsky – for years. So we’re blood, brother.
You see, I have myself been working for years on transforming the healthcare sector into something that serves humanity, not corporate bottom lines or C-suite ivory tower dwellers. I’ve been doing this based on my direct experience, as a family advocate and caregiver for two members of the Greatest Generation, and then as my own advocate through cancer treatment.
As I mentioned, my head exploded at the $630K speaking fees you received for keynoting at the World Summit over two years. You see, I get invited to all sorts of national healthcare system transformation shindigs, often to appear on the platform myself, usually as part of a panel. My voice apparently has some sort of value, since the invitations keep rolling in for me to share my perspectives on how to fix our fractured, unsafe, crazy-train healthcare delivery system.
However, I’m not paid in high-dollar speaking fees. I’m usually paid in warm handshakes, cold bagels, and occasional airfare. In other words, I’m working as what amounts to slave labor a volunteer in service of transforming a system that, as I mentioned, manages to suck up $3T/year (20+% of US GDP), and still manages to kill somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 people a year through preventable error.
The Society for Participatory Medicine is dedicated to “a model of cooperative health care that seeks to achieve active involvement by patients, professionals, caregivers, and others across the continuum of care on all issues related to an individual’s health. Participatory medicine is an ethical approach to care that also holds promise to improve outcomes, reduce medical errors, increase patient satisfaction and improve the cost of care.”
The Lown Institute is a collection of researchers, doctors, nurses, policy experts, and just plain people-patients (sensing a theme here?) that “seeks to catalyze a grassroots movement for transforming healthcare systems and improving the health of communities.” Their RightCare Alliance “is the first grassroots social movement that brings together health professionals, religious and community groups, and the public. Together we are working toward a society in which the right care is accessible by all. We believe this will be made possible through a collaborative process that engages local healthcare institutions and the community in the stewardship of resources for health.”
C’mon, Bill. It’s not like you can’t spare the $630K. Put your money where your mouth is. Those of us in the trenches are getting pretty tired of living with what we’ve come to call “#RattyBoxers syndrome.” We’ll put that cash to use making sure our ground troops can show up at the meetings where they’ll have a chance to make a real difference, at speed. Even the World Summit.
I’ve been MIA here, but I’ve been loud/proud pretty much everywhere else in the last few months. Including here and here. What follows is a rant based on what I’ve been seeing/doing since last seen on this page.
Elephants
There’s an old joke that goes like this: “What’s an elephant?” “It’s a mouse designed by a government committee.” There’s also the old “elephant in the room” bromide about topics that are not to be mentioned under any circumstances, despite their obvious impact on the issue under discussion. And the “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” motivational meme, along with the “blind guys describing an elephant” metaphor used to explain the impact of silo-ed thinking.
We’re up to our parietal bones in pachyderms in the healthcare transformation discussion. The biggest one – you can call him Jumbo, or you could call him Dumbo – is always in the room. What I call him is Huckster Nation.
Image: Banksy
What do I mean? I mean the underpinning of pretty much all of American culture – the carnival barker sales guy (guy in this usage is gender neutral). We are a nation of flacks, flogging everything from Sham-Wow to space stations, and that includes our healthcare system. Hell, I’m selling myself, or at least I’m offering to rent out the contents of my cranium in exchange for coin of the realm, as are we all, in one way or another.
Americans have taken this to the level of a cultural art form, in that we’ve built our national myth around economic freedom. That it works out to be a literal myth for too many of us – income divide, I’m talking to you – is part of what I’m calling out here, but for the moment let’s focus on the carnival barkers sales guys in US healthcare, shall we?
I’m taking about the ….
Middlemen
Who are the middlemen in healthcare? Apart from the obvious ones – the health insurers, including Medicare, who administer the payment/money side of healthcare delivery – there are a metric sh*t ton of middlemen of all sorts threaded throughout the system. To use a biology metaphor, let’s call the ones that help Good Bacteria and the ones that don’t help Ebola Outbreaks. By the way, I’m defining “help” as an effort at improving something: making care more accessible, creating technology that improves care/care process, research that discovers new treatments.
Here are some examples of Good Bacteria:
Organizations that build health literacy tools to improve people’s access to and understanding of healthcare (click here for an example)
Open-access scientific journals (click here and herefor examples)
Companies that build tech that helps patients, or clinical teams, or patients AND clinical teams (click here and here for examples)
Here are some Ebola Outbreaks:
Any commercial enterprise operating the healthcare sector that puts ROI above human lives (click herefor an example)
Not-for-profit healthcare systems that treat humans solely as profit modules (click here for an example)
Health insurance companies that allow games of “gotcha” where their covered lives are the game pieces (click here for a Modern Healthcare piece on the issue)
Systems
Which brings me to the whole US healthcare system conundrum, which was summed up pretty well by my friend Dan Munro:
Image: Dan Munro
I attended the Population Health Alliance Forum conference recently in DC. I was surrounded by middlemen – some Good Bacteria, some Ebola Outbreaks – as I sat and listened to clinicians, analytics geeks, policy wonks, and carnival barkers sales guys talk about issues in population health. Population health is defined as “the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group.” Meaning that in most conversations where the phrase appears, you’re talking about Employer Sponsored Insurance (ESI), or Medicare. So the attendees were heavy on the big insurer and big health provider side, with a strong showing in the “we want to sell our stuff to big insurers and big health providers” cohort.
I was, as far as I could tell, the only person wearing the “I’m a patient here, myself” label. I guess I was the patient voice carnival barker sales guy. Hey, we’re all selling something, even if it’s only an idea.
Meanwhile, I’m surrounded by system players in a series of hotel ballrooms in DC. I found myself getting a little shouty with frustration on Twitter:
Hearing *part* of my song, but where are wellness or engagement programs co-designed by PATIENTS? #phaf15
In the metaphor I’m using in this post, Ebola Outbreaks are overwhelming the Good Bacteria. So here’s what we gotta do – we gotta call out Ebola Outbreaks when and wherever they appear. If you see one, shout it out – preferably in public, like on Twitter! – and tag me. I’ll be “Nurse with the Good Bacteria,” and whistle up both some outrage, and some common sense solutions.
Let’s not keep the insanity that is $3T+/year in exchange for “sorta OK” on a lather/rinse/repeat cycle. Who’s with me?
I’ve spent a good portion of the last two months on the healthcare equivalent of the political stump – called the “rubber chicken circuit” in political circles. Thankfully, there was no actual rubber chicken served during these sojourns, although there was the incident of the seductive breakfast sausage, followed by my solo re-enactment (off stage) of the bridal salon scenes from the movie “Bridesmaids.” I will draw the veil of charity (and gratitude for travel expense coverage) over the details of that incident, and just advise all of you to stick to fruit, cereal, or bagels at conference breakfasts. ‘Nuff said.
My original editorial calendar plan was to turn this into a series of posts, broken down by focus into technology and clinical categories. However, since a big part of my goal in standing on the barricades at the gates of the healthcare castle, waving my digital pikestaff in service of system transformation, is breaking down silos … well, go grab a sandwich, and a beverage. This is gon’ be a long one.
Being a person with no letters after her name (like Elizabeth Holmes [update: she’s trash, so redacted] and Steve Jobs, I’m a college dropout), I’m used to showing up at healthcare industry events and being seen as something of a unicorn fairy princess. That’s how people commonly called “patients” are usually viewed in industry settings outside the actual point of care. Healthcare professionals/executives are so used to seeing us as revenue units, or data points, or out cold on a surgical table, but not as walking/talking/thinking humans, they can do a spit-take when meeting an official “patient” at an industry conference. Which is fun if they have a mouthful of coffee, but I haven’t seen anyone actually get sprayed yet.
All kidding aside, I really have to hand it to HIMSS for their uptake speed on seeing people/patients as valuable voices in the conversation about healthcare IT and quality improvement. In the time since they first noticed (in 2009, I believe) that people like ePatient Dave deBronkart, Regina Holliday, and others might have something to add to the discussion, they’ve made a visible effort to include people/patient voices in their national programs. Of course, had they not invited patients to present at their Patient Engagement Summit, they would have been line for a public [digital] beating … and so there we were: Amy Gleason, Kym Martin, Alicia Staley, and yours truly, ready to grab a mic and speak some truth.
A favorite tweet during the opening keynote by Dr. Kyra Bobinet, a friend of mine via our mutual membership in the Stanford MedX community:
I see patient engagement as healthcare that nourishes the people it serves, and also as a nutrient for the healthcare delivery system itself. Healthcare itself will get better, in its body (clinicians and all other folks who work inside the system) and in its spirit (its culture), with authentic connection – engagement – with the human community who seeks its help in maintaining or regaining good health.
Both panels went well, and the audience seemed to be both awake, and interested in what we had to say. For those of us who have been working the user – PATIENT – side of healthcare transformation, it’s frustrating that we’re still saying the same things to professional audiences that we’ve been saying for (in my case) close to 20 years now. But those of us on the patient side of this change management rodeo can sense a paradigm shift, and are starting to believe that we’re seeing transformation slowly deploy across the healthcare system. As the oft-repeated William Gibson quote goes, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
I should be able to, via dashboard radio button, select EHRs to share my #qself data with. YES, REALLY. #engage4health — Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey) February 9, 2015
Patients ARE engaged. We’re working our butts off to get medical professionals and healthcare execs on the same page as us. Like the old story goes, when it comes to bacon and eggs, the chicken’s involved, but the pig’s fully committed. In the bacon-and-eggs of healthcare, patients are the bacon. We’re all in, and we know more, in many ways, about how to fix the system than the “professionals” do. Alicia Staley said, again, what she says consistently to healthcare audiences, “You need a Chief Patient Officer on your board.” So … get one. And we all need to be wary of blaring headlines, which can be very misleading when it comes to the real health risks we all face:
Healthcare doesn’t have to reinvent the #infosec wheel. Finance/banking, another high-reg/high-risk industry, is great model. #hitprivacy — Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey) March 5, 2015
In early March, I winged my way out to San Diego, one of my several hometowns (growing up a Navy kid means you get more than one) for the HIMSS Privacy + Security Forum. I was a panelist for the last session of the conference, which I knew meant that many of the attendees would already be in the TSA screening line at Lindbergh Field, but I was going to share my thoughts with whomever stuck around, even if it was just the busboys. Our session was titled “What Matters Most: Patient Perspectives on Privacy & Security,” and what happened at the end of our panel was something I had hoped for – several of the folks who had stuck around come up to us and said, “that panel should have opened this conference!”
When it comes to IT security, the healthcare industry is rightly terrified, given the epic bitch-slap that a HIPAA fine can be ($1.5 million dollars per incident) – and the irony of the Anthem data breach affecting up to 8.8 million of their members making headlines the week before this conference was not lost on me … or any of the other folks at the HIMSS Forum meeting. Yet it’s critical to note that access, by patients and by clinicians, particularly at the point of care, to all the relevant data necessary to deliver the right care at the right time to the right patient, is still an undelivered promise across the health IT landscape. So don’t be Mordac, Dilbert’s Preventer of Information Services – we have enough of him. He’s like a freakin’ virus.
Hilariously, the day before I traveled to San Diego, I had to threaten a HIPAA complaint to get my records transferred from one provider to another. I had been asking for TWO MONTHS for the rads practice where I had gotten my mammograms 2009 through 2011 (twice a year in 2009 and 2010, given my Cancer Year of 2008) to send my scans and reports to my current mammography radiologist, and it took a voicemail with a HIPAA violation threat to get someone to call me back. My records are so damn secure that NO ONE can get them, except for “Robert in the basement” at [rhymes with … Bon Secours]. It felt like I was talking to Central Services in the Terry Gilliam movie “Brazil.” And people wonder why I have a QR code linked to my health history tattooed on my sternum …
I for one threw privacy overboard like a dead cat by planting this on my chest (PW protected, tho) pic.twitter.com/kH1BZLzzhY#hcsmca
Speaking of right care/right time/right patient, two days after the HIMSS Privacy + Security Forum wrapped, the Lown Institute’s RightCare 2015 conference kicked off just down the street.
Dr. Bernard Lown is the cardiologist who invented the cardiac defibrillator in the 1960s, and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for his part in creating the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The Lown Institute, founded to continue the work on healthcare and human rights that Dr. Lown has devoted his life to, states as its mission “We seek to catalyze a grassroots movement for transforming healthcare systems and improving the health of communities.”
In short, this event made me feel like I’d taken a trip in the Wayback Machine to my college days 1970-1973 in the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco … without the LSD, but with all the fire of my youth, mixed with the wealth of mature knowledge I’ve managed to velcro on to myself in the decades since. The real beauty part? There were lots of young people in the room, who are the age today that I was 40 years ago (in my early twenties), speaking up for the human rights of the people served by the healthcare system. The ones commonly called “patients.”
I got a chance at a scholarship to #Lown2015after meeting Shannon Brownleeduring our work on the Patient & Family Engagement Roadmap, and our attendance at Dartmouth’s SIIPC14 “informed patient choice” conference last year. She tipped me off that scholarships were available, I applied, and got lucky by snagging one. Doubly lucky, because it put me in the room while some of the leading voices on the clinical side of medicine called out the industry they work in for being slow to fully enfranchise the people they serve – patients – by being too driven by money, and not driven enough by their own humanity. A sampling:
Excited to see a bunch of #AF4Q faces at #Lown2015! A multi-faceted, multi-stakeholder movement toward the #rightcare — Deborah Roseman (@roseperson) March 9, 2015
“If a little chemo is good, more must be better” tragic tale of unproven, ineffective BrCa Rx related by @ShannonBrownlee at #Lown2015 — Kenny Lin, MD, MPH (@kennylinafp) March 9, 2015
Shannon Brownlee: “The medical system today helps many, but harms too many “#LOWN2015 — Pink Ribbon Blues (@PinkRibbonBlues) March 9, 2015
Medical industrial complex designed perfectly as revenue generator. Designed HORRIBLY for delivery of effective right-care. #lown2015 — Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey) March 9, 2015
On the other side is the recognition of the mission and purpose of medicine, which is, at its root, to serve. #Lown2015 — Lown Institute (@lowninstitute) March 9, 2015
“American people hire lobbyists to represent their interests in Washington.” Said no one, ever. (Except @TheOnion) #lown2015 — Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey) March 9, 2015
Jeff Kane: “Cancer is like a bomb going off in the living room.” #lown2015 cc: @BC_Consortium — Pink Ribbon Blues (@PinkRibbonBlues) March 9, 2015
“I can cure homelessness. You just house them and it’s cured. Completely curable problem.” Mitch Katz from LA County #Lown2015 — Chris Moriates (@ChrisMoriates) March 9, 2015
“I am still trapped in a system whose main interest is diagnosis and treatment. But my interest is health.” -Mitch Katz #Lown2015 — Lown Institute (@lowninstitute) March 9, 2015
“Ethical erosion” = med students having their altruism surgically removed via medical school. #lown2015 — Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey) March 9, 2015
Don’t just describe the problem. Don’t get stuck on the negative. Ask what to do to make things better? ~Harlan Krumholz @hmkyale#lown2015 — Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey) March 10, 2015
Harlan Krumholz demolishes the informed consent sham. Resonates: this was the crux of my dad’s MRSA demise. Fresh tears. #Lown2015 — BartWindrum (@BartWindrum) March 10, 2015
Peter Drier’s remarkable engagement in his care/cost negotiation underscores that vulnerable patients don’t have that wherewithal #Lown2015 — Deborah Roseman (@roseperson) March 10, 2015
Public needs to express collective voice for new #patient bill of rights. Right to info about cost & quality. #lown2015#Time4Change — Harlan Krumholz (@hmkyale) March 10, 2015
Only 7% of those with terminal illness in CA talked to their doctor about end of life. Over 70% wanted to. #Lown2015 — Emma Sandoe (@emma_sandoe) March 10, 2015
imagine if the trillion excess in health care spending went to social determinants of health. #Lown2015 — Janice LynchSchuster (@jlschuster827) March 11, 2015
“We will never have a healthy society if we don’t address the poverty and racial disparities that drive our system.” -Steve Nissen #Lown2015 — Lown Institute (@lowninstitute) March 11, 2015
Nissen challenges value of CME– miseducation, paid for by those who stand to profit. ROI for companies, not for care. #Lown2015 — Deborah Roseman (@roseperson) March 11, 2015
Nissen: Millions of dollars flow to physicians from pharma/device companies. “In any other world, this would be called bribes.” #Lown2015 — John Mandrola, MD (@drjohnm) March 11, 2015
This is key!! ‘Know when to quit’. Will be a BIG challenge to #Rightcare movement. How measured? #lown2015 — Gregg Masters (@2healthguru) March 11, 2015
And, because it just ain’t a movement unless this gets thrown down:
Power to the M*****F****** people, yo! Seriously, did I really *have* to say it? Make healthcare work FROM. THE. GROUND. UP. #lown2015 — Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey) March 11, 2015
The bedrock message here? The democratization of knowledge that’s been delivered thanks to the Information Age has lifted the scales from the eyes of the early-adopter people/patients who are on to what healthcare is now, and what it must become to remain sustainable, or even relevant. Patients are coming up off their knees. The occupants of the ivory towers of medicine must descend from their aeries, or risk being flung from the parapets. Like winter …
You’ve heard me before on the subject of shared decision making (SDM). Short version: I’m an advocate for partnership in medical care. Partnership that includes the values, outcome goals, and cost considerations of THE. PATIENT. Which means shared decision making.
A majority of patients (68 percent) say they would prefer to make collaborative decisions about treatment options with their healthcare provider.
Forty percent of patients say they have participated in SDM before, and 21 percent have done so within the past year.
Most patients surveyed say that SDM improves their satisfaction (89 percent) and makes them feel more involved in the care they receive (87 percent).
Nearly half (41 percent) of patients report that they would be “much more likely” to adhere to a treatment plan developed using SDM.
47 percent of patients would be “extremely” or “very likely” to switch to a provider whose practice offers SDM.
If you click through to the full article in the 2nd graf, you’ll see a number of graphs and charts reporting on patients’ responses to questions about provider choice and treatment protocol adherence – one of my least favorite words, but it’s a favorite of pharma and healthcare system peeps, so there it is. The pie chart that stood out for me was this one:
Likelihood to Switch to SDM Provider
For the math-challenged, 80% of the patients surveyed were moderately, very, or extremely likely to switch to a healthcare provider who practices SDM. Physicians and other clinicians who interact with patients at the point of care need to digest this: fully informing patients of the treatment options available to them, and working with patients to craft a treatment plan TOGETHER, is a survival strategy for the clinician. Ignore SDM principles at the peril of your continued professional relevance.
This is particularly timely given my upcoming attendance at the Lown Institute’sRoad to RightCare: Engage, Organize, Transform conference in San Diego March 8 through March 11. I’ll be hearing from researchers, clinical teams, patient voices, and policy wonks on how to create a right-care healthcare system whose bedrock is shared decision making.
Also, the recent JAMA Oncology articleson the myth of the demanding patient, which myth has formed some of the institutional-side (translation: dinosaur providers) pushback against the wide adoption of patient input on their treatment (in other words: SDM) in the U.S. and elsewhere, are starting to knock down the walls that have kept SDM from becoming the standard medical practice model it should be.
“Nothing about me, without me” is a rallying cry of the participatory medicine movement. Shared decision making is, I believe, part of an overall civil rights issue, since patients who aren’t asked their goals and preferences for treatment are being given care that isn’t their choice. A real hurdle for SDM is going to be the inevitable end-of-life conversation – life is, after all, 100% fatal – that we all have to have, unless we die suddenly in a plane crash or car wreck.
Where are you on the SDM spectrum? Does your doctor talk you through all your options, or just write you a prescription or send you for a scan? “Shut up and do as I say” medicine needs to be consigned to the scrapheap of history. Agree? Disagree? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Now that I have, for my sins, been tagged as a patient engagement expert, I figure that entitles me to the occasional rant on the topic of the healthcare system – particularly the US iteration thereof – and its utter inability to understand how to connect and communicate effectively with its customer base: patients.
If you’ve been a patient, for anything beyond a short trip to your primary care doc for something simple (and easily diagnosed) like a laceration or a minor infection, you know that arriving at the doors of The Medical-Industrial Complex is like being the new kid in school.
There’s an old joke about bacon and eggs – the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. In the ongoing sketch comedy/Shakespearean tragedy that is medical care. the clinical teams who deliver care, and the facilities in which they deliver it, are most certainly involved. Patients? We’re fully committed. We are engaged, we are fully present. What we’re not getting from the delivery side is an authentic invitation to engage.
en•gage•ment: noun, a formal agreement, i.e. to get married; an arrangement to do something at a specific time; the act of being engaged, i.e. “continued engagement in trade agreements”
Seems simple, right? Patient appears, asking for care. Clinical professionals deliver that care. Patient happy, clinicians happy, everybody wins. Oh, wait – did the doctor wash her hands before she started the physical exam? If the patient is aware of the importance of handwashing in preventing infection, and asks if the doctor lathered up and rinsed according to protocol, does that patient risk being labeled “difficult” or “aggressive”?
If so, so much for patient engagement. Given that the statistics on handwashing in healthcare settings aren’t at 100% (~ 90% for RNs, < 75% for attending MDs in a 2008 study at an Ohio hospital), clinical folks are as non-compliant as the patients they slap that label onto.
Then there’s the whole medical records dance. I got so sick of filling out health history forms that I said, out loud and online, that I’d get a barcode tattooed on my neck if it meant I never had to fill out another one. Even if you’ve been to a practice countless times before, you’ll likely have to fill one out EVERY. TIME. you have an office visit. Then, if you actually want to SEE your health history – the one contained in the electronic health record (EHR) system, hospital or office, or even the old school paper version – it’s like petitioning the Vatican for a dispensation: begging, more paperwork, and the forking over of cash money.
[Side note: I did tattoo my medical history on myself – not a barcode on my neck, but a QR code on my sternum. It’s visible online as my Twitter avatar– without the password that opens the page, of course.]
When you need medical care, you want to know what your treatment options are. Your doctors should be using a shared decision making approach, where they outline the options and possible outcomes of each one. They also should be able to provide you with COST impacts of the various options, but they don’t – usually because they can’t, since the array of insurance plans they take don’t make cost/price information easy to find.
We can thank what I call “stupid payer tricks” for the opacity of the money side of medical care delivery. Cost – the reimbursement numbers for physicians and facilities, along with the patient co-pay numbers – is considered “proprietary negotiated rate information” that’s the property of the insurance company. They dole it out in drips, only AFTER the bill has been submitted. Imagine buying a car, or a house, and signing the sales contract with no price on it, while being told that the bill will arrive in 60/90/120 days, and that’s what you’ll have to pay.
Hard to engage with something like what’s outlined above, isn’t it?
Add to all this the perception by the people who aren’t regular users of the healthcare system that healthcare is something that happens “over there, to sick people, but not to me,” and you have a complete lack of system literacy for healthy folks. Until, of course, they wind up at the hospital door with “a thing” – a car wreck, cancer – when they have to navigate new territory while sick, and in pain, without a map.
What’s needed here is not another earnest academic study from the health-system side, examining how to drive patient engagement. What we need is a grassroots-led effort, by expert patients who have created maps navigating the “new territory” mentioned above, to work with the doctors, nurses, administrators, data geeks, and scientists who recognize the need to flip the patient engagement paradigm from top down – Ivory Tower Rules – to bottom up: built with patients.
Back when I slaved in the depths of Hunter Thompson’s“shallow money trench,” we had a phrase we deployed whenever we thought the grownups were keeping us in the dark. We would say we’d been sent to Mushroom Land, where one is kept in the dark and fed sh*t, the better to keep us from making, or spotting, trouble.
source: HITconsultant.net
These were the very same grownups who, every four years like clockwork, would look at the calendar and say, “Holy crap, there’s a Presidential ELECTION this year?” But I digress.
The medical-industrial complex has, for eons, kept its customers (commonly called “patients”) in Mushroom Land pretty consistently. For a very long time, that was facilitated by a lack of access to scientific knowledge for the common human, but that started to shift in the 19th and 20th centuries, as public education rose across most parts of the globe. Of course, “math phobia” and “science denial” are still pernicious little devils, but the average person with an 8th grade literacy level and an internet connection can find out about just about anything.
I had the privilege of being awarded a seat at Dartmouth’s 2014 Summer Institute for Informed Patient Choice, orSIIPC14 for short, in late June 2014 (last week, as I write this). The purpose of the conference was to chew on topics and issues related to not keeping patients in the dark when it comes to making informed decisions about their health, their healthcare, and their relationships to the medical care teams they work with to gain or retain “best health.”
This event had some serious meat on its bones, both in reputational throw-weight of the presenters and breadth of stakeholder groups represented in the audience. Dartmouth itself is no stranger to uber-smart-ness, particularly in healthcare, given the work and thinking that emerges from Geisel School of Medicine and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (one of 23 Pioneer ACOs in the US).
I’m not going to walk you through the whole program, because who wants to read 15,000 words, really? What I will do is walk you through a very short list of the presentations that cast the longest memory shadow, for me at least, in the conference aftermath.
How I had not known of Wennberg’s work is a mystery, but it doesn’t need solving ‘cause I now not only know about it, I’m officially an evangelist for it. He’s one of the people behind the Dartmouth Atlas(if you follow that link, pack a lunch – it’s a glorious time-sink for healthcare geeks), and has participated in more thought-provoking and system-transforming research than pretty much anyone I’ve met in my health policy wonk travels to date. His presentation drilled in on what he calls the “Glover phenomenon,”referring to the research of James Alison Glover, a British physician who studied medical practice variation region to region in the UK, with some interesting results that essentially boil down to (my paraphrase) “everyone’s doing it, so I will, too.”
Dr. Wennberg’s talk was the perfect scene-set to kick off the conference, because his work, inspired by Glover’s, points up the price of keeping patients in the dark about why their medical care team is recommending any particular course of treatment for [whatever]. Simply “because I said so” – which was the prescriptive rule in medicine for … ever – is a really bad idea if you’re trying to reduce unnecessary treatments, control costs, or create a healthcare system that runs on scientific evidence, not patriarchy. Shared decision making requires that all participating in that decision have a grasp of all the facts, including possible outcomes.
“The care they [patients] need and no less, want and no more.”
That’s a quote from Dr. Mulley’s involvement with the Salzburg Global Seminarin 2012, and is a pretty good anchor for his message at SIIPC, which was titled “The Silent Epidemic of Misdiagnosis.” That misdiagnosis can come from misattribution of the patient’s outcome preferences (do doctors even ASK most of the time?), which then puts both patient and care team on a trip down the rabbit hole. This approach causes everything from unnecessary surgery to unwanted extraordinary measures at the end of life to who-knows-HOW-many unneeded pharmacological “interventions.”
One quote from Mulley’s talk really stands out for me: “Doctors talk about the science of medicine to preserve their authority and the art of medicine to preserve their autonomy.” Shifting that boulder will take some persistent pushback from patients who want to work with participatory medicine practitioners. (Alliteration-itis.) Click this link to read a paper by Dr. Mulley, Dr. Glyn Elwyn, and a colleague on why patient preferences matter.
I met Elliott Fisher at Health Datapalooza in DC in early June of this year, and sat pretty much at his feet (in the 2nd row) as he delivered the opening keynoteat that event. Since he’s the director of Dartmouth’s Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, I knew he’d be presenting at SIIPC and looked forward to hearing what he had to say.
As an MD with deep experience working to build Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Accountable Care Organization (ACO), Fisher has a 3D view of the healthcare delivery landscape. He rings all my favorite changes, particularly in the areas of cost and quality of care delivered to patients. My favorite slide from his deck said, simply, “No outcome, no income.” In the gold rush that US healthcare has been since … forever, now sucking up close to 20% of GDP – and making the defense lobby look like homeless people in the process – tying money to outcomes, and to the patient preferences that define those outcomes, seems downright revolutionary.
Since I am myself a revolutionary when it comes to pushing for healthcare system transformation, I’m thinking of Elliott Fisher as a brother from another mother, on this topic at least.
Keeping patients in the dark = REALLY. BAD. IDEA.
BUT … (and there are many buts in this story)
If the smart folks running the Dartmouth thinkiness on healthcare system transformation are smart enough to invite the wide panoply of players who attended this conference to listen, and to talk about, how that transformation might be driven … where’s some outcome there? Bueller, Bueller … anyone?
There was much conversation traffic on Twitter throughout the conference, anchored by the hashtag #SIIPC14 (clicking that link will take you to Symplur’s Healthcare Hashtag Project, where you can parse the SIIPC conversation). Much of the undertone of that conversation was “OK, so what’s going to be DONE here?” From the e-patient perspective, that’s a perpetually unanswered question at ALL healthcare related conferences, even our own.
As individuals, and even as groups (professional and consumer), we’re arrayed against what I call the K Street Mafia, who I called out during the Q&A after Elliott Fisher’s talk on the last day of the conference. I also said that silos where the greatest danger to the health of all mankind. Used to be missile silos that risked global destruction. Now it’s just silos of doctors, data geeks, revenue cycle management types, policy wallahs, software developers, patients, and a partridge in a pear tree. I said, “End the silos – can I get an AMEN?” To which the assemblage responded with a rousing “AMEN!” But … did it move the needle, any needle, at all?
Even though gatherings like SIIPC are dedicated to including the patient voice, the scales are not at all balanced when it comes to the power matrix in healthcare. As I said in along conversation on my Facebook wallin the aftermath of my trip to Dartmouth, “It is not lost on me that, in most of the rooms where I am invited to share my recommendations for system transformation, I’m paying my own way amongst a large cohort of well-dressed […] folks on expense accounts.”
This is IN NO WAY meant to snipe at the great folks who put on the Dartmouth conference, and who invited me to attend. I was delighted to be there, and am deeply grateful for the experience. I met some great people, and connected with some others that I already knew.
But … I’ve been doing this for a while now. When will the number 210,000 (the number of avoidable medical error deaths in the US annually) go back to being just another number? When will the cost of care stop being a game of Where’s Waldo? When will expert patients be seen as equals when it comes to getting paid for the work we do to drive system transformation?
The plethora of horror stories that emerge from the “medical professional” ranks about their own terrible experiences when they’re on the other end of the scalpel from their usual position hasn’t made a dent in the stone wall that is the medical-industrial complex’s change management rodeo.
We all have to work on this. The outcome is still uncertain, because institutionally, healthcare seems to be dedicated to “business as usual” in spite of all efforts to shift that thinking. We – the change agents – are arrayed against some powerful forces with very deep pockets.
Are we stuck in a bad remake of “Groundhog Day”? Only time will tell … but this e-patient is very impatient. She’s been doing this for more than 20 years, and she hasn’t seen much “transformation” yet.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock since October 1, you’ve heard that Healthcare.gov, the site where Americans can shop for health insurance, had a rocky start in life. OK, it was an epic mess.
I was one of the people who was eager to jump on the site on October 1, since I haven’t had health insurance since I completed cancer treatment in 2008. That cancer diagnosis and treatment put me in the pre-existing condition pile, which put renewal insurance premiums for my individual coverage at an eye-popping level. You can read the details on that here.On October 1, I hopped on my Mac, and surfed over to Healthcare.gov … and had the same experience everyone else seemed to be having:
image credit: forbes.com
That continued over the following seven days, with me developing a nice little flat spot on my forehead from head/desk-ing my way through many attempts per day at getting past the first step of creating a profile on the site. Even when I had completed that process of creating a profile, every time the site announced “Success! Click here to continue.” I clicked “there” and … got a blank page.
On October 8, I realized that I, and the site’s developers, might have missed something. I was using Google Chrome, my default browser, and the dominant browser across the web. Could it be that the dim bulbs that built the Frankenstein that is the Healthcare.gov site optimized the site only for native browsers? I opened Safari, and discovered that yes, they were indeed that dim, because even though the site loaded at the speed of a slug on Quaaludes, it did load. And “Success!” allowed me to continue the enrollment process. No blank pages.
I re-enacted scenes from 1995, when I would log on to Netscape to download email on my dial-up connection: open the page, hit “go,” and then make coffee. When I returned with a hot cup of joe, I’d repeat the process on each subsequent page, working in another tab while the site loaded the next page in the process. I managed to complete the entire enrollment process, save for the last “pull the trigger” step of hitting the ENROLL button, because I wanted to make sure I had the money for my first month’s premium available. Which turned out to be unnecessary, since when I did hit the ENROLL button, I got a message saying that my selected insurer would be contacting me about billing. That conversation happened a few days ago, and I’ve paid my first month’s premium.
As of January 1, 2014, I’ll have health insurance again for the first time since December 31, 2008. WIN.
Here is the upside of what I saw in my voyage through Healthcare.gov:
Premiums were a wide range, with some surprises: the lowest-premium Bronze Plan had 0% co-insurance (I wasn’t on the hook for a percentage of cost on covered services), with higher premium plans tagged with 25% co-insurance.
Here’s the thing that made me go “WTF?”:
Only the Bronze Plans are HSA-friendly. HSA=Health Savings Account, essentially 401(k)s for healthcare. Individuals can sock away $3,300/year (in 2014) of pre-tax money in a dedicated savings account for healthcare costs, with people over 55 allowed to sock away an additional $1,000 for a total of $4,300 in 2014. Since all the Bronze Plans I was offered had deductibles of $5,500 or more, with the plan I selected carrying a $6,350 deductible, it would seem reasonable – fairer? – to allow consumers to fund their HSAs annually to match the level of their deductible.
I had the great good fortune of being tagged as an ePatient Scholar for the 2013 edition of Stanford Medicine X. That allowed me to sit at the feet – literally, since the ePatients were the mosh-pit for the three day conference plenary stage – of some of the best and brightest minds in healthcare. And guess what? Many of those best/brightest were … PATIENTS.
(c) Lucien Engelen
MedicineX (a/k/a MedX and #medx) is the uber Patients Included medical conference. It grew from seeds planted at conferences like Health 2.0 and Patients 2.0, for which seeds-to-beautiful-flowers gardener credit goes to Dr. Larry Chu and his team from Stanford Anesthesiology AIM Lab, who seem to prestidigitate rabbits out of hats without breaking a sweat. Or the hats. Or the rabbits.
MedX – in my opinion, at least – trumps every other Patients Included event by not just including patients, but by putting them front and center throughout the program. In fact, I cannot think of a session that I attended that didn’t have someone who was there primarily as a customer of healthcare (commonly called “a patient”) on the platform, presenting or participating in a panel discussion.
My ePatient socks were knocked off from jump thanks to the opening keynote by Michael Seres and Marion O’Connor on “The New Engaged Patient,” which was the morning keynote on Friday. Michael uses his blog as his personal health record, up to and through a lifetime battle with Crohn’s disease that led to his becoming the 11th patient to ever receive a bowel transplant, and only the 6th to survive that transplant experience. Michael is hilarious, and Marion is exactly the sort of caring brainiac any patient would like bedside as s/he battled a life-threatening illness. Here’s the video of their session:
The rest of the day played out as a firehose of ePatient awesome, including the first presenter to bring me to tears: Sara Riggare, a brilliant woman who is, among many other things, an engineer and a Parkinson’s patient. During the panel discussion on “The Self-Tracking Patient,” and my (somewhat sobby) conversation with Sara afterward, was when I fully realized, even though I’d talked about it last year on one of my blogs, that I had been born an ePatient. Well, maybe not born, but them that brung me into the world also brought me to ePatient-cy. I felt my late father, whose Parkinson’s laid him low, and then to rest, over 10 years ago, standing by me as I listened to Sara talk about her own self-tracking and self-advocacy. My dad was a warrior – literally, a US Navy fighter pilot – and brought that warrior spirit to his battle with Parkinson’s. I’d like to think that Big Mike would be proud of the work I do today to bring sense, and sensibility, to the most human of all sciences: medicine.
The Friday sessions ended with a “What If Healthcare …” panel discussion, conveniently tagged for the Twitter-verse as #whatifhc(click that link for a Symplur transcript of the conversation as it unfolded live). This session is the only one that pressed my buttons in a not-good way, and here’s why: there were a group of white-dude brainiacs, and one not-a-white-dude, on that panel. Don’t get me wrong, I like white dudes. Hell, I’ve married two of ’em (NOT at the same time!). But I found it sort of anachronistic that, as the “dream big” panel on the first day of a Patients Included medical conference on the campus of a major medical school (Stanford Med), the participants on that panel were so very white-dude, with the notable exception of healthcare artist/activist Regina Holliday. Regina herself mentioned the very-not-diverse makeup of the panel during the session. I made the observation on Twitter, as I listened to the panel’s conversation, that healthcare in the US is a great wealth-transfer system … but as a health-transfer system?
Saturday opened with something for which I was utterly unprepared: hearing first-hand about the project that won the 2012 Intel ISEF Prize. Jack Andraka is the 16 year old kid from Baltimore who, at 13, decided that not having a reliable early-detection test for pancreatic cancer was a terrible thing. He resolved to create that test … and he did. It’s been patented in the US, and is in the process of being patented globally. Here’s the first-look video of his hilarious and inspiring call to action for open science:
Frankly, I count hearing that talk, and meeting Jack later that day at the MedX reception on the Dean’s Lawn, as the highest high point of my MedX experience. I told Jack that I couldn’t wait to see what he did next, but that even if he decided to rest on his uber-science-geek laurels with his mesothelin discovery, he’d given a gift to humanity unlike any other since Jonas Salk. Visit his website to keep track of this approachable, funny, huge-hearted young man who has the mind of a god.
The other big high of my MedX time was finally – FINALLY – being in the room with all three of the women who birthed #BCSM, one of the most powerful healthcare communities on Twitter. My ePatient journey may have been started by the voyage with my parents through their health issues, but it was forged into hardened steel by my own breast cancer experience. Connecting with Alicia Staley was one of the things that helped turn my book, Cancer for Christmas, into an Amazon bestseller in ’09. I spent much of the conference touching base with the #BCSM crew, who were in attendance in force at MedX. It was #BCSM Summer Camp!
The conference closed on Sunday with a keynote by Vinod Khosla, “2025: 20% Doctor Included?” Khosla’s viewpoint – which I share – is that technology will provide more reliable and efficient diagnostic tools, removing the mis-diagnosis risk that leads to most medical errors. He also stated that transformation of the healthcare system will not happen from within. Khosla backed up his positions with evidence, and I was nodding so hard in agreement I risked whiplash. It was the perfect close for the epic firehose of forward-thinking that was MedX 2013. Here’s the first-look video of Khosla’s talk:
What will I remember most about my MedX experience? I’ve listed some of it above, but even as I write this post I realize how much more mental food was served up during those three days. There were the conversations that happened over coffee, during lunch, with a frosty beverage in the Sheraton bar. I met people I’d known online for years, but had not had the opportunity to hug and thank for the impact they’d had on my life until MedX put us in the same room.
Amir Dan Rubin – the CEO of Stanford Hospital & Clinics, his master class on quality improvement will inform my hospital-med journo work for years to come
Dr. Marc Katz(I hadda go to Silicon Valley to meet a terrific doc who practices down the street from me – go figure)
What did I learn at MedX? I learned that there’s hope. Hope for healthcare, hope for humanity, and hope for every single person who winds up a patient (and hey, we’re all patients, right?). The key is that medicine is a team sport. It requires the full participation of everyone in every health-related transaction.
So pick up your ball, and let’s play together, shall we?
In case you missed it, getting a Really Big Diagnosis like, say, cancer, is a big whack to the wallet. Even if you have titanium-plated insurance (spoiler: there is no such animal in the US healthcare payment system), there will be bills for many, many things.
