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Dec 07 2015

Internet of Things (IoT) + healthcare = what, exactly?

By healthcare industry, technology

You can’t turn around these days without running into a headline about the Internet of Things (IoT). It seems as if everything from your car to your cardiac pacemaker is talking to everything else on the internet, and we’re all about to

If you’re confused about the whole IoT thing, and what it means to healthcare, you’re not alone.

As buzzphrases go, “Internet of Things” is having its Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame on an auto-replay loop right now … but what will the actual interconnectedness of the technology we use in our daily lives deliver to us in the way of helping us live better/healthier lives? Will we find ourselves living out a cautionary “I, Robot” sci-fi tale as we become slaves to our IoT robot masters?

The answer is … (wait for it) … “it depends.” And what it depends on is how we humans build and interact with our robot mast … um, the Internet of Things.

The biggest challenge is that healthcare, as an industry, sees the people it serves – we’ll call those people “patients” – as the product, not the customer. Which, I think, goes a long way to explaining why this most human of all industry sectors – the one we seek help from when we get sick – has so resolutely resisted becoming digitally accessible/approachable to its customer base.

If you need a ride, Uber. If you want to shop, Amazon. If you want dinner, Yelp or BlueApron. If you need a doctor’s appointment … well, you can call the office to make an appointment. Or use the portal (if there is one). Or hit up the local urgent care. But there will be plenty of waiting, and it’s unlikely to be a tech-assisted process in any meaningful way.

How could the IoT help you in this situation? Well, if you have an iWatch, or an Android smartwatch (yes, there are such things), you could share your health-related data with your doctor (if s/he has an electronic medical records system that allows for that – pro tip: there ain’t many of those). There are a few consumer-accessible IoT devices that can communicate with clinical teams, like the AliveCor mobile ECG.

The IoT revolution, which allows your refrigerator to alert you if you’re low on milk and your car to text you to remind you it’s time for an oil change, hasn’t really arrived in healthcare. Sure, your iWatch and your Fitbit can send and receive health-related data via the web to you, and to anyone you’ve shared it with, but that “anyone” is unlikely to be your doctor unless s/he is a *very* early-adopter, tech-wise.

For those of us who are early-adopters on the consumer side of tech, this presents an opportunity to be leaders in the healthcare arena by testing and assessing IoT quantified-self and self-tracking tools. When we find something that works well for us – in losing weight, in managing a chronic condition – we can then encourage our healthcare partners (our doctors and nurses) to join in our tech-enabled self-care.

What about the hackers who are lying in wait for all that user-generated data on the Internet of Things? The folks at Arxan sent me the infographic below, which is a great starting place to assess the security of any IoT app or device you’re assessing.

Meanwhile, gotta dash. My Fitbit is reminding me it’s time for a walk.

 

 

Nov 06 2015

Elephants, middlemen, and systems – oh, my!

By healthcare industry, politics, technology

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.

elephant in the room by banksy

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 here for 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 here for 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:

system isn't broken image

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:

 

 

 

 

 

That last one – the “what’s the ROI?” thing – was fueled by rage. The US healthcare system, which sucks up $3 trillion-with-a-T every year – making it the most expensive healthcare system in the world, but 11th on the Top 10 list on health outcomes – is stuck on a “what’s the ROI?” loop, driven by the carnival barkers sales guys, while human lives sink below the metric radar. In other words, loot trumps lives.

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?

Jun 18 2015

UPDATE: Patients ARE smarter (and louder) … here’s proof

By e-patients, healthcare industry, media commentary, technology

It’s been a fun week here in Mighty Casey Media Land. We kicked off the week a little early (on Sunday) – the 411 on that is available here, and some of the social exhaust is available on Storify here and here. One member of the e-patient posse worried that the guy was gon’ have to enter witness protection, given the avalanche of opprobrium aimed his way from the expert-patient community.

In an email thread among a group of expert patients working on aggregating and curating patient-useable outcomes reporting tools, Dr. Corrie Painter said she had called the Brookings Institution, the think tank where the author of the US News piece that set my hair on fire does his think-tank thing, and left a terse message on the Governance Studies main line about pontificating patriarchal putzes (technical term).

Given my willingness to talk to anyone, any time, if it moves the needle on healthcare system transformation, I went one better and called the *other* number on the guy’s bio page. I expected to wind up leaving a voicemail, but …

He. Answered. The. Phone.

We talked for about 30 minutes, during which I assured him that I did *not* think that Yelp reviews were the ne plus ultra, or even a thing, when it came to outcome metrics on physicians and other clinical providers of medical services. But, as I pointed out in my “I’m channeling Lewis Black, with boobs, in healthcare here: righteous rage + cutting humor = driving that point home!” post, what real metrics are *available* to patients seeking intel on the expertise and outcomes of the doctors they go to for care?

There are PQRS and Physician Compare data sets, but they’re pretty small beer. Physician Compare serves up Medicare data – just *try* to find intel on a pediatrician, or an obstetrician, in that reporting tool.

In a follow-up post of his own, Yaraghi clarified his position on online review sites like Yelp *not* being the right place for medical provider ratings based on medical training, outcomes, or efficacy of care. His closing graf is the money shot for me:

Patients’ involvement in their medical care is the best thing that could happen to our severely sick health care system. Patients should have access to reliable and valid data to help them decide about their medical provider. They should have the capacity to shop around and visit multiple providers. Healthcare is the most important service we obtain in our life and being able to choose who provides it, in my opinion, is a fundamental patient right. Currently available online patient reviews however, are not the correct measure to rely on when making such a decision.

Net/net here: Niam Yaraghi is a guy with an open mind on the idea of patient expertise. In the days and weeks to come, I hope that the e-patient community turns out in force to engage him in conversation, and to make their case for both patient expertise and the deep need for effective, accessible physician scoring – on number of procedures, on patient satisfaction, on recurrence rates, on all stats relating to the efficacy and humanity of their care – that people can use to find the best doctor for their healthcare needs.

Jun 14 2015

From the Patients Are Smarter Than You Think Desk …

By e-patients, healthcare industry, media commentary, technology

See this UPDATE, too.

Sundays are pretty quiet here in Mighty Casey Media Land. Yeah, there are those Sundays where I read my wall calendar without my glasses on, and totally think it’s Father’s Day when it’s really Flag Day … but that’s about as exciting as it gets most weeks.

Today is one of the latter Sundays, where I not only cause a Father’s Day panic on Facebook (yeah, that’s a thing), but also get Twitter DMs that set my hair on fire. Which you know, if you’ve been hangin’ round this water cooler for a while, is never a good thing.

This morning, I picked up my phone while I was waiting for my coffee to brew, and what ho – a DM from my friend HealthBlawg with a link to a “stupid patients, don’t Yelp doctors” piece on US News with the headline “Online Doctor Ratings Are Garbage.” The piece is by Niam Yaraghi, whose pieces on US News usually have me nodding along in full agreement … but not this time.

In the “don’t Yelp, bitch” piece, Yaraghi essentially tells people they’re too stupid to understand medical care’s value and outcomes, that we should just lie back and think of England and let those nice doctors do their work.

Let’s take ’em in order, shall we?

Patients are neither qualified nor capable of evaluating the quality of the medical services that they receive.

Seriously?? Does Yaraghi know any cancer patients, or people with MS, or ALS, or rheumatoid disease, or diabetes? I’m pretty sure the answer there is “no,” that he knows a whole bunch of polysyllabic “experts” due to his work at Brookings, but very few ASPs (Actual Sick People). The patient community is teaching the clinical community constantly about both medical research and business operations.

I’ll say it again: input from the patient community is, daily, saving the bacon of MDs/NPs/PhDs and other letter-after-name denizens of the medical-industrial complex and their minions.

So slow your roll, Niam, and the next time you meet an ASP, thank them for their *own* work on healthcare quality improvement.

If patients are not qualified to make medical decisions and rely on physicians’ medical expertise to make such decisions, then how can they evaluate the quality of such decisions and know that their doctor’s decision was the best possible one?

It’s spelled S-C-I-E-N-C-E, bitch.

But hey, most of gen-pop (people who are temporarily, not permanently, ASP – like when they break their leg, or get pneumonia) might not be as UpToDate (yes, many of us read PubMed, and even understand it) as a practiced e-patient ASP. So what do most people do when they need to find some on-the-ground help for a health issue? They hit the web … and usually find us. Or Dr. Oz, which is regrettable, but that snake oil PR machine has got a big f**king ad budget. But even if they hit Oz first, they usually wind up with us.

And hey, are DOCTORS even the real experts when it comes to evaluating the efficacy of their treatments? Plenty of evidence suggests that clinicians get as stuck in Usual Suspects-ville as does any other profession. I call it We’ve Always Done It This Way syndrome. It takes 17 years, on average, for proven science to arrive at the point of care. If you get diagnosed with [pick a really big disease], do you want to just trust that your MD is up on all the latest treatment options, or do you want to be *sure* s/he is? Welcome to Dr. Google, dude. Yelp reviews don’t turn up on condition-specific searches, but *we* sure do.

Since patients do not have the medical expertise to judge the quality of physicians’ decisions in the short run and are neither capable of evaluating the outcomes of such decisions in the long run, their feedback would be limited to their immediate interaction with medical providers and their staff members.

I’ve addressed the “science, bitch!” thing above, but let’s drill in on that “outcomes” point, shall we? Have you, yourself, ever tried to find outcomes data on a doctor? Pack a lunch. A lunch that can last for days. Physician Compare on Medicare’s (CMS) site looks like it could serve up some stats … but it doesn’t serve up much beyond “has EHR tech that fulfills Meaningful Use requirements.” Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS – another CMS data bank project) serves up a whole lotta data – in table or spreadsheet form – but it’s pretty hard to parse “quality” from “takes Medicare” or “participates in PQRS” or “participates in eRX.” No notations as to whether s/he is Dr. Hodad.

How about, rather than bitch about patients who want to serve up UX (User Experience) data on their clinical teams, you use your keyboard to help create some clarity on quality reporting that can be understood BY. AVERAGE. HUMANS.

Instead of the quality of the medical services, patients would evaluate the bedside manners of physicians, decor of their offices and demeanor of their staff.

Bedside manner is no indication of the value of the care received at the hands of a clinician. I’ve had doctors look deep into my eyes, hold my hand, and then do a hard sell for a pharmaceutical product of questionable efficacy for my condition. I’ve taken a show about that on the road (sort of), which you can read about here.

Office decor reviews for doctors’ offices will only add ordnance to the arms race that US healthcare has become, where providers build more and more luxurious settings for us to get questionably effective care in … and then charge us higher fees for that care, since marble is really expensive.

To choose the best medical provider, patients are encouraged to rely on measures of medical expertise and avoid invalid online reviews. 

And just how the French-pressed **** are we supposed to do that, Niam? Having the whole alphabet after your name on a list of medical specialty MDs is no guarantee, at all, of either efficacy of care, or basic humanity.

Dr. Farid Fata had a solid platinum set of credentials as an oncologist – residency at Maimonides Medical Center, an oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and a respected practice in the Detroit metro area for over a decade – until the FBI burst into his offices on August 6, 2013 to arrest him for fraud. He’d diagnosed and treated people for cancer who did not have cancer. BTW, there were no Yelp reviews for his practice.

Here’s the thing: patients KNOW STUFF. Rather than telling us to shut up and stop Yelping, how about you recommend *listening* as a cure for what ails US healthcare? I’m a Yelp Elite reviewer – that and $4 will get me a crap fancy coffee at Starbucks – who’s a globally recognized patient voice, and I’ve posted four reviews of health/medical facilities (a 3% rate of review in my total number of 141 reviews to date). Two of those facilities are mammography practices. I’ve had breast cancer, so as experts go … yeah, I am one.

I don’t use Yelp reviews on my checklist for choosing a new member of my clinical care team, because I’m an e-patient expert with a massive global network in both the medical and patient communities.

So, hey, Niam, what’s your recommended roll for someone who’s got [insert suspected diagnosis here] and is looking for credible, actionable information to inform their decision tree? Until the clinical side of the house gets their outcomes reporting sh*t together … people gon’ Yelp.

Shut up and deal.

yelp welcome screen

Apr 21 2015

Security vs. access: threading the needle

By healthcare industry, media commentary, politics, technology

The annual big-data party known as the HIMSS conference played out in Chicago – and online – last week. During the event, one of the central issues that arose in the social media conversation under the #HIMSS15 tag involved the one facing patients trying to access their health records, either digitally or on old-school paper: the security/access conundrum. Data that’s accessible to a patient could also wind up accessible to Romanian hackers (you’ve heard me on this topic before), and efforts at making patient data “secure” mean that data is often secure from the patient whose data it is. Patients give their forehead some serious keyboard every day over that one.

The folks over at Software Advice released a report on HIPAA breaches on March 12*, which I only caught up with when I returned from my Mighty Mouth 2015 Tour of Info-Sec and Right Care. Full disclosure, I’m quoted in the report, but that’s not why I’m talking about it here.

Here’s my biggest takeaway from the piece: 54% of the patients surveyed for the report would consider ditching a healthcare provider if that provider had a breach.

Most Patients Would Switch Providers After Breach

pie chart of likelihood of switching providers

 

Key findings in the report:

  1. Forty-five percent of patients are “moderately” or “very concerned” about a security breach involving their personal health information.
  2. Nearly one-quarter of patients (21 percent) withhold personal health information from their doctors due to data security concerns.
  3. Only 8 percent of patients “always” read doctors’ privacy and security policies before signing them, and just 10 percent are “very confident” they understand them.
  4. A majority of patients (54 percent) are “moderately” or “very likely” to change doctors as a result of a patient data breach.
  5. Patients are most likely to change doctors if their medical staff caused a data security breach, and least likely to change doctors if hackers were responsible.

Given the rising number of breach reports hitting headlines, including the massive one that impacted 80 million Anthem customers (possibly including me – not 100% confirmed yet) in January, this is not an issue that will go away. From the expert patient perspective, this is doubly frustrating, because the first thing that happens after a breach headline is the throttling of patient access to our records. Additional sign-on protocols, tighter credentialing, or a full-on “no more digital access” from smaller providers, all laid at the door of “because HIPAA.”

This doesn’t just affect access, it can have an impact on care. Here are the report’s stats on patients withholding information from their medical providers due to breach concerns:

Security Concerns Can Stifle Communication With Doctor

pie chart on patient withholding info

Quoting from the report:

“Health care lawyer and blogger David Harlow is also troubled by our results. Doctors need to get a full picture of a patient’s health history, he explains. If they don’t, the effectiveness of treatment could suffer—or worse, the patient could be harmed. For example, if a doctor is not told about a patient’s current prescriptions, the doctor could inadvertently prescribe a second medication that has adverse interactions with the first drug.

“That’s an invitation for disaster,” Harlow says. “It means we have a lot of work to do to convince people of the safety and importance of sharing information with physicians.”

My thinking on this topic can be summed up in the closing quote from the report, from yours truly:

“Concerns over digital privacy and security have obscured the real conversation, which is, ‘How can we make health care more accessible, frictionless and safe with the data we collect about patients?’”

*Source: Practice Management systems consultancy Software Advice

Apr 13 2015

World on fire. Film at 11.

By healthcare industry, media commentary, politics, technology

I wasn’t lucky enough to get a press pass, or a scholarship, to HIMSS15 this year. Given events of the last few days, I’m really sorry I can’t be on the ground in Chicago for what feels like a grassroots revolt brewing in protest of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) dropping an announcement, on Friday late afternoon, that they were thinking of gutting the rules for patient access to their own records under the “Meaningful Use” criteria of healthcare reform. You know, the one where we spent something like $6B of taxpayer money. Which was supposed to make care easier, safer, cheaper.

There are phases and stages of Meaningful Use. We’re in MU2 right now. Originally, by the end of the MU2 period (running through 2020), a practice or facility had to demonstrate that 5% of the people/patients cared for in that practice or facility viewed, downloaded, or transmitted their personal health information (PHI) to a 3rd party. That was the criteria for a healthcare provider seeking stimulus $$ for EHR technology deployment [updating: and Medicare reimbursement].

Here’s the “new” rule (clue train: instead of 5%, it’s 1. No, not 1%, one patient) being proposed:

mu2-gutting

I know, right? Friday afternoon, everyone in the industry is heading to Chicago for HIMSS15, who’ll care? Sorry, CMS, but you are totally busted. Here’s data access rights activist Regina Holliday, who’s at HIMSS and whose hair is now on fire.

Speaking of “hair on fire” … so’s mine.

Seems like the Empire is trying to strike back. Or the Capitol (the big-money healthcare industry players who drop money on K Street lobbyists like snowflakes in Boston in the winter of 2014) thinks it’s run over all the Districts (patients, caregivers, families) and has little to fear from our powerlessness. I think they’re wrong. Dead wrong. And they’re about to find out just *how* wrong. Expert, activist patients, along with savvy clinical folks whose hearts are truly in their work, are now assembled in District 13.

My take can be summed up in this image [updated on Tuesday, April 14]:

bluebutton mockingjay mashup image

We are coming for your silos. Because it’s OUR data, and OUR lives.

Mar 25 2015

Report from the front lines: Technology, engagement, and killing paternalism

By healthcare industry, politics, technology

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.

HIMSS Patient Engagement Summit

In early February, I headed to Orlando for the first Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Patient Engagement Summit. I was asked to participate in two panel discussions, one titled “Patient Perspectives: The State of Engagement,” the other “Can We Talk? The Evolving Physician-Patient Relationship.” Both were moderated by Dr. Patricia Salber, the bright mind behind The Doctor Weighs In.

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.”

 

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:

HIMSS Privacy + Security Forum

 

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 …

 

Lown Institute RightCare conference

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 #Lown2015 after meeting Shannon Brownlee during 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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, because it just ain’t a movement unless this gets thrown down:

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 …

Feb 24 2015

Shared decision making, please

By e-patients, healthcare industry, media commentary, technology

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.

My buddies over at Software Advice have just published the results of a survey* they did in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic’s Knowledge and Evaluation Research (KER) Unit that took a deep dive into what’s happening in the real world with SDM, and what patients who are exposed to the process think of it.

The key findings:

  1. A majority of patients (68 percent) say they would prefer to make collaborative decisions about treatment options with their healthcare provider.
  2. Forty percent of patients say they have participated in SDM before, and 21 percent have done so within the past year.
  3. Most patients surveyed say that SDM improves their satisfaction (89 percent) and makes them feel more involved in the care they receive (87 percent).
  4. Nearly half (41 percent) of patients report that they would be “much more likely” to adhere to a treatment plan developed using SDM.
  5. 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

11-likelihood-switch

 

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’s Road 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 articles on 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.

*Source: Practice Management systems consultancy Software Advice

Feb 18 2015

EHR technology: Match.com without a happy ending?

By EHR, health records, healthcare industry, media commentary, medical records, technology

My last two posts explored the question of the doctor/patient relationship in the context of romantic relationships. The first one asked if we were anywhere close to getting engaged, the second looked at the possibility that the whole enchilada needed some intervention-level relationship counseling.

In the couple of weeks since, I’ve had some interesting digital and face to face conversations about digital communication tools, patient engagement, and the doctor/patient relationship that have led me to ask if the crop of EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems in current use across the land, as part of Obamacare’s drive toward healthcare system quality, safety, and access (or, as I like to put it, to the tune of “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” EHR, HIE, E-I-E-I-O!), aren’t analogous to online dating sites like Match.com.

healthcare cupid imageWhich leads me to the observation that the EHR tech I see – all of it, from Epic to Practice Fusion to athenahealth to NextGen to Cerner – can in many ways be compared to Match.com. You put in personal data – name, personal details, outcome goals – and the technology (supposedly) helps you toward your goal. With EHR, that’s best-health, with Match.com, it’s a romantic relationship, but both take data input, digitize it, and claim to provide solutions based on that input.

And I have to say that my observed success ratio on both EHR technology and online dating is similar. As in: mostly it feels like “failure to launch.”

So … go grab a cup of coffee, or a bottle of water. This will be a lengthy look at that question, but I promise to bring it home with at least a couple of laughs along with my pointed observations.

The leading lights of healthcare IT haven’t made the doctor-patient relationship any easier to create and maintain than Match.com has for romatic relationships. For every success story, there are hundreds (thousands? millions?) of examples of bitter frustration. With the billions (yes, with a B) spent on buying and implementing EHR systems, the phrase “meaningful use” – which was supposed to be the demonstration of clinical and patient communication tools to enable better quality healthcare – has become a punchline.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a post from The Health Care Blog by Bob Wachter, an interview with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka, on my social media channels. In it, Halamka said that only 3% of patients wanted their health records kept locked up tight behind virtual doors, so he had to lock up the data of the other 97% to keep the 3% happy. When I shared that post on my LinkedIn profile, it opened a conversation about that statement, such as what the heck the underlying facts to support it were.

“It’s interesting that the 3% figure was not referenced. I am not in the health informatics field, nor do I have time to do an in depth literature review for discussion. However, a quick Google search yields several informative studies. One small study (n=30) of patient preferences found that patients wanted granularity in terms of what they want to share, or not share. No participant wanted to universally share ALL information. Another study (n=105) reported that 1 in 2 patients hid medical information from their own doctors.”

In other words, is that 3%/97% statement the equivalent of creating convenient details about yourself on an online dating profile? When I asked a few people in the e-patient zone about this, I heard this story about how a major health records system in Boston [spoiler alert: Halamka’s IT system] basically spewed garbage instead of useful patient health history data when they opened the data taps to the now-dead Google Health. So, apparently it’s exactly like confabulating facts on an online dating profile. Also, some additional reading led me to a story on CIO about an epic system failure, also in Boston [spoiler alert: I’ll let you figure out what/why], that tied up an entire hospital network’s system for five long days in November 2002.

Back to my metaphor, of EHR tech being analogous to online dating. If the communication partner you’re talking to says they’re a 42 year old architect in Cambridge, or the lab that’s just completed the path report on your biopsy, can you trust what they’re saying? Is there accessible, verifiable information to support the claim? Can you believe what you’re seeing? Can you even SEE what’s really there?

Both of those scenarios rely on trust, and a sense of security. And the ability to actually SEE. WHAT’S. GOING. ON. As Mordac, the “preventer of information services” in the Dilbert comic strip, says, “Security is more important than usability. In a perfect world, no one would be able to use anything.”

I had the opportunity last week to be part of the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)’s first Patient Engagement Summit in Orlando. Yep, more acronyms – E-I-E-I-O. The two panels I was part of talked about the current state of the doctor/patient relationship, and the overall event was all about how technology can either support, or hinder, that relationship. The crazy part is that both the clinical side of healthcare – doctors, nurses, researchers – and the patient side – the rest of us – are desperately determined to get engaged (with each other), get married (create the best possible outcomes), and live happily ever after (better community health for EVERYBODY!).

The trouble is, I’m afraid, that the tools that are supposed to be the grease on the rails to making that happen – the digital communication systems that hold our care data – are set up by Mordac. Screaming headlines about stuff like the recent Anthem breach are like screaming headlines about sharp rises in sexual assault figures – they’re a real buzz-kill for trust between possible relationship partners.

If you actually know me, you know I’ve taken a rather extreme step toward fostering relationship clarity, doctor/patient-wise. It’s the image that is my Twitter avatar (click that link to see it), and it is a real 3×3″ QR code tattooed on my chest. I can’t say that it has any effect on my dating profile (I bailed on online dating years ago), but it has made many of my healthcare-relationship interactions … interesting.

Can I, or any of us, trust health IT and EHRs to help make our healthcare relationships happy and successful? Or are we stuck in the slough of despond that is Match.com?

Jan 15 2015

Patient Engagement. You’re doing it wrong.

By healthcare industry

frustrated patient with word balloon

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.

Let patients help.

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