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The Practice of Medicine

The Impact of Community Health Workers: Cutting Re-Admissions and Creating Healthier Communities

Community health workers can support, guide and encourage patients to manage their health over the long term. Many poor countries use CHWs on an enormous scale. This is a crucial role in a country where vast numbers of people are sick with chronic lifestyle-related diseases. Doctors can’t help patients change their behavior in the 15 minutes they spend with each patient. But community health workers can.

In the United States, in 2010, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania began interviewing patients who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods about what they saw as barriers that kept them from getting health care, and kept them sick. Those responses — from long interviews with 115 patients — became the basis of the Penn Center and IMPaCT, which stands for “individualized management for patient-centered targets.”

The Penn Center is one of several new models hospitals are trying to make CHW programs sustainable. Another is program is Grand-Aides. Unlike the Penn CHWs, Grand-Aides don’t help with social or logistical issues. They are nurse extenders who get hundreds of hours of medical training. Each patient visit is supervised in real time by phone by a nurse, who makes all the decisions. A pilot at two pediatric Medicaid sites in Texas showed that the program cut readmissions by at least two-thirds. Learn more…

Do Patients Feel Better in Redesigned Hospitals/Rooms?

Often ignored by front-rank architects, left to corporate specialists who churn out too many heartless buildings, hospitals are a critical frontier for design, for exterior design as shown in the photos included here, individual room layout, and overall hospital layout.

As an example of the impact of interior changes, after months of testing a new room layout at the University Medical Center of Princeton, patients in the model room rated food and nursing care higher than patients in the old rooms did, although the meals and care were the same.

Some innovations are logical and even seem obvious, and some do have their downside: patients in single rooms are likely to share more information with the medical staff more quickly than those in double rooms, so the Princeton plan opts solely for single rooms, though this increased the building’s overall size, thus forcing a larger separation between certain departments and thereby requiring new methods of internal communications. The new rooms include a sink positioned in plain sight, so nurses and doctors will be sure to wash their hands, and patients can watch them do so. A second sink is in the bathroom, which is next to the bed, a handrail linking bed and bathroom, so patients don’t have to travel far between them and will fall less often.

But the real eye-opener was this: Patients also asked for 30 percent less pain medication. Reduced pain has a cascade effect, hastening recovery and rehabilitation, leading to shorter stays and diminishing not just costs but also the chances for accidents and infections.

Health care is a trillion-dollar industry just discovering the medical and economic benefits of better design. “It’s a significant part of our G.D.P.,” noted Christopher Korsh, the principal architect on the Princeton project. “Patients now say they won’t come to a facility because they don’t like it, and if there’s a building that can save 2 percent on the cost of delivering health care, that’s huge. Plus good design really can make you better faster.” Read more…

$1,600 for a Diaper Rash Treatment?

Alarmed by a rapid increase in spending on compounded drugs, like a $1,600 baby balm, insurers and others are acting to control their use.

Drug compounding involves a pharmacist making medicines for a patient who cannot be helped by mass-manufactured drugs. Compounded drugs do not require FDA approval, though Congress recently has moved to enact regulatory legislation. They might be used when a patients is allergic to an ingredient in a commercial product, or a patient needs a liquid formulation of a medication rather than it being in pill form.

Pharmacy benefit managers say there is scant evidence that these combinations of ingredients are safe or any more effective than conventional drugs. Express Scripts, the largest PMB, has said it will stop paying for more than 1,000 ingredients used in compounding, cutting spending by its health plan clients on such medicines by 95 percent. It said such spending had grown to $171 million in the first quarter of this year from $28 million in the first quarter of 2012.

When Posting Baby Photos Became Illegal

Though no identifiers such as names or contact information are included, it is illegal for doctors and midwives to post photos of the babies of their patients on their office wall, though this has been a common practice since not long after the advent of photography.

Under HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), baby photos are a type of protected health information, no less than a medical chart, birth date or Social Security number, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Even if a parent sends in the photo, it is considered private unless the parent also sends written authorization for its posting, which almost no one does. A thoughtful piece in The New York Times mulls over this and is worth the read for those involved with protecting health information. The comments are thought-provoking as well, such as this one:

“Yes, the HIPAA privacy rules do forbid public displays of baby pictures. That’s perhaps too bad, but it’s not life threatening.

“The real problem with the HIPAA privacy regulations is that while they do address a real issue – the use and often abuse of private medical information for non-medical purposes (for example marketing), the rules have brought about a much more serious problem: the frequent inavailability to legitimate health care providers of important medical information regarding patients, information these doctors (and other providers) need to make urgent, life saving, medical decisions.

“The HIPAA rules and data security requirements are well intentioned, but complex and difficult to implement, and the penalties for non-compliance severe. In the real world it’s hard for the custodians of medical data (such as hospitals) to prohibit unauthorized access, while at the same time permitting it for care providers with a real need to know. And sometimes medical care suffers as a result. The security requirements can be particularly troublesome, as it’s hard with present technology to implement data security that is both secure and functional.

“HIPAA regulations will probably some day find the right balance. But we’re not there yet. And medical care is sometimes shortchanged as a result.”

Certainly the IME and peer review industry has been impacted in recent years, as has the larger world of health care and insurance, with ongoing focus and concerns on maintaining data security, to where it is a cornerstone of providing quality services to claimants. As this reader notes, it is important to remember what the purpose of these industries is—providing for the health of the patient—and to ensure our procedures all work to this end.

What Happens When Hospitals Buy Clinics?

One thing that happens is that the prices increase for services at these clinics. According to hospitals, one reason is that because hospitals (unlike individual doctors) must maintain 24-hour emergency room coverage and cannot turn away patients, they need to raise revenue elsewhere to help absorb this expense. Thus hospitals charge higher rates for many items than do private practices. Nationally, hospitals are buying more and more clinics, where they are also charging higher rates.

As the Affordable Care Act attempts to steer people away from pricey inpatient admissions, hospitals have begun buying up doctors’ offices in hopes of increasing their revenue and market share. The number of oncology practices owned by hospitals, for instance, increased by 24 percent from 2011 to 2012.

Cancer drugs often double in price when hospital systems charge for them. A treatment of Herceptin, a breast cancer drug, costs private insurers $2,740 when used in an independent clinic and $5,350 in a hospital outpatient setting, according to an analysis of 2012 claims by PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute. The price of Avastin increased from $6,620 to $14,100 when used in a hospital setting, the Health Research Institute says.

In some instances conflicts have arisen between insurance companies and hospitals over how much to pay for treatment. In one case, the insurer says reverting to lower payments for roughly 20,000 Pennsylvania chemotherapy patients should $200 million a year.

Steven Weiss, spokesman for the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, said in an e-mail. “For years, patients have paid different prices for the same procedure or drug, depending on where they are treated,” he said, and “long-standing trends like this one continue to threaten patient access to lifesaving care.” Read more…

Trying to Bring Down Oz

Concerned with the public health impact of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s health advice, in 2013 University of Rochester medical student Benjamin Mazur asked state and national medical associations to take action. However, though for over a hundred years the federal government has passed legislation and created agencies to prevent consumers from being deceived or harmed by “bad medicine,” the situation is a complicated one. For instance, though the Federal Trade Commission has the legal authority to prosecute people who mislead and injure consumers, they can’t do anything about Oz since he’s not actually selling the products he talks about.

With regard to his concerns, Mazur noted: “I’m definitely not the only one.”  Sen. Claire McCaskill, for instance, told Dr. Oz during a Capital Hill hearing: “The scientific community is almost monolithic against you in terms of the efficacy of…three products that you called miracles.”

Mazur explains his concerns:

This issue was brought up by a number of physicians I worked with during my family medicine clerkship. We had all of this first-hand experience with patients who really liked his show and trusted him quite a bit. [Dr. Oz] would give advice that was really not great or it had no medical basis. It might sound harmless when you talk about things like herbal pills or supplements. But when the physicians’ advice conflicted with Oz, the patients would believe Oz.

Mazur is not entirely anti-Oz, of course; as he explains, “I would probably say that he does have the health interest of his viewers in mind. But in the long term, undermining good science and the relationship patients have with their current physicians is probably doing much more harm than good. If they’re not going to listen to advice from physicians—who are providing good, evidence-based advice—if they’re going to listen to other doctors on the show, it’s going to do more harm than good.” Read more…

Opioid Deaths Drop in Florida as the State Cracks Down

Prior postings have decried deaths and abuse in prescribing of opiates. Florida was the poster child of abuse, with strip mall featuring “pain clinics” where patients from other states would fly into to receive bogus prescriptions.

The sheer number of prescriptions nationwide has helped drive abuse in the United States. In 2012, more than 259 million prescriptions for pain pills were dispensed, federal researchers said, enough for every American adult to get a bottle of them. For the past decade, more than 20,000 Americans have died each year from prescription pain pill overdose.

As this article and associated editorial demonstrate, change is possible. Florida and other states have made a good start in curbing abuse. Lives have been saved in the process. There is more to be done in curbing the misuse of opiates for chronic pain. Opioid painkillers are dangerously overprescribed, but Florida has shown how states can confront this problem.

Vaccinations: The Soaring Price of Prevention

MCNTalk has long taken on the vaccination story and has advocated rational and life saving public health policies that promote vaccination.

As this article demonstrates, the dark side of vaccinations is not the overstated risk of side effects, but the predatory cost escalation. The short answer to why the manufacturers are driving up prices is because they can.

This is further enabled by the requirements that some vaccinations be administered for school admission and other public good.

Also the lack of marketplace pressures since the cost is generally borne by government and insurance carriers promotes insensitivity and indifference among those who benefit from them. Finally, monopolies granted via patents and regulations do nothing to induce competition among manufacturers.

Politicians’ Prescriptions for Marijuana Defy Doctors and Data

Brian L. Grant MD

This is a fascinating article on a number of levels. The comments by readers as well as the article are illuminating. I come to it as a person who came of age in the 70s, trained in psychiatry and reside in Washington State. I also have an interest in medical anthropology which among other issues looks at cross-cultural health care systems and beliefs. Finally, I have a strong interest in medical politics and economics which are major drivers of policy and practice in US Healthcare.

Washington State is one where medical marijuana (cannabis) is legal and recreational marijuana will be legal in July with a rigorous permitting and taxation system. In observing the medical marijuana “industry” and practice in Washington, what has been clear is that it is a parallel system whereby anyone can obtain a prescription for medical marijuana and that a tiny minority have the sorts of diagnoses such as glaucoma, terminal pain, cancer, and the like that were invoked to justify medical marijuana in the first place. Furthermore, given the wide array of symptoms that may be “helped” by medical marijuana, most of which are subjective, such as pain and anxiety – there is not a person reading this post who could not receive authorization if they so choose. The dispensaries that provide pot use nice euphemisms such as “medicine” to describe cannabis, and “donations” as what one pays to receive their medicine. Whether one can obtain marijuana while declining a donation is not clear.

So in my view, medical marijuana at least in principle, if not in practice, is by and large a sham. It makes liars out of decent people who want to get high, have a good time, harm nobody in most cases, and perhaps relieve some real symptoms. Similarly, it promotes disingenuous behavior on the part of practitioners who prescribe it, some of whom are true believers, but all of whom are paid good money to write a script often based upon one visit with someone they will never see again.

Therefore, with reasonable reservations and concerns, one should be pleased to see marijuana become legal for recreational use. Like alcohol, which was touted during prohibition as having medicinal value as a way to access whiskey and other drinks  and more, read here and here), marijuana as a medical substance has by and large been a back door to access by those who want to smoke it for its mood altering attributes.

There are many similarities between alcohol and marijuana. Both are substances that can alter one’s thinking and are psychoactive. Both can be sources of enjoyment and conviviality and both can and do cause harm. One is by and large legal and the other not and therein lies the problem. If we as a society wish to ban all substances and behaviors with potential for harm, the list would be long, not end with alcohol, and would certainly start with tobacco and include excessive caloric consumption and other quite legal and common substances. Unlike alcohol, or increasingly prescribed opiates, marijuana has little propensity for physical addiction and tolerance.

Relatively speaking, the end organ damage and aggressive behaviors that excess or chronic use of alcohol induce significantly outweigh the degree of harm seen in typical marijuana users. The numbers of those who use alcohol abusively with resulting damage to themselves or others is significant. Since marijuana use is generally defined as abuse per se, studies looking at actual damage from the use of marijuana need to focus on objective rather than regulatory criteria. Is marijuana harmless? Of course not. Dosages are imprecise as one smokes something with inconsistent intake and varying amounts of active THC. “Edibles” can be misused or accidentally fall into the hands of children. One can simply lack balance and overuse marijuana in lieu of more productive and useful activities, just as could happen with alcohol consumption. And the impact of smoking marijuana is of unknown concern as at least one study suggests that lung damage from typical use is not an issue.

Neither cannabis nor alcohol belong in the hands or mouths of children and make no mistake – increased access to either creates some collateral damage that non-use would avoid, just like opiates or the 70 MPH speed limit on the highways.

Interesting systemic questions include: What is the role of the health care system in deciding that it owns a portion of the human experience, or that something is a medical issue rather than a component of general life? What are the economics of the system and the impact of a substance like marijuana that can be easily grown and distributed outside of the pharmaceutical industry with no inherent barriers to entry other than access to sun or artificial light, soil, fertilizer, water and seed stock? Could there be an element of those in power wanting to maintain control of an income stream, resulting in criminalization, and restrictive regulations along with false or distorted claims of harm to control distribution and access?

Finally, what damage has flowed from criminality of cannabis? How many have died as a result of criminal and gang drug traffic? How many harmless individuals have been prosecuted and jailed for use or distribution of marijuana? How many of the judges, prosecutors, and jurors sitting in judgment on these defendants can with a straight face deny their own use of cannabis in their own lives at some point? What can we learn from countries like Holland where cannabis has long been legal?

We are about to embark on an experiment in Washington state, already started in Colorado, with legal recreational marijuana. The ultimate results remain to be seen. Whatever one’s personal views on legalization of cannabis, facts and data should inform both personal and government decisions on the policies and use of cannabis and other products. Unfortunately the subject is often polarized by advocates and opponents.

Judge Upholds Policy Barring Unimmunized Students from School during Outbreaks

Brian L. Grant MD

MCNTalk has been following the vaccination refusal controversy for some time. As noted in this recent Times article, a NY court has affirmed the right to deny access to schools by unvaccinated children when another student is ill with a vaccine-preventable disease.

These particular cases are interesting because they illustrate a clash in values between sincerely held beliefs, religious or otherwise, and the public good. It leaves unanswered or at least unresolved the question of whether beliefs may trump good science. Also un-addressed is the practice in place whereby one can invoke religion where convenient, though scriptures are silent on vaccines and many other practices that individuals may choose to invoke religion to justify or excuse behaviors and choices.

Vaccines are a medical miracle that have virtually eliminated smallpox, diphtheria, measles, pertussis, and polio, maladies that have killed and maimed untold millions in the world and which can easily re-emerge when there is a sufficient number of unvaccinated to allow for transmission from person to person, versus current herd immunity that keeps the diseases in check.

Beyond the bad science claiming dangers of vaccinations are the polarizing effect of well-meaning parents and others who have come to believe these claims, clashing with other parents and authorities who do not want to support policies that in turn support the unvaccinated exposing their children and others to preventable risk.

The comments by readers, available along with the article, contain many compelling arguments worth considering on the topic.