What are the implications of the upward spiral occurring in the specialty drug cost trend?

By Clive Riddle, May 1, 2015 

What are the implications of the upward spiral occurring in the specialty drug cost trend?" That was the question asked of experts in the current issue in MCOL’s ThoughtLeaders. A running theme in their responses was that this will further drive the value-based payment movement. Our ThoughtLeader Dr.  Peter Kongstvedt also takes us a “wonk on the wild side: predicting policy implications including more legislation. 

Here’s some excerpts from their responses in ThoughtLeaders: 

Vicky Parikh,  MD, MPH, (Executive Director, Reliance Health and Executive Director, Mid-Atlantic Medical Research Centers) frames the discussion, and points to further cost-sharing as the consequence – “Specialty drugs can cost more than $600 per treatment, $4,000 or more a month and can reach expenditures up to $100,000 a year. By 2020 the overall spending for specialty drugs could potentially reach $400 billion, or 9.1% of national health spending. In 2009, .12 cents out of every dollar spent went to specialty drugs. Now, that amount has risen to .32 cents out of every dollar. But what does the increase of prices for specialty drugs have to do with anything, when most individuals have a health plan that pay for medical expenditures? Employer based health plans could cause employees to see a change of benefits, increasing deductibles and overall shifting of the more expensive bills being passed towards the employee.” 

Jeremy Nobel,  MD, MPH, (Northeast Business Group on Health,  Executive Director, NEBGH's Solutions & Innovations Center and Faculty, Center for Primary Care, Harvard Medical School)  sees the trend hastening value-based purchasing – “The upward spiral on Specialty Pharma costs will likely accelerate the pace at which patient-centered care will reshape the healthcare marketplace from ‘volume-based’ to ‘value-based.’ Facilitated by highly personalized care coordination, back-stopped by advanced analytics, and rewarded with a host of outcomes-based payment mechanisms, providers and systems that can adjust to that ‘new normal’ will become dominant players. From a purchaser perspective, the traditional focus on reducing costs of "components of care" and managing unit price through volume discounts for everything from drugs to hospital days, to office visits and diagnostic tests, needs to move rapidly and comprehensively towards a focus on ‘total cost of care’ with a payment model that rewards cost reduction as long as quality benchmarks are maintained. And with the inevitable market entry of new medications like the PCSK9 class of drugs targeting extremely common conditions like hypercholesterolemia, the current Rx cost/value management mechanisms for Specialty Pharma will ‘fall short’ quickly.”  

Cyndy Natyer, President, CyndyNayer.com and Founder/CEO of Center of Health Engagement) also looks to value – “My goal is to shift the conversation to what is the value of the drug, and if it can prevent high cost conditions from becoming higher costs, then a higher priced drug may well be worth the negotiated spend…On the other hand, some of the drugs in the specialty arena are going thru yearly increases of thousands of dollars without new technology or formulations. In this case, the price escalation without better outcomes must be considered when negotiating the price of the drugs. We are even seeing many-hundred-percent increases in some common drugs, not specialty, for common chronic illnesses, again with little or no attribution to new technology in the drugs. In each case, I'd like to think that we will not simply deny a drug to a patient because of the cost, and that we would not waste valuable time demanding that folks fail on the drugs we know will not suit them because they are cheaper.” 

Constance A. Wilkinson (Member of the Firm, Epstein Becker & Green, P.C.) and Alan J. Arville (Member of the Firm, Epstein Becker & Green, P.C.) also go down the value-based path – “Manufacturers (and payors) will continue to pursue a value-based purchasing strategy, such as an outcomes-based approach, to support the value proposition of the drug. Such arrangements build in financial incentives or penalties for manufacturers that are contingent upon negotiated performance standards (typically based on quality or health outcomes). There are particular challenges in implementing this approach for federal health care program beneficiaries due to the potential implications to manufacturer drug price reporting under those programs, and the attendant financial consequences.” 

Peter R. Kongstvedt, MD, FACP (Principal, P.R. Kongstvedt Company, LLC) sees policy implications - “The two most significant long-term implications of rising specialty pharmacy drug costs are to create the pressure for another round of "health reform" and on international trade policy. These are obvious choices, I know, but let's look closer and take a wonk on the wild side ("...and the wonks go doo, da-doo, da-doo, da-doo doodoo, doo, da-doo, da-doo, da-doo doodoo..." *). [* Apologies to the late and sorely missed Lou Reed.] 

Peter explains that “there are really two broad types of specialty pharmacy though: manufactured drugs that are one or perhaps two molecules, regardless of how they are manufactured or delivered; and compounding pharmacy drugs. Compounding accounts for a surprising amount of the specialty pharmacy cost increase, but because it uses drugs manufactured by others, it can be managed with through tough negotiations, the use of a single compounding pharmacy, strict adherence to medical guidelines, preauthorization, a closed formulary, and benefits design. That leaves us with the manufactured molecules that have the long term implications.”

Peter sees the trend accelerating cost-sharing, which in turn will accelerate legislative reform of cost-sharing, and even pricing. “We will bypass all but one of the short term implications related to the existing approaches to managing costs such as preauthorization, drug utilization review, step therapy, formulary control and the like, as well as the counter-measures used by the manufacturers. But one of the most common approaches is increased cost-sharing, and that's the one that could get us to another round of health reform. Increased cost-sharing for specialty pharmacy is not quite the same as upping the PCP office visit copay by $10. It now often includes separate deductibles and coinsurance being applied only to specialty pharmacy coverage, which for a lot of people is both good news and bad news. The good news is that cost-sharing goes away when they hit their annual out-of-pocket maximum, which may occur in the second month of coverage; the bad news is they are slowly going bankrupt because most people don't have $6,600.00 (2015 single) / $13,200.00 (2015 Family) of spare cash every year in their savings or under the couch cushions. This brings us to Health Reform II: The Next Act…..Multiple states are now considering "cap the copay" bills that would require state licensed insurers and HMOs to markedly limit cost-sharing; for example, one Oregon bill under consideration would cap cost-sharing at $100 per month.”

Peter warns that “’Cap the copay’ and similar laws are like mowing the lawn to get rid of dandelions - it only appears to solve a problem that is actually growing. Specialty pharmacy costs, and really all healthcare costs related to pricing, in reality grow faster when richer coverage is required. Eventually those very real and ever-rising costs will force us as a society to once again grapple with national health policy about how we finance health care goods and services. Payers were first in the reform barrel. Pricing is likely to be next, though it may be confined to one sector, and specialty pharmacy or drug manufacturers overall seems to have raised its collective hand to be called on next.”

Prescription Costs Returning to the Wild

By Clive Riddle, March 13, 2015

Numerous studies have been warning that prescription cost increases, domesticated and docile for some time now, have returned to the wild - resurging and rearing their unpleasant head.

During last fall, Evaluate published a new 18-page report , "Budget-busters: The Shift to High-Priced Innovator Drugs in the USA." that addresses the growth of high-end prescription drugs. Evaluate tells us that "the median price of the Top 100 drugs has skyrocketed from $1,260 in 2010 to $9,400 in 2014, representing a seven-fold increase," and that "the average patient population size served by a Top 100 drug in 2014 was 146,000 down from 690,000 in 2010. The number of treatments costing in excess of $100,000 per patient per year rose to seven in 2014 versus four in 2010."

When Segal released their 2015 Segal Health Plan Cost Trend Survey, they stated “Health benefit plan cost trend rates for 2015 are forecast to drop slightly for some coverage, but to increase substantially for prescription drug coverage...…The increase in the cost of prescription drug carve-out coverage for actives and retirees under age 65 is expected to jump to nearly 9 percent. Prescription drug trend for retirees age 65 and older is expected to rise to 7.5 percent, more than twice the rate of retiree medical cost trends. The projected specialty drug/biotech trend rate for 2015 is an exceptionally high 19.4 percent.”

A number of other studies cite similar concerns, and this week Express Scripts weighed in with their annual Drug Trend Report. They state “new hepatitis C therapies with high price tags and the exploitation of loopholes for compounded medications drove a 13.1 percent increase in U.S. drug spending in 2014 – a rate not seen in more than a decade.”

Here’s some key selections from Express Scripts findings:

“Hepatitis C and compounded medications are responsible for more than half of the increase in overall spending. Excluding those two therapy classes, 2014 drug trend (the year-over-year increase in per capita drug spending) was 6.4 percent.”

“Specialty medications – biologic and other high cost treatments for complex conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and cancer – accounted for more than 31 percent of total drug spending in 2014. As Express Scripts forecasted last year, specialty drug trend more than doubled in 2014, to 30.9 percent. Hepatitis C medications accounted for 45 percent of the total increase in specialty spend despite having the second lowest prescription volume among the top 10 specialty conditions. Medicare plans – required to follow Medicare Part D formulary guidelines – were the hardest hit, as their annual specialty drug spend increased 45.9 percent.”

“Spending on traditional classes of medications continues to rise as a result of compounded drugs, which emerged in the top 10 traditional therapy classes for the first time. Despite having the least number of prescriptions among the top 10 classes, compounded medications accounted for 35 percent of the increase in spending, the most of any traditional therapy class of drugs.”

“Drugmaker consolidation and drug shortages also led to increases in traditional drug trend, which rose to 6.4 percent in 2014. Diabetes remains the leading traditional therapy class for a fourth straight year based on total costs; Express Scripts expects double-digit increases in spend in this class over the next three years due to once-weekly oral and injectable drugs in the pipeline.  Cost for medications to treat pain increased 15.7 percent in 2014, due in part to new tamper-resistant formulations for opiates.”

How the Mighty Haven't Fallen

By Kim Bellard, February 17, 2015

I recently read an article that speculated on how even the mighty Google could fade into irrelevance faster than we might think.  It made me wonder why that kind of change doesn't seem to happen in health care.

The Google article, by Farhad Manjoo in The Wall Street Journal, cited one-time technology leaders like Wang and DEC, and pointed out that other long-time powerhouses such as Hewlett Packard and even Microsoft are furiously trying to reestablish themselves after decades of (relative) decline.  

Then there's health care.

Just out of curiosity, I looked at share of spending by type of service in the National Health Expenditures, from 1960 to 2013.  Here's what I found:

For all our many clinical and technological advances, the same three health sectors that dominated health care spending in 1960 still command virtually the same shares in 2013 -- over 60% of our overall spending.  They've "lost" less than 2% of share to other types of spending during those decades.  

It hasn't all been smooth sailing, of course.  Hospital spending reached almost 40% in the early 1980s, dipped below 30% in the early 21st century, and rebounded this decade.  The physician share has been steadier -- a peak of around 22% in the early 2000's, a low of 18.3% in 1978, but mostly stayed around 20%.  Prescription drugs spending, on the other hand, got to as low as 4.5% in 1981-82, reached a peak of 10.4% in 2006, and now seems to be on a slow decline.  But, all in all, the composition of Big 3 of the medical-industrial complex remains unchanged over a very long time.

It's as if the Big 3 U.S. auto manufacturers still maintained their 1960 dominance today, or the 3 TV broadcast networks still had their pre-cable/Internet share of viewers.  Both trios still have hefty market shares, still play key roles, but are nowhere near their historical dominance. New competitors emerged to give consumers more options, and took away significant shares of those markets.  

Unlike what has happened in health care.  

Hospitals, physicians, pharmaceuticals, and the health care industry generally have certainly evolved significantly in the past 50+ years, but it is more incremental evolution than the kind of "punctured equilibrium" Steve Jay Gould and others posit that result in rapid changes that overthrow species.  

I don't have anything against hospitals, doctors, or prescription drugs, at least not in principle.  It just doesn't feel like progress that we're not coming up with radically new care and delivery options that don't rely on them.  

Unlike most markets, health care isn't really driven by consumer demand.  A couple years ago, JAMA published a survey of physicians, in which  they blamed rising costs on pretty much everyone else but themselves, more than half even blaming patients.  A new study has cast doubt on the view that patient demand is driving unnecessary spending.   The saddest thing for me from the study was that only 8.7% of patient encounters included a patient demand.  We're a long, long way from informed patients taking responsibility for their own care, or their own health.

Having control over what constitutes the "practice of medicine" is certainly an effective way of forestalling new kinds of competitors.  That control has been placed in the hands of the providers practicing care, ostensibly to safeguard patients' interests,. but it's getting harder and harder to believe those interests are primary.  It seems more like protecting turf.  

A couple months ago I wrote a post that raised the question of whether, in a world where microbiome treatments, gene therapy, even nanobots may emerge as prevailing types of treatment, we'll even need physicians, at least in the same way we do now.  I received a number of comments that were aghast at the notion that we might not always need physicians to deliver our care.  I believe it is this kind of thinking that has allowed the Big 3 of health care to retain their dominance.  

If we can't even imagine a health care system that doesn't solely rely on the traditional sources of care, we'll certainly never achieve one.

This post is an abridged version of the posting in Kim Bellard’s blogsite. Click here to read the full posting

The Convenience Truth

By Kim Bellard, December 17, 2014

The U.S. Mint reports that it now costs 1.7 cents to make a penny; nickels are slightly better, costing "only" 8 cents to make the 5 cent coin.  This is economics the way health care practices it.

According to Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post, we could save $100 million annually by eliminating both coins.  Or we could change the metal composition to make them cheaper, but that would create havoc with vending machines.  So we just blithely chug along, mostly because we've always had them and the businesses that revolve around them don't want to change.

See how this is like health care?

What made me think about this was a recommendation from Britain's National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE).   They now say that midwife-led birthing units are safest, and advised more women to consider them for low risk pregnancies.  They believe this could account for as many as 45% of live births.  Moreover, they think home births are just as safe as births in a hospital.  The Netherlands is considered the leader in home births, at a little under 25%.  The U.S. has 1.36% home births.

The literature -- often drawn on Netherland's data -- generally supports the NICE recommendation, but not everyone is convinced. It would be very easy to weigh all the factors, and conclude that even a relatively small increase in risk is not something you'd want to take for your own baby, and opt for the "traditional" OB/hospital delivery.

This is where the penny analogy starts to really apply.  These decisions on risk reduction are not without financial consequence.  A vaginal delivery with no complications averages about $10,000, whereas a birthing center costs under $2,500, according to Childbirth Connection.  I assume home delivery is less expensive.

In a piece for The New York Times, professor/physician Aaron Carroll notes that the ACA-created Patient Centered Outcomes Research Center is explicitly prohibited from considering cost effectiveness.  Its website says: "We don’t consider cost effectiveness to be an outcome of direct importance to patients."

Huh?

In theory, value-based purchasing will help us address these decisions.  In practice, though, most of the value-based purchasing arrangements I am aware of -- and that certainly is not an exhaustive list -- reward providers whose outcomes are simply what we'd hope for, may penalize them slightly for disappointing results, and are indifferent about if the care could have safely been done elsewhere for less.

I'm beginning to think that trying to reshape our health care system through value-based purchasing, cost-effectiveness, or even greater transparency may not work.  The "killer app" may not prove to be any of those high-minded strategies but rather a much more basic one: convenience.

Indeed, one of the earliest urgent care chains attributes its inspiration to the example of McDonald's.  We are, after all, the nation that invented fast-food, decided even that wasn't fast enough and so invented drive-throughs, which we use for over half of our fast food.  We liked the convenience of them so much that we've extended the approach to banks, car washes, pharmacies, even weddings and  funeral homes.  The concept of drive-throughs itself is rapidly being supplemented and even superseded by mobile apps, allowing consumers not to even have to get in their car.

Health care cannot ignore these consumer demands for more convenience.

Walgreens' chief medical officer recently noted that: "The idea of convenience ... is really becoming a dominant theme in health care."  It's no coincidence that Walgreens has been investing in in-store clinics, has a 24/7 Pharmacy Chat option, and just rolled out a direct-to-consumer physician virtual visit app, similar to American Well's Amwell service.  Not to be topped, Kaiser is now offering EMT home visits, in addition to its array of in-office and virtual visit options.

Our traditional approaches to care delivery have revolved around convenience for the providers, not the consumers.  Many consumers, especially younger ones, find ridiculous the notion that they have to call for an appointment that may end up weeks away, go to an office or facility that may not be close, only to wait there with sick people, and perhaps be sent to some other office or facility for more services.  They'd rather get their care via their mobile devices and/or in their home, and the technology is increasingly allowing that for many health concerns.  

We've come to recognize that health care is one of the few industries where technology typically not only doesn't lower costs but usually adds to them.  Maybe, though, expecting providers whose revenue is at stake to focus on cost-effectiveness is asking too much of them.  Focusing on convenience shouldn't be.

Focusing on convenience is simply a way to make sure we're focusing on the consumer (AKA "patient").  Isn't that supposed to be the point?

This post is an abridged version of the posting in Kim Bellard’s blogsite. Click here to read the full posting

State Health Care Prison Spending by the Numbers

by Clive Riddle, July 10, 2014

The State Health Care Spending Project, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has been monitoring and analyzing prison healthcare costs for some time, and Pew has just released a new 32-page report: State Prison Health Care Spending: An Examination.

This is on the heels of their report Managing Prison Health Care Spending first released last October, which covered the period of 2001 – 2008, and found that spending sharply increased in most states during that time period. The new report analyzes spending from 2007 – 2011 and found “state spending on prisoner health care increased from fiscal years 2007 to 2011, but it is trending downward from its peak in 2009.”

The new report concludes: “Correctional health care spending poses a fiscal challenge to state lawmakers, though evidence indicates that spending peaked at the end of the last decade. The situation posed by these expenses may be particularly acute in states where older inmates represent a relatively large proportion of the prison population. Corrections officials will be better positioned to manage their systems effectively with access to rigorous, disaggregated spending and health outcomes data that can be used to identify cost drivers and to evaluate the value and impact of cost-containment initiatives.”

Here’s a compilation of various analysis and findings from the new report, by the numbers:

4 key variable characteristics that affect delivery of health care and increase costs include: (A) Prison population trend; (B)  Older inmates, greater expense; (C) Prevalence of disease and mental illness. And (D) Location and inmate transportation.

4 strategies being used to manage costs are: (A) use of telehealth technologies; (B) outsourcing of prison health care, (C) enrollment of prisoners in Medicaid, and (D) appropriately paroling older and/or ill inmates.

37% of health care spending was on general medical care (20% was on hospitalizations; 14% on pharmaceuticals; 14% on mental health; 5% on substance abuse)

39 States saw per-inmate health care spending rise from fiscal 2007-2011, with a median growth of 10%.

41 States experienced growth in their correctional health care spending from fiscal 2007-2011, with a median increase of 13%.

34 States saw their total correctional health care spending peak before fiscal 2011

40 Of 42 states surveyed experienced a rise in the share of older inmates from fiscal 2007-2011

204% increase in the number of state and federal prisoners age 55 and older

from 1999–2012

$441 million - The amount of California’s decrease in spending from fiscal 2009 to 2011 accounting for most of the national decline of half a billion dollars during that time

$7.7 billion total prison health care spending in fiscal 2011

$8.2 billion total prison health care spending in fiscal 2009

Humana Study Measures Claims Costs and Absence Rate by level of Wellness Program Engagement

By Clive Riddle, May 2, 2014

Humana has released findings from their HumanaVitality Health Claims and Productivity Impact Study of Humana employees. HumanaVitality is a joint venture between Humana Inc. and Discovery Holdings, Ltd. That serves 3.5+ million members and “is a data-driven wellness and rewards program that motivates members to make healthier life choices.”

Humana touts that “the two-year study found improved health, as shown through lower health care costs and fewer unscheduled absences, among employees who actively participated in the HumanaVitality program.”

Here’s their specific findings:

• Unengaged members in both years averaged $53 more per month spent on health care claims than members who were engaged in HumanaVitality both years.
• The largest impact on health care costs was on members with lifestyle-related chronic conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes. Engaged members with these conditions had 60 percent lower health claims costs than unengaged members with these conditions.
• Another way of stating this: Unengaged members with lifestyle-related chronic conditions had 101% higher claims costs than the total population, while engaged members with these chronic conditions had 41% higher claims costs than the total population
• Unscheduled absences were 56.3 percent higher among unengaged members in both years than engaged members
• Members who were unengaged the first year but engaged the second year had 29% higher unscheduled absence and an average of $28 per month in claims costs than members who engaged both years

Humana shared this about the study methodology: “This study was performed on a cohort of Humana associates that were on a Humana employee medical health plan for a full 12 months in at least two consecutive plan years over the study period. The study was conducted by Humana actuaries for the following time period: Baseline Year (July 2010 – June 2011), Year 1 of the HumanaVitality program (July 2011 – June 2012) and Year 2 of the HumanaVitality program (July 2012 – June 2013). Only Humana employees were included in the study; individuals with high cost claims (>= $ 150,000 in the Baseline Year, Year 1 or Year 2) were removed from the sample. The final sample size was 13,046 members in the Year 1 analysis and 16,296 members in the Year 2 analysis.”

The Colossal Ship - The SS Rx Costs – makes a Course Correction

by Clive Riddle, April 17, 2014

Course corrections on mammoth shipping lines don’t happen in an instant – you watch them develop over a period of time. The same can be said for pharmaceutical costs as well as the entire healthcare sector, and the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics tells us we’re witnessing a slow correction right now.

Costs that have been stabilized this decade are gradually starting to tick upwards. The IMS Institute has just released a study: Medicine Use and Shifting Costs of Healthcare: A Review of the Use of Medicines in the United States in 2013 which found that “total dollars spent on medications in the U.S. reached $329.2 billion last year, up 3.2 percent on a nominal basis and a rebound from the 1.0 percent decline in 2012…  Total spending on U.S. medicines increased 1.0 percent on a real per capita basis in 2013, while the use of healthcare services overall rose for the first time in three years.”

This doesn’t mean that costs are about to go crazy in an upward spiral just yet – remember that this is a big ship. Instead, Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, tell us  “following several years of decline, 2013 was striking for the increased use by patients of all parts of the U.S. healthcare system – even in advance of full implementation of the Affordable Care Act.  Growth in medicine spending remains at historically low levels despite a significant uptick last year, and continues to contribute to the bending of the healthcare cost curve.”

So what is driving this gradual correction? The IMS Institute identifies these factors:

1. The reduced impact of patent expiries (“Patent expiries in 2013 contributed $19 billion to lower medicine spending, compared with $29 billion the previous year.”)
2. Price increases for branded products added $4 billion more in spending growth last year compared to 2012
3. Higher spending on innovative new medicines (“while 36 New Molecular Entities launched in 2013, the largest number in a decade”)
4. Greater use by patients of the healthcare system  (“Overall utilization of healthcare services grew slightly as consumers returned to the healthcare system – primarily through more office visits to specialist physicians as well as outpatient treatments – following several years of self-rationing. “)

The IMS Institute shared these other key findings from their report:

• The number of patient office visits to primary care physicians fell by 0.7 percent in 2013.
• Visits to specialists increased by 4.9 percent overall and by 9.5 percent for seniors.
• Patients filled an average of more than 12 retail prescriptions last year, up nearly 2 percent year over year.
• Those aged 65 and over filled an average of 28 prescriptions annually, down slightly from 2012.
• Overall spending on medicines remained concentrated in traditional small-molecule pills dispensed through retail pharmacies.
• But higher spending growth was seen in biologics and specialty drugs – particularly in retail and mail-order settings.
• A total of 27 new oncology drugs have launched in the past three years.
•  Additionally, clusters of innovation are transforming patient care in hepatitis C, multiple sclerosis and diabetes, as well as stroke and acute coronary syndrome.
• Seventeen orphan drugs – developed for patient populations of fewer than 200,000 individuals – launched in 2013, the most in any year since the passage of the Orphan Drug Act in 1983.
• Patients with insurance are incurring higher out-of-pocket costs for healthcare services despite lower co-pays for many prescriptions and additional discounts for preventive medicines.
• Prescription drug costs paid by most patients are declining, with average out-of-pocket costs falling below $5 for 57 percent of all retail prescriptions filled.
• At the same time, 30 percent of total patient out-of-pocket costs relate to just 2.3 percent of prescriptions, often high-cost specialty medicines.
• Twenty-three percent of prescriptions now carry no out-of-pocket costs, a dramatic rise in 2013 driven by common preventive medicines that include oral contraceptives.

Want to get more detail? The report can be downloaded as an app via iTunes.

Seated Behind a Health Plan Dashboard

By Clive Riddle, March 21, 2014

Spring has sprung, and if your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of health plans, and in fact you are driven towards such thoughts, a dashboard can be useful. You may be in luck, as Sherlock Company provides a summary from their health plan dashboard as part of their complementary publication, Plan Management Navigator.

Here’s what Sherlock Company reports in their just released March 2014 issue of the Navigator, about the trailing three months ended December 31, 2013, for health plans participating in their dashboard program. Health plans in their Dashboard universe are comprised of Blue Cross Blue Shield and Independent/ Provider-Sponsored Plans.

Health Plan reported “an increase in health revenues of 8.7%. Revenues for Medicaid grew most rapidly, increasing by 17.2%. Medicare Advantage revenue growth followed at 4.7%, while Indemnity product revenues increased 2.7%. ASO/ASC and Managed Care revenues fell by 6.2% and 4.3%, respectively. Overall, membership increased 1.1% for all health lines. Enrollment in Managed Care fell 1.1%, while increasing 1.6% for Indemnity. ASO/ASC membership declined 0.4%.”

“Membership grew in both Medicaid and Medicare by 4.6% and 4.2%, respectively. Both Managed Care and  Medicaid experienced the largest price increases, both at 3.5%. Indemnity followed with a price increase of 1.1%. Medicare Advantage products had a price decrease of 2.3%, while ASO/ASC posted a decline of 5.3%.”

“Health benefit ratios for health lines deteriorated by 2.0 percentage points to 90.0%. Managed Care and Indemnity had the largest increases of 5.4 percentage points and 4.5 percentage points, respectively. The number of scripts per person increased by 0.4 to 9.5 on an annualized basis. E/R visits per thousand members fell 13.4 to an annual rate of 241.8 per thousand, while hospital days also increased by 21.2 days to 335.1 days per thousand. The administrative expense to premium ratio increased 0.6 percentage points to 11.8%, while the administrative costs per member per month increased 2.3% to $34.76. Claims volumes increased 0.87 to 17.7 per member per year, while inquiries per member grew 0.34 to 1.9 per member per year. Staffing ratios fell 0.32 FTEs per 10,000 members to 21.1.”

You can click here if you’d like to subscribe to Sherlock Company’s complementary Plan Management Navigator, which includes additional articles full of great health plan data, benchmarks, and insights like those provided in the Dashboard Summary.

Effectiveness of SMS in healthcare

By Krista Burris, January 28, 2014

Healthcare is at a tipping point and as such, unprecedented efforts are being made to improve health outcomes and foster efficiencies in healthcare delivery. What seems promising with the current reform and transformation efforts is the convergence of existing mass markets influencing healthcare innovation. For example, leveraging mobile phones to track, monitor, and engage patients in lifestyle and self-health management. Mobile text messaging communication in particular has proven to be an effective way to foster desired behavior change in patients and improve the way in which care is delivered by capturing important data that is actionable.

The need for improving outcomes and creating efficiency becomes increasingly important in the context of the coverage expansion in the Affordable Care Act where millions of Americans will enter the system, utilizing more healthcare resources. In particular, the Medicaid expansion is projected to result in a total of 75.6 million enrollees for 2014, an increase of roughly 19.5 million as a result of the ACA[i]. Leveraging mobile text message communication to facilitate convenient and efficient communication among patients and providers, as well encouraging desired behavior change by providing patients with educational tools to improve health outcomes, is encouraging to achieve on the triple-aim objective of healthcare reform[ii].

The opportunities to innovate using mobile technologies among the low-income and underserved populations are robust. A review of several research publications as well as surveying key constituents within the healthcare ecosystem serving these populations[iii], it is clear that the unmet needs plaguing the healthcare safety-net and contributing to waste include poor appointment attendance[iv], poor medication adherence[v], and poor health literacy[vi].

Extending the successes of current mobile text message patient engagement strategies to each of these unmet needs has the potential to reduce waste and inefficiencies in the system by improving health literacy and self-health management of low-income and underserved populations.

SMS text-messaging has shown a positive impact on fostering the desired behavior change in patients. A review of existing studies show that text messaging can support improvement in appointment attendance, increased medication adherence, and enhanced literacy through educational content outreach.

SMS text message appointment reminders

Patients failing to attend their scheduled doctor visits contribute to inefficiencies and misused resources[vii]. In general it is found that a reminder, whether it be by text or phone, is helpful in improving attendance, however SMS technology is a more cost-effective approach[viii].

A 2012 study analyzing the effect of SMS text reminders to reduce nonattendance for hospital outpatient visits found a significant difference in the attendance rate of patients who received a text reminder compared to patients who received no reminder[ix]. The results concluded that the attendance rate for patients who received text message reminders over the 4 month period were significantly higher (79.2%) compared to the attendance rate of those who received no reminder (35.5%).

Another study measuring the impact of SMS appointment reminders for outpatient clinic visits in Brazil found that text message reminders reduced nonattendance rates, improving patients’ care and ensuring the right care at the right time[x]. The nonattendance reduction rates for appointments at the four outpatient clinics studied were 0.82% (p= .590), 3.55% (p= .009), 5.75% (p= .022), and 14.49% (p= < .001).  These results suggest that text is an effective and efficient way to ensure patients attend their scheduled clinic visits and do not have interrupted care.

SMS text message medication reminders

Patients’ failure to adhere to their medication regimen can lead to unnecessary disease progression and complications. This contributes to waste in the healthcare system including preventable visits to the emergency room and increased utilization of other healthcare resources. Researchers have evaluated the impact of SMS text reminders on promoting medication adherence. The results are promising, suggesting text as an efficient and effective way to ensure patients take their medication.

The World Health Organization conducted a review of trials and studies that evaluated the effectiveness of mobile text medication reminders for HIV patients on anti-retroviral therapy drugs[xi]. The overall conclusion was that patients who receive text message reminders had a significantly higher adherence rate to their medications compared to patients that did not receive any kind of reminder. For conditions such as HIV where medication adherence is critical in preventing or stalling disease progression towards AIDS, as well as other comorbidities, the use of SMS technology can enable proper compliance of medication needs.

A study reviewing SMS reminders for diabetic patients concluded that text reminders improves adherence to oral antidiabetics[xii]. In the study 56 patients were confirmed to receive text reminders to take their medication, compared to 48 patients who received no reminder. Medication of both groups was measured using Real Time Medication Monitoring (RTMM) of oral antidiabetics in terms of (1) days without dosing; (2) missed doses; (3) doses taken within predefined standardized time windows. Patients' experiences were surveyed through questionnaires. The results found that patients who received reminders had a higher rate of adherence including a higher rate of taking their medication in the predefined time interval of receiving the reminder. The study also concluded through the patient survey questionnaire that patients found the reminders helpful.

SMS text message delivering educational content

SMS text-based education is emerging as an effective way to engage patients in better self-care. Lack of education around basic health information leads to approximately $106 billion to $238 billion in economic burden each year[xiii].  Text message outreach with educational content can be an efficient way to improve patients’ health literacy.

The Center for Connected Health in Boston reported in a study that text messaging improved treatment adherence and self-care for dermatology patients suffering from atopic dermatitis[xiv]. In the study, 25 patients received daily text messages over a period of six weeks. The text messages included treatment reminders and educational content pertaining to their health condition. At the end of the six week study, patients reported and improvement of treatment adherence of 72% and roughly 68% of the patients reported an improvement in self-care behaviors to help their conditions.

Two other studies evaluated the use of text messaging in improving self-care and desired behavior change for Type 1 diabetic patients[xv]. One study tailored text message communication to self-management goals, as well as untailored content such as newsletters and tips from other patients. The results showed that the patients enrolled in the text program were engaged in interacting with the technology. The participants seemed to enjoy the community aspect of the technology through the ability to connect with their provider and peers. The second study evaluated the use of text message technology among families of children with type 1 diabetes. In this study, the parents received informational messages pertaining to their children’s care needs. The study results concluded that the text messages were helpful and aided in better dialogue between parent and child around the disease condition.

Ensuring proper self-care is important for patients living with chronic disease as much of the care needed to manage these diseases occurs outside of the clinic and provider supervision. Providing patients with easy and consistent access to information to better understand their conditions and comply with proper care practices can lead to improved health outcomes.

Conclusion

Mobile text communication can be a cost-efficient and effective way to engage patients in the desired behavior change to improve appointment attendance, medication adherence, and self-care management of disease. As the healthcare system transitions to a focus on improving health outcomes, engaging patients in the management of their health is critical. SMS text messaging is a low-cost way to facilitate engagement and enhance the health literacy of individuals living with chronic conditions and other health challenges.

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[i] National Health Expenditures Projections 2010-2020. Forecast Summary. http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/proj2010.pdf.

[ii] The triple-aim is a framework developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to address experience of care, population health (improving outcomes), and per capita cost of healthcare services; It is generally accepted that the Affordable Care Act uses the triple-aim as a core principle to design healthcare transformation: “Moving toward the “triple-aim”: The Affordable Care Act and the implications for payment and quality reform”. http://www.ehcca.com/presentations/pfpsummit6/dentzer_1.pdf.

[iii] Feedback from the healthcare community includes discussions with senior leadership of San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium, including St. Anthony’s Foundation.

[iv] Kaplan-Lewis, E. Percac-Lima, S. “No-show to primary care appointments: why patients do not come.” Journal of Primary Care and Community Health. July 2013. http://jpc.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/07/26/2150131913498513.abstract.

Anecdotal feedback from St. Anthony’s Foundation reported an approximate $250 loss in revenue from each no-show appointment.

[v] Nichol, M.B. Knight, T.K. Priest, J.L. Wu, J. Cantrell, C.R. “Nonadherence to clinical practice guidelines and medications for multiple chronic conditions in a California Medicaid population.” Journal of the American Pharmacist Association. 2010. http://japha.org/article.aspx?articleid=1043767.

[vi] Somers, S. Mahadevan, R. “Health Literacy: implications of the Affordable Care Act.” The Institute of Medicine, Center for Health Care Strategies, Inc. 2010. http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Activity%20Files/PublicHealth/HealthLiteracy/Commissioned%20Papers/Health%20Literacy%20Implications%20of%20Health%20Care%20Reform.pdf.

[vii] Hasvold, P.E. Wootton, R. “Use of telephone and SMS reminders to improve attendance at hospital appointments: a systematic review”. Journal of Telemedicine & Telecare. 2011. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21933898.

[viii] Chen, ZW. Fang, LZ. Chen, LY. Dai, HL. “Comparison of an SMS text messaging and phone reminder to improve attendance at a health promotion center: a randomized controlled trial.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18196610.

[ix] Prasad, S. Anand, R. “Use of mobile telephone short message service as a reminder: the effect on patient attendance.” International Dentistry Journal. 2012. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22251033.

[x] da ,Costa TM, Salomão, PL. Martha, AS. Pisa, IT. Sigulem, D. “The impact of short message service text messages sent as appointment reminders to patients' cell phones at outpatient clinics in São Paulo, Brazil.” 2010. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19783204.

[xi] Sharma, P. Agarwal. P. “Mobile phone text messaging for promoting adherence to antiretroviral therapy in patients with HIV infection.” The WHO Reproductive Health Library. The World Health Organization. 2012. http://apps.who.int/rhl/hiv_aids/cd009756_sharmap_com/en/index.html.

[xii] Vervolet, M. van Dijk, L. Santen-Reestman, J. “SMS reminders improve adherence to oral medication in type 2 diabetes patients who are real time electronically monitored” In J Med Inform. 2012;81(9); 594-604. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22652012.

[xiii] Vernon, JA. Trujillo, A. “Low Health Literacy: Implications for National Health Policy.” Rep. Washington: George Washington University, 2007. http://sphhs.gwu.edu/departments/healthpolicy/CHPR/downloads/LowHealthLiteracyReport10_4_07.pdf

[xiv] Pena-Robichauz, V. Kvedar, J. Watson, A. “Text Message as a Reminder Aid and Educational Tool in Adults and Adolescents with Atopic Dermatitis: A Pilot Study.” Dermatology Research and Practice. 2010. http://www.connected-health.org/programs/dermatology/research-materials--external-resources/text-messages-as-a-reminder-aid-and-educational-tool-in-adults-and-adolescents-with-atopic-dermatitis-a-pilot-study.aspx.

[xv] Franklin, V. Greene, A. Pagliari, C. “Patients’ engagement with ‘Sweet Talk’- A text messaging support system for young people with diabetes.” Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2008. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2483928/#!po=2.50000.

Wangberg, SC. Arsand, E. Andersson, N. “Diabestes education via mobile text messaging.” Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare. 2006. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16884582. 

A Stitch In Time…Will Cost A Lot of Money

By Kim Bellard, December 5, 2013

It almost seems like piling on to pick on hospital pricing anymore, following such incisive articles already this year such as Steven Brill’s Time article “Bitter Pill” or Elizabeth Rosenthal’s “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill” in the New York Times, but there just continue to be more examples of how irrational health care charges are in the U.S. health care system. 

Jillian and Joseph Bernstein just published a study in JAMA Internal Medicine, focusing on the difficulty in getting hospitals’ prices for electrocardiograms (ECGs) – and comparing that with the ease of obtaining those same hospitals’ prices for parking.  This followed a study published earlier this year that looked at the difficulty of getting hospitals to quote prices for hip replacement.  The Bernsteins were testing the hypothesis that perhaps hip replacements included too many variables, thus making quoting prices difficult, and so chose the more standardized ECGs. 

The results will probably not surprise anyone.  They contacted twenty Philadelphia area hospitals to ask for the two kinds of prices.  Nineteen of the hospitals were easily able to provide the cost for parking, but only three could come up with a price for the ECG (and don’t you want to know what hospital couldn’t even quote its own prices for parking?).  It’s also interesting to note that the three ECG prices they got ranged from $137 to $1200, almost a tenfold difference.

The authors conclude that “hospitals seem able to provide prices when they want to; yet for even basic medical services, prices remain opaque.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Rosenthal of The Times was at it again, this time in “As Hospital Prices Soar, a Stitch Tops $500.  The article points out not only simple stitches that cost $500 in ERs but also IV bags that cost under $1 but for which hospitals charge $137, or $20 neck braces for which that hospitals want $154.  And these are not the most egregious examples cited. 

Few people pay full charges, of course – except for the people without insurance, who are probably least able to pay them – but the hospitals build their charge structures due to what one physician told The Times was the Saudi sheikh problem: “you don’t really want to change your charges if you have a Saudi sheikh come in with a suitcase full of cash who’s going to pay full charges.”  That’s what passes for pricing strategy in U.S. hospitals?

The Times attributes the seemingly unfettered hospital pricing to increasing market dominance, using Sutter Health in California as a prime example.  Indeed, a recent study in JAMA found that price increases – not increased demand or aging of the population – accounted for 91% of the increases in overall health care costs since 2000, with market consolidation blamed as one of the key drivers of these price increases. 

We’ve been waiting for patients to care about prices for some time, especially with the advent of high deductible plans, and there is some evidence perhaps that is starting.  A survey by TransUnion Healthcare found that 55% of insured consumers have started to pay more attention to their medical bills in the past year, and that 67% claim they want to know not just how much services cost them directly but also how much their insurance is paying on their behalf. 

The TransUnion survey also found that, when it comes to choosing providers, consumers rated “makes it easy to see the cost of services” right below “world class specialists and technology,” and – amazingly -- above high quality scores or proximity to home.  Even more interesting was that the survey found some correlation between consumers’ perception of quality of care with their satisfaction with the billing experience, a fact to which one hopes providers are paying close attention. 

Ironically, health plans now are expressing some concern over exactly what type of transparency they support.  AHIP, their trade association, indicated that calls for an all-payer claims database, which would facilitate comparisons between providers and across payors, could backfire, raising the spectre of lower paid providers demanding higher reimbursements once they started seeing what other providers were being paid.  Having once led transparency efforts for a large health plan, I can affirm that this concern is very much on the minds of provider contracting staff.

At the same time, many physician specialty organizations, including the AMA, continue to balk at many forms of transparency.  Lately they have questioned the wisdom of a proposal to make public the Medicare payments to physicians, something the Wall Street Journal, among other organizations, has long been pushing for.  They worry that the data could be confusing or misleading to consumers, although it’s hard to see what could be more confusing or misleading to what we’re doing now.

Still, not everyone is a fan of transparency, at least not as it has been attempted so far.  The ever-quotable, always insightful Uwe Reinhardt, writing recently in JAMA, throws cold water on many previous efforts.  In his words, “[T]he idea that American patients should 'shop around for cost-effective health care' so far has been about as sensible as blindfolding shoppers entering a department store in the hope that inside they can and will shop smartly for the merchandise they seek,  In practice, this idea has been as silly as it has been cruel." 

Reinhardt does think that health IT can change the game by more easily making pricing available to consumers, citing such innovators as Healthcare Blue Book and Castlight Health.  He likes the reference pricing approach (which I discussed recently), which involves setting a uniform payment limit and making providers compete for anything they want to try to charge above those limits. 

Of course, simply disclosing costs is only a necessary, but not sufficient, change to bring about true competitive pressures for pricing.  We’re moving to ICD-10 codes, and a cottage industry has emerged to find the funniest examples.  For example, there are separate codes for being struck by a turtle, orca, or duck, not to mention for walking into a lamppost.  You know that in back offices of provider organizations and health plans, diligent bean counters are coming up with prices for each of these. 

If we merely made visible the existing pricing structures, which are built for billing and diagnostic accuracy rather than for consumer understanding, it’d be liking going to Dr. Reinhardt’s metaphorical department store and finding that each item showed the cost of every party involved in the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of the item, plus costs for a variety of additional variables based on the consumer’s needs.  No exactly an Amazon one-click kind of experience.

Despite the big challenges ahead for it, I do believe that, whether it is AHIP, AMA, AHA, or any other providers making a living in the current arcane system, there is a danger that if they don’t get on the transparency bus, they may get run over by it.  The Saudi sheikh strategy can’t last.

“Health Care Productivity” is an Oxymoron

By Kim Bellard, September 26, 2013

It has long baffled me when politicians and others trumpet job growth in the health care sector, while at the same time bemoaning rising health costs, as if there was no connection. Some Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland have bet a large portion of their economic future on their growing health care industries, and some economists attribute much of the nation’s recent economic revival on the growth in the health care sector. But job growth in itself is not always a good sign. An insightful piece by Robert Kocher suggests that the situation is even worse than I already suspected.

Kocher concluded that productivity is actually dropping in health care, with hiring outstripping output. He figures that the health care workforce has increased 75% since 1990, with almost all of the growth coming from non-doctor workers. There are 16 non-doctor workers for every doctor, and only 6 of those have a clinical role. As Kocher says, “[T]he problem with all of the non-doctor labor is that most of it is not primarily associated with delivering better patient outcomes or lowering costs.” So what the heck are they doing?

Health care professionals would be quick to note that there are ever-more administrative demands, driven by the multiplicity of payors, health care plan designs, and the number of hoops through which they are expected to jump in order to justify payment. Fair enough; it is hard to think of many other industries in which there is so little standardization. Payors want more standardization from providers in how the deliver care, providers want more uniformity from payors in coverage and requirements, and patients are stuck in the middle with neither side listening to them very well.

The latter, at least, may be starting to change. Hospitals are now facing big Medicare penalties for poor scores on HCAHPS, and physicians have to be looking forward to that future. There are some signs that hospitals are paying more attention, such as reported for California hospitals. One of the initiatives mentioned was simply to ensure patient rooms are cleaner. It’s sad that in 2013 it takes the threat of penalties to make this a focus.

Providers may be going overboard on trying to improve patient satisfaction by focusing on amenities. The New York Times’ recent article “Is this a Hospital or a Hotel?” discussed this issue, and included a series of photos that dare the reader to determine which is which. I know I had a hard time distinguishing them. Is this really where our health care spending should be going, and is this improving productivity – or patient care?

Perhaps this kind of focus on amenities partially explains both our high costs and the productivity issues. Ironically, it’s not at all clear that patient satisfaction is directly tied to quality. A recent study found statistically significant correlations between the two, but with only a weak association. Another study from Johns Hopkins similarly found that patient satisfaction does not necessarily reflect the quality of surgical care patients receive.

Moral of the story: patient satisfaction is important, but we shouldn’t let it be a substitute for better empirical measures of quality and outcomes.

A crucial component of improved standardization – and, with it, increased productivity -- is with the data. HITECH is most commonly known for being the stimulus for EHR adoption, but it also spurred the development of health information exchanges (HIEs), which are critical for the sharing of all that desired electronic information. Progress certainly has been made, with HIEs now funded in every state, but a recent report by HIMSS Analytics reminds us that the war is not yet won. Although 73% of surveyed hospital IT executives indicated they participated in an HIE, only 20% indicated that it had improved patient safety, and only 12% believed it saved time for clinicians. The biggest challenge, voiced by 49%, was that other organizations were not sharing data robustly; 64% admit to still relying on faxing to get around this problem.

It is typical health care: spend lots of money – billions in this case – but do not use it to drive ruthlessly towards improving care or cutting costs. To make things worse, providers aren’t able to eliminate the old, paper-based processes, which means work flows can’t become more uniform, and all those new costs become additive.

I have a hard time believing Walmart, Apple, or GE have this much trouble transmitting and using data across their supply chains.

Indeed, David Cutler – former health aide to President Obama – argues that health care will be much more like Walmart once the effects of the information technology “revolution” is more fully realized. He likens health care to the retail industry of the early 1980’s, full of solo practitioners and lacking useful information technology. As companies like Walmart and Amazon have demonstrated, he sees the future as being made up of larger, more integrated institutions, and able to drastically cut administrative expenses through more effective information technology.

Cutler also believes the patient has to become more central -- connected to the most appropriate health resources and providers via technology and finally becoming a more equal contributor in his or her own care.

The lack of a patient-centered system is one of the key barriers Michael Porter names in a recent blog (and article). As he and co-author Thomas Lee say, “[P]roviders are organized and reimbursed around what they do, rather than what patients need.” This is not exactly news to anyone, but it is nonetheless a profound insight. The seemingly haphazard, provider-centric structure of our health care system goes a long way towards explaining both our high costs and the difficulty in improving productivity.

Porter’s solution is that health care must focus on value; again, hardly a unique proposal, but one that is hard to argue with. Porter outlines the barriers he believes is preventing our system from improving value. In addition to the previously mentioned provider-centric structure, he also cites the following barriers:

• Free-agent physicians operate independently, rather than as part of an integrated team.
• Patient volume is fragmented, making every patient a special case.
• Massive cross-subsidies in reimbursement for individual services have distorted care and stalled care integration.
• No participant in the system has good information about patient outcomes and the cost of care.
• Information technology has often made care integration and value improvement harder, rather than enabling it.

Today’s health care “system” simply has too many entities pursing too many distinct goals, and limited ability to measure what is happening. None of these entities is particularly happy with the current situation, and most would agree that there’s too much waste in the system. Porter believes we can get to a value-based system, but it will take some radical changes in delivery systems, payment, and measurement. His article even includes a nifty infographic to illustrate. I hope I live long enough to see that future realized.

Cutler compared health care to 1980’s retail, and I would extend this to say that the productivity gap in health care is akin to what happened when personal computers became more widespread in offices in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Economists kept wondering where the productivity gains were. It wasn’t enough to simply add computers to existing business practices; business had to truly re-engineer their processes to take advantage of the new capabilities in order for productivity to soar, as it started to do in the late 1990s. Health care is not there yet.

Maybe the problem with productivity in health care – or even measuring its productivity – is that we’re too vague about exactly what we want to have happen. Process measures and patient satisfaction measures are all well and good, but what matters is what actually happens with the patient. When we can track that more effectively, maybe we can finally start identifying and attacking productivity more effectively.

Gorillas in Our Midst

By Kim Bellard, August 13, 2013

There’s a well-known psychology experiment in which participants were asked to keep track of how many times a basketball was being passed in front of them, only to have a (fake) gorilla stroll in front of them.  Surprisingly, about half of the participants were so focused on their task that they were totally oblivious to the gorilla’s presence.  Researchers call this “inattentional blindness,” and we now have some evidence that it happens even to trained health care professionals as well.

Researcher Trafton Drew recently published results of a study in which he and his colleagues placed an image of a gorilla – I swear, I am not making this up! -- in one of a series of slides radiologists were reviewing for cancer nodules.  Amazingly, 83% of the radiologists failed to detect the image, even though it was 48 times larger than the typical nodule they were looking for and eye tracking indicated the radiologists had looked directly at the image.  They weren’t looking for gorillas and, as a result, did not see them. 

“Inattentional blindness” seems to me an apt description of how those of us in the health care field tend to look at health care.  It’s the old “if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail” syndrome and it may help account for why our health system is so dysfunctional.  Health care has a lot of hammers and we sure do like to use them.

Take health insurance.  Health insurers are notoriously low rated when it comes to consumer trust, and it’s no wonder: consumers don’t understand their product.  Recent research by George Lowenstein of CMU indicate that only 14% of consumers understand four basic terms – deductible, copay, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket maximum – and only 11% could estimate their cost for a hospital stay given all the applicable data. 

I worked a long time in the health insurance industry and like to think I’d do well on Dr. Lowenstein’s tests, but when it comes down to reading all the fine print from different companies I suspect I’d not know how to evaluate them either.  We’ve simply made coverage too complicated, and if anyone thinks the new health insurance marketplaces will solve this problem, then I suggest they think again. 

It’s all well and good that ACA dictates which preventive services are covered at 100%, what “essential benefits” are, and how much different levels of plans must pay out, but none of that is making health insurance understandable to the average consumer.  We’re so busy debating things like high deductible plans versus first dollar plans, single payor versus competing private plans that we ignore the real problem: not only don’t consumers understand the product but, even worse, the product fails to help them be healthy.

Or take hospitals.  Let’s say you were very sick but had no idea what a hospital was.  Your friend tells you they are where sick people go to get better.  As a result, they’re full of sick people; in fact, it’s more likely than not that you’ll have to share a room with some sick stranger.  All those sick people means lots of germs; the official statistic is that one in 20 patients will pick up an infection during their stay (which is almost certainly understated) and that about 100,000 will die from those each year (which hopefully is overstated).  Part of the problem is that hospitals can’t even do a good job of getting their employees to do simple hygiene tasks like washing their hands. 

When you arrive, you’ll have to fill out lots of forms, giving them information that you no doubt have already given to other health care professionals.  The hospital will expect you to wear a flimsy gown that affords no dignity, and stick a wristband on you like you are a piece of merchandise, which is supposed to lessen the chance that they’ll, say, remove one of your limbs or a kidney by mistake.  An array of different hospital personnel will keep interrupting you for a variety of tests, procedures, and other tasks, virtually none of which you’ll have much advance warning of when to expect and which will make sleeping or resting very difficult.  You’ll spend most of your time in the hospital waiting around, but don’t expect much in the way of good distractions: the food is bland at best and terrible at worst, and the entertainment options on the television might have been state-of-the-art for 1970’s cable. 

Don’t bother trying to find out what anything is going to cost; no one can tell you until long after the fact, and then you’ll be shocked at how expensive everything is – at prices that would make even the most hardened Pentagon procurement officer blanch.  Oh, and there’s a one in five chance that you’ll have to be readmitted within 30 days, either because you didn’t really get better during your stay or because something else bad happened to you when you were there. 

If you learned all this for the first time, you might think twice about being admitted.

Hospitals have been around in some form for centuries, but they didn’t really start turning into these impersonal behemoths until federal money started pouring in after World War II, first with Hill-Burton funds and then with the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid.  The trend has accelerated in recent years.  Hospital buildings have often grown very complex due to repeated expansion and renovation, to the point that visitors need color coded maps just to try to get around.  The equipment in the hospitals, down to the beds themselves, has grown equally complex – and expensive.   Hospitals can certainly help patients in ways that would have been unimaginable even twenty or thirty years ago, but I doubt there are many people who could assert that the hospital experience has improved.

It’s not that smart people aren’t thinking about this.  Take, for example, Patient Room 2020, led by design firm NXT Health in conjunction with Clemson’s Healthcare + Architecture Program, and funded by the Department of Defense.  They’re reimagining what patient rooms should look like and work, and have come up with some cool design changes (see, for example, more pictures in Wired’s article).  As Wired said, it’s like the Apple Store meets Tron (although I think I’d have chosen a better sci-fi movie – or at least one that had a medical facility in it). 

The trouble is, they’re not seeing the metaphorical gorilla.  It’s the concept of the hospital that we’re not seeing properly.  It’s sort of like Windows 8 – some impressive engineering that provides expanded capabilities, but at the end of the day still a kludge trying to maintain an approach that is quickly becoming bypassed by newer ones. 

To carry the analogy further, hospitals and health insurers would surely be the mainframes of the health system, with outpatient clinics and surgical centers perhaps the desktops.  Physician offices and perhaps physical therapy offices might be considered the laptops.  In this analogy – where are the equivalents of tablets and smartphones, and where are the “apps” that make using the system easier?  Again, I mean these as an analogy, not literally, to illustrate that we’re just not doing a good job of rethinking the system.

Just look at all the artificial distinctions that have ossified in our health system: allopathic versus osteopathic (or chiropractic); “Western” versus alternative medicine; primary care versus specialty versus subspecialty; dental versus vision versus medical; workers compensation health coverage versus “commercial” health insurance; state by state licensing of health care professionals and insurance.  I could go on and on, but it’s clear that there are a lot of gorillas that we’re missing with our inattentional blindness. 

For example, a recent study found that one in ten Americans now take an antidepressant.  The problem is, nearly two-thirds of them don’t meet the criteria for depression and probably shouldn’t be taking the prescription.  Both the patients and the prescribing physicians are guilty of going for the medication fix because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to look for.

We need to go back to first principles.  What are the structures we need to encourage and incent consumers to focus more on good health?  What are the types of professionals and support systems that can assist them in that ongoing journey?  How do we better identify when health issues turn into medical problems, and apply the “least necessary” resources to them?  How do we keep the patient in the center even as care becomes more complex?  How much should consumers be expected to pay towards their own health, and how do we want to finance those costs?  Answering these questions from first principles would be monumentally hard, but right now there are not many people even trying.

We’re so busy seeing tests/procedures/pills/payment that we’re missing, not the gorilla, but the patient.

It Was Those Other Guys

Kim Bellard, July 26, 2013

A fascinating study in JAMA on physician’s attitudes towards controlling costs helps illustrate the bipolar attitudes our health system tends to generate.  The study found that physicians generally believe other players in the health system have the major responsibility for controlling costs – led by the popular culprits: trial lawyers (60%), insurance companies (59%), and pharmaceutical/device manufacturers (56%).  Patients were cited by 52%.

Only 36% of the physicians cited physicians as bearing a major responsibility for controlling costs.

When I saw the latter result, I initially assumed the respondents would simply plead ignorance about costs, or at least take the 5^th, but nope: 76% agreed that they were aware of the costs of services they recommend.  Even more surprising, 73% disagree that doctors are too busy to worry about costs of tests and procedures, and 75% agree that trying to contain costs was every physician’s responsibility.  There’s a certain cognitive dissonance here that is hard to understand.

As for cost containment strategies the physicians were enthusiastic about, mom-and-apple-pie approaches dominated: promoting continuity of care (75%), the ever-popular “rooting out fraud and abuse” (70%), and chronic disease care coordination (69%).  Only 7% were in favor of eliminating fee-for-service and only 6% liked the approach of bundled payments.  I guess they haven’t gotten the memo that FFS is supposedly dying.

I was particularly disappointed that the physicians were not more enthusiastic about more empirical approaches to controlling costs, with only 51% in support of expanding access to quality and safety data and only 50% supporting head-to-head trials of competing treatments. 

Support for head-to-head trials should be much higher, based on some findings recently released by the Mayo Clinic.  The researchers reviewed ten years of articles in a “high impact” medical journal, looking both at articles studying new medical practices and ones evaluating existing treatments.  The results are disturbing: 40% of the existing treatments reviewed were no better or worse than the prior standards of care; i.e., the results recommended reversing an existing practice that was considered the current standard of care.  Only 38% reaffirmed existing practices, with the rest inconclusive.  This is medicine by ready-shoot-aim.

New treatments fared better, with only 17% failing to improve upon existing practices.  I suppose I should be comforted by that result, but it just makes me wonder if the discredited practices ended up being used anyway (especially if they resulted in higher revenue).  

Another recent survey of physicians – this one by Wolters Kluwer Health – didn’t paint a better picture than the JAMA study.  For one thing, 34% reported that it was somewhat or very likely that they’d leave their practice in the near future.  The respondents found it challenging to manage shifting reimbursement models with payors (91%) as well as their practice’s financial management (90%); as a result, 88% reported it challenging to spend enough time with patients.  Improving patient care was seen as further down their list of challenges (78%, but with the lowest result for being seen as very challenging -- only 20%). 

These physicians do think that HIT is making progress in having an impact on ensuring patient safety and in improving quality of care (both 55%), but are more skeptical that it is making progress in improving ease of use (56% disagree) or managing costs (63%). 

In terms of areas of focus for the next 3-5 years, 48% listed improving practice efficiency, 34% planned to explore different business models, while only 14% were focused on public reporting of quality metrics and only 11% wanted to concentrate on patient safety.  To be fair, 31% did hope to adopt technology to improve clinical decision-making/evidence-based medicine. 

One likes to think that it truly isn’t all about the money, but it’s also easy to be cynical about this.  The Washington Post recently wrote about how an AMA committee is driving Medicare reimbursement decisions, using some questionable assumptions.  The Post asserts that some of the committee’s assumptions grossly exaggerate the time involved in procedures, such as for colonoscopies.   The assumptions can be as 100% higher than actual time and effort. 

The Post also notes that the committee is seven times more likely to raise time estimates than to lower them, in apparent contradiction to presumed technology and productivity advances.  Despite the billions of dollars at stake, CMS only uses “six to eight” people to review the recommendations, and none of them are devoted full-time, in contrast to the “hundreds” of people the AMA and specialty societies use to develop their recommendations.

Former Medicare chief Tom Scully is quoted as saying, “The concept of having the AMA run the process of fixing prices for Medicare was crazy from the beginning.  It was a fundamental mistake.”  The Harvard researcher who originally developed the RBRVS point system, William Hsiao, says, “The AMA fought very hard to take over this updating process.  I said this had to be done by an impartial group of people.  This is highly political.”

The AMA committee’s recommendations do not directly result in higher payments, nor is it likely that most individual physicians are aware of the assumptions embedded in their payment rates, but the process is another illustration at how no one is minding the store.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the IOM’s new report “Variation in Health Care Spending: Target Decision Making, Not Geography.”  They were asked to investigate since Congress has been considering shifting money from high-cost areas of the country to lower cost ones.  Somewhat surprisingly, IOM did not support that tactic.  They reaffirmed that geographic spending differences do exist, for both Medicare and private insurance, and that there is essentially no correlation between quality and spending.  However, they did not support geography-based reimbursement models, finding that the geography is not the issue.

For Medicare, they found that higher spending differences were most associated with post-acute care, and to acute care only to a lesser extent; indeed, post-acute care differences accounted for 73% of Medicare’s geographic spending differences.  For private insurance, spending differences were due to price markups rather than utilization differences.

The IOM’s main conclusion is in the subhead of their report’s title: “Target Decision Making, Not Geography.”  Now if only we could figure out who is making the decisions.   The physicians don’t think it’s them; the government is delegating theirs to special interests and lobbyists; the payors can’t negotiate tough enough with the provider systems (especially now that those systems continue to consolidate); the provider systems – well, they’re terrified that the physicians will stop generating all that revenue for them. 

We can continue to pin the tail on new culprits, but we need to get past blame.  I’m naïve enough to think that there aren’t many villains here (although there are, allegedly, some), but it boils down to too many involved parties not being willing to be accountable for their actions.

When it comes to increasing value – not just controlling health care costs but also improving quality – in our health care system, I think of words of the always wise Benjamin Franklin: we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

CMS Pronouncements on Pioneer ACO Results and 2014 HIX Premiums

By Clive Riddle, July 18, 2013

This week CMS announced results from the first performance year of the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Model, along with a new report that finds premiums in the Health Insurance Marketplace will be nearly 20 percent lower in 2014 than previously expected.

Here are the Pioneer ACO results that CMS is touting:

• Costs for the more than 669,000 beneficiaries aligned to Pioneer ACOs grew by only 0.3 percent in 2012 where as costs for similar beneficiaries grew by 0.8 percent in the same period.
• 13 out of 32 pioneer ACOs produced shared savings with CMS, generating a gross savings of $87.6 million in 2012 and saving nearly $33 million for Medicare
•  Pioneer ACOs earned over $76 million in compensation.
• Only 2 Pioneer ACOs had shared losses totaling approximately $4.0 million.
• All 32 Pioneer ACOs successfully reported quality measures and achieved the maximum reporting rate for the first performance year, with all earning incentive payments. 
• Overall, Pioneer ACOs performed better than published rates in fee-for-service Medicare for all 15 clinical quality measures for which comparable data are available.
• 25 of 32 Pioneer ACOs generated lower risk-adjusted readmission rates for their aligned beneficiaries than the benchmark rate for all Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries.
• The median rate among Pioneer ACOs on blood pressure control among beneficiaries with diabetes was 68 percent compared to the comparison value of 55 percent as measured in adult diabetic population in 10 managed care plans across 7 states from 2000 to 2001. 
•  Pioneer ACOs performed better on clinical quality measures that assess low density lipoprotein (LDL) control for patients with diabetes. The median rate among Pioneer ACOs for LDO control among beneficiaries with diabetes was 57 percent compared to 48 percent in an adult diabetic population in 10 managed care plans across 7 states from 2000 to 2001.
• Pioneer ACOs were rated higher by ACO beneficiaries on all four patient experience measures relative to the 2011 Medicare fee-for-service results.

CMS did disclose that seven Pioneer ACOs that did not produce savings intend to switch to the Medicare Shared Savings Program, and two Pioneer ACOs have indicated their intent to leave the program. 

The Wall Street Journal  didn’t interpret these results as rosily as did CMS. Here is the WSJ take, from their July 16^th article Mixed Results in Health Pilot Plan: “All of the 32 health systems in the so-called Pioneer Accountable Care Organization program improved patient care on quality measures such as cancer screenings and controlling blood pressure, according to data to be released Tuesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But only 18 of the 32 managed to lower costs for the Medicare patients they treated—a major goal of the effort. Two hospitals lost money on the program in the first year. Seven have notified CMS that they intend to move to another program where they will face less financial risk. Two others have indicated they intend to leave the program,”

On the Health Insurance Marketplace front, CMS touted findings from a just released twelve-page ASPE Issue Brief: Market Competition Works: Proposed Silver Premiums in the 2014 Individual and Small

Group Markets Are Nearly 20% Lower than Expected. CMS notes the report found that:

• In the 11 states (including the District of Columbia) that have made information available for the individual market, proposed premiums for 2014 are on average 18 percent lower than HHS’ estimate of 2014 individual market premiums derived from CBO publications.
• In the six states that have made information available in the small group market, proposed premiums are estimated to be on average 18 percent lower than the premium a small employer would pay for similar coverage without the Affordable Care Act.
• Preliminary premiums appear to be affordable even for young men. For example, in Los Angeles - the county with the largest number of uninsured Americans in the nation - the lowest cost silver plan in 2014 for a 25-year-old individual costs $174 per month without a tax credit, $34 per month for an individual whose income is $17,235, and a catastrophic plan can be purchased for $117 per month for an individual.

Here a chart provided in the ASPE report, comparing the ASPE premium estimate for Individual Silver premiums compared to actual premiums for applicable states:

Study finds fewer office visits, prescriptions with CDHPs | Home Channel News

By Cyndy Nayer, July 1, 2013

There are more studies being translated for consumer sites and broader business reach.  Small and large businesses alike know that up to 20 cents of every revenue dollar goes toward health care.  Understanding what works, what appears to work, and what really isn’t hitting the mark is crucial for business success.

This article echoes the findings of studies from Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI),  Kaiser Family Foundation, and others.   When folks have to choose between paying out of pocket for appropriate care and paying the rent, the care falls behind.  Study after study have shown that, over the past 5 years, fewer prescriptions have been filled, more prescriptions have been subject to non-compliance (pill splitting, etc.), fewer follow up physician visits and tests/labs have been performed, all of which hinder outcomes.

AHIP recently published an infographic showing the increase in CDHP plans.  These increases appear to dovetail with the lower adherence to protocols that could prevent rescue treatments and avoidable inpatient days.  

The opportunity in value-based design is to follow the high-value protocol and treatments.  These can be place on special designs that encourage the appropriate behaviors.  Further, direct contracts with providers, urgent care centers, and pharmacist coaches can help to manage high-cost chronic care, even within account-based consumer-directed plans.

Let’s spread the word:  consumer-directed can work, but the insurance plan design and contractual arrangements for appropriate, outcomes-based quality providers, are essential.

Hiding in Plain Sight

by Kim Bellard, June 18, 2013

I saw two recent articles in The New York Times recently that I thought merited further discussion.  One attracted a fair amount of attention, the second not quite as much.  They deal with the high prices in the U.S. health system and the trend towards provider consolidation, respectively.  Both problems are well known, yet they describe continue to get worse, not better.  

The first article – The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill: How Colonoscopies Explain Why the U.S. Leads the World in Health Expenditures – focuses on the wacky world of charges and overuse of expensive procedures, especially as they relate to colonoscopies.  It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but their analysis indicated that charges for the procedure varied dramatically between providers, and were much higher than in other countries.  The U.S. also does them more commonly than many other countries, preferring the expensive surgical approach to other screening options.  

The boom in the number of colonoscopies has been great for gastroenterologists, anesthesiologists, and surgical centers; for patients, perhaps not so much.  The article’s discussion of how many gastroenterologists have invested in surgical centers to reap more of the profits from the procedure is disturbing, and they are far from the only specialty to have discovered this financial gimmick.  It’s part of what drives our health care bill.  

The article notes that insured patients typically shrug off the inflated charges, since their insurance has negotiated rates that are far lower, but, of course, uninsured patients get stuck with the full bill, kind of like having to pay those absurd prices on the back of hotel room doors.  Arbitrary and inconsistent as charges may seem, they’ve nonetheless helped lead to “allowed charges” that are still much higher than anywhere else in the world.  We all end up paying for the costs, of course, through higher insurance rates or as taxpayers.  

Meanwhile, the second article – Health Care’s Overlooked Cost Factor – centers on market consolidation, particularly through mergers of health systems.  It starts off with the FTC’s first successful antitrust case against a hospital merger since 1990 (!!), blocking the merger of two neighboring Chicago hospitals.  A victory of sorts, but the case was done post-merger and it is not at all clear that the ruling actually rolled back pricing with the payors to the levels they would have been sans merger.  

Earlier this year the FTC did move to block the acquisition of Idaho’s largest physician group by its largest hospital provider, so perhaps they’re starting to wake up to the problem.  With all the health system merger activity in the past 10-15 years, these isolated victories lead one to wonder why the FTC has been so asleep at the wheel. 

The article cites research by Gaynor and Town, done for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation last year, which concluded that hospital consolidation generally raises prices, often dramatically, and that physician-hospital consolidation has not led to improved quality or reduced costs.  Their research is not the first to reach these conclusions, and of course the American Hospital Association has a different perspective.  Earlier this month they released a report that which indicated that only about 10% of hospitals have been involved in a merger in the past five years, that most mergers aren’t happening in concentrated markets, and don’t necessarily result in higher prices.  Uh-huh.  

AHIP was quick to rebut the recent study’s conclusions. 

These are well-known problems.  The insight on prices goes back at least ten years to Gerry Anderson’s Health Affairs famous article “It’s the Prices, Stupid.”  Steve Brill wrote a similar article in Time (“Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us”) earlier this year.  The state of California and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have both publically been concerned about the consolidation issue, and there was the great quote from consultant Robert Murray: “Finally the evidence is catching up with the reality that we have a humongous monopoly problem in health care.”  Even I’ve previously written on both prices and market consolidation.  So, no, these shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. 

Many experts cite greater transparency as an important way to attack prices, and there are numerous companies purporting to provide consumers transparency tools.  Indeed, a recent report from the Aite Group claims transparency itself will be a $3 billion industry by 2016 – up from $540 million in 2012.  Of course, someone – i.e., consumers – ultimately will pay for that increase.  Only in the American health care system does creating a business to provide information on prices lead to greater costs for the system, as to date the data is inconclusive at best that consumers will actually change their behavior based on transparency information.  And in a consolidated market they may find few options to price shop even if they want to. 

We need more competition, and we need it on the right things, like value.  I’m not sure any of the metrics we use now are going to get us there anytime soon.  Some claim that this is the era of “Big Data,” and its application in health care will provide revolutionary insights.  McKinsey & Company issued a report that says use of Big Data in health cae could save $450 billion a year.  Do a search on Big Data in health care and you’ll find a plethora of eager companies, from behemoths like IBM to upstarts that specialize in health care, like Explorys,  GNS Healthcare, or Health Catalyst, to name a few.  Hidden in the morass of health care data, it appears, are gems. 

Much has been made of the recent scandal over the NSA pulling unimaginable reams of data from telephone and internet records, and using their Big Data capabilities to mine it – hopefully only to detect terrorists.  Meanwhile, when I read articles like the one Bloomberg News recently reported about how one Chicago hospital has literally been cutting patients’ throats – e.g., performing tracheotomies -- unnecessarily to increase revenues, I kind of wish we did have some Big Brother looking at the data better.  

In a series of articles over two years ago the Wall Street Journal showed (see here or here) the kinds of fraud can be detected through proper analysis of the Medicare claims data – and it makes one wonder why CMS hasn’t done the same.  Perhaps now that the Wall Street Journal has forced CMS to release Medicare claims data on individual doctors someone else can detect this kind of abuse on an ongoing basis.  That data is still not freely available, but at least the door is open wider.  

Some say pricing can be addressed via greater transparency, others want more bundled payments, and yet others like reference pricing, which essentially limits payor liability to a fee schedule.  I’m old enough to remember when health insurance often had set fee schedules, with charges above those scheduled amounts the patient’s problem, and I don’t recall people being too crazy about them.  On the other hand, costs were a lot lower, so maybe there is something there, just as we’re also going back to the old idea of big upfront deductibles.  

Personally I think the source problem is that we’ve allowed our pricing structures to become so complex, so piecemeal, and so jargon-filled that no consumer – and few professionals – can really be expected to understand them, much less shop based on them.  Step one has to be to greatly, greatly simplify how we price health care services. 

One of my pet peeves in health care are those financial responsibility forms providers try to get everyone to sign upfront.  They say, essentially: we don’t know exactly what we’ll do to you, or how much it will cost, and we may get some other people to do some other things to you too, and we don’t know what that will cost either, but whatever is done to you and however much it costs, you are obligated to pay.  I’m no contract lawyer, but that sure doesn’t seem like an enforceable contact to me, given the vast asymmetries.  I’d sure love to see the ACLU or Public Citizen or maybe even AHIP take this on in court.  Pricing would get a whole lot more rational if there had to be more upfront disclosure and agreement. 

As for the market consolidation, if health systems are going to create monopolies or virtual monopolies, they may need to be treated more like public utilities, facing rate and spending review.  I’d hate for that to happen, and much prefer that we reimagine the role of these capital-intensive structures.  Why do these big buildings with all those beds and all that equipment still make sense in the 21^st century?  Can they be reinvented with something that allows more competition?  I offered one conceptual approach some time ago, but would welcome other proposals to address the issue. 

There is a lot of “reform” happening in health care these days, but if they just end up incorporating these two structural problems I doubt we’re going to actually see much real improvement to our health care system.

More Arrows Out of the Cost Management Quiver?

By Kim Bellard, May 31, 2013

Even as health costs seem to have dramatically slowed in recent years, some recent studies now question whether some commonly proposed methods of attacking those costs – reducing geographic practice variations, increasing patient shared-decision-making, and employee wellness programs -- actually have the potential that proponents have claimed. 

Let’s start with the geographic practice variations.  It’s been over thirty years since Jack Wennberg first mapped out the sometimes startling variations in health care costs and utilization.  The Dartmouth Atlas has continued and expanded on his work, and it has become almost dogma that such variations exist.  The belief has been that they could account for as much as 30% of care that is inefficient/unnecessary, which could be cut without harming patient safety.  Respected experts like Atul Gawande have written eloquently on these variations, and then-CBO head Peter Orszag popularized the idea to the extent that President Obama seized upon it in his campaign to pass the Affordable Care Act.  Turns out the conventional wisdom may be wrong.

New research from Jack Reschovshy and his colleagues indicates that health status, not geographic practice variations, drive 75-85% of apparent geographic cost variations.  They took a new approach to case mix adjustments and concluded that, for the most part, higher cost patients were, indeed, sicker.  The researchers took pains to note that their conclusion is not to suggest that significant waste and inefficiency do not exist in our health care system, but simply that those are not easily boiled down to geographic practice variations.

I’m not sure how this research squares with, say, the differences in hysterectomies or C-sections that have long been known, but, to be fair, the researchers did only focus on the Medicare population.

Then there is patient shared-decision-making.  This is at the heart of consumer-driven plans, with the belief that once patients are more involved in their care, and more exposed to the costs and trade-offs inherent in that care, they will become more prudent purchasers.  The latest issue of JAMA Internal Medicine included several studies and articles on this topic – one of which, a study by Tak and colleagues, throws cold water on the idea of SDM saving money.  They found that while over 70% of patients preferred to leave decision-making to their physician, patients who did actively participate in that decision-making had longer hospital lengths of stay and costs (the study only focused on hospital patients). 

One could easily see how more vocal patients might demand more care, or we can speculate that these patients became more involved in their decision-making because they were sicker.  Correlation is not, after all, causation.  We should also keep in mind that Tak’s results are somewhat at odds with recent research by Hibbert that suggested higher patient activation predicts lower costs.  As researchers always like to say, more research is needed. 

It’s not good days for SDM.  Another of the JAMA Internal Medicine studies, by Fowler et alia., was a nationwide survey of adults 40 years or older on their experiences with being involved in medical decision-making.  Patients reported more discussion of pros than cons, and more balanced discussion about surgeries than cancer screenings or medication treatment.  The authors conclude that “discussions about these common tests, medications, and procedures as reported by patients do not reflect a high level of shared decision making.”  A third study, by Wachterman and colleagues, found a lack of congruence between expectations of hemodialysis patients and their nephrologists, with the patients being much more optimistic about their prognosis, and conclude better communication is needed. 

A fourth study, by Krumholz, surveyed patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction, and found that over two-thirds wanted active involvement in decision-making, but the authors admit that “…shared decision-making is not yet integrated into routine medical care.” 

Face it: the winners in the health care system have been hospital systems and pharmaceutical companies.  These are important institutions, which employ many caring and well-intentioned people, but whose historical orientation is treating sick people – the sicker the better.  As comedian Chris Rock puts it, “Ain’t no money in the cure, money’s in the medicine.” 

Hospitals are consolidating and buying up physician practices at record rates in order to improve their clinical integration – or improve market clout – and the pharmaceutical industry has been off to the races ever since DTC advertising has been allowed.  As proof, consider the fact that Americans take, on average, 4 billion prescriptions per year.  That’s 13 prescriptions per year for each and every one of us, and many of those are for “lifestyle conditions” that arguably could largely be avoided if we simply ate better and got more exercise. The answer may be less in changing what we do to sick people than in simply having more healthy people. 

That is one reason why many employers have instituted employee wellness programs.  According to Aon Hewitt, 83% of large and mid-sized firms have some employee incentives in place to help them be more active in maintaining their health.  ACA not only permits such programs but expands how much they can incent employers.  Under new rules, employees will be able to reduce their health insurance contributions by up to 30% -- up to 50% if smoking cessation is included – by participating in such programs.   The oft-cited success story in employee wellness programs is that of J&J, which was so happy with its success that it turned the programs into a business line, part of the $6 billion wellness industry. 

However, even the success of wellness programs is not quite clear-cut.  Reuters reports that a recent report from RAND to DOL and HHS found at best only modest successes – and the report was mysteriously pulled from public availability within hours of its release.  Looks like some other people have some explaining to do…

Sometimes it seems like we really don’t know anything, or that the things we thought we knew aren’t true.  For example, for decades the gold standard for treatment of appendicitis was an appendectomy; now it appears that surgery may not be called for at all, with antibiotics doing the trick.  And doing even get me started on the controversies about cancer screenings, like PSA tests.

I wonder if years from now we’ll look back on this age of medicine much like we might regard medicine of the 19^th century: well-intentioned but almost comically primitive in its misguided notions about how to treat conditions.  E.g., maybe the future is in the microbiome rather than in our prescription medicines and surgical approaches.  No one can tell me that any clinical studies for a given drug are truly taking into account the other 12 prescriptions a user might also be taking, nor fully take into account what havoc the cocktail of prescription drugs will have on the body’s natural defenses. 

We are starting to realize the importance of our internal bacteria, but we still don’t really know exactly what they do or how we can take best advantage of them.  Then again, we’ve been studying geographic practice variations, shared-decision-making, and employee wellness programs for a long time, and we don’t seem to know as much about them as we thought we did either.  Based on these new studies, there are a lot of consultants, disease management companies, and wellness firms that may have a lot of explaining to do.  

When push comes to shove, I still believe that there are unnecessary practice variations, that getting patients more involved in decision-making is the right thing to do, and that efforts to focus on health rather than on illness are the way to go.  Whether we know how to do any of those correctly, though, is an open question.

Health Sector Economic Indicators – Altarum Institute

By Clive Riddle, April 12, 2013

Altarum Institute each month issues Health Sector Economic Indicators Briefs through its Center for Sustainable Health Spending. The brief cover health care spending, utilization, prices, and employment, and are worth perusing each time. 

Altarum’s Charles Roehrig, Director of the Center, had this to say about their current assessment of health care in the economy:  “Health spending has remained at about 18 percent of gross domestic product since mid-2009, but health employment continues to slowly increase as a share of total employment.  Expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act should push these figures upward, but an improving economy will push in the other direction as non-health spending and jobs accelerate. We look forward to tracking how these forces play out.”

Here’s the current pulse of the health care economic sector from Altarum’s just issued April briefs, which incorporate February and March 2013 data:

• National health care spending in February 2013 grew 3.9% relative to February 2012
• Health care price growth rose to 1.7% in February 2013 compared to February 2012, two-tenths above January 2013 reading
• This was still the second lowest rate of price increase since 1.3% growth recorded in December 1997.
• The 12-month moving average price growth at 1.9% in February 2013 is the lowest since the same figure recorded in November 1998.
• In February 2013, health spending increased to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $2.89 trillion, slightly higher than its value of $2.88 trillion in January.
• The health spending share of the gross domestic product was steady at 18.0% in January 2013, up from 16.4% at the start of the recession in December 2007.
• Health spending by category in February 2013: Hospital – 32%; Physician & Clinical – 19%;  Prescriptions – 10%; Nursing Home – 5%; Dental – 4%; Home Health – 3%; Other personal healthcare – 11%; Other health spending – 16%
• Year-over-year, hospital prices rose to 2.6% in February (from 2.0% in January). Physician and clinical services rose 0.8%, barely above the low 0.6% January print.  Prescription drugs saw price growth tumble to 0.8%, from 4.0% as recently as August 2012, and the lowest since 0.7% in June 2007.
• Implicit per capita health care utilization averaged 1.3% growth over the last 12 months.
• Health care employment rose by 23,000 jobs in March 2013, somewhat below the 24-month average increase of 24,000
• Health care represented 10.74% of total employment in March 2013, compared to 10.67% a year ago and 9.49% in December 2007.

If Kaiser Is Not the Answer, What Is the Question?

by Kim Bellard, March 28, 2013

The New York Times recently published an interesting article, “The Face of Future Health Care,” that raised questions about whether even a model like Kaiser is delivering what we need to reform our health care system.  It’s the old “be careful what you wish for…” dilemma.

After all, Kaiser could be considered a prototype for what ACA wanted when it created Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).  It is a fully integrated hospital-physician organization, delivering care and managing risk with salaried physicians and other health care practitioners, and its own hospitals.  Hospitals all over the country are rushing to build their own versions, buying up physician practices at a record pace – one survey indicated that 52% would do so this year, while another predicted 75% of physicians would be so employed by 2014.

Kaiser may not have been the first integrated delivery system, nor are they the only one, but they certainly are the largest and have been around for decades.  With all those decades, though, one would expect they would be dramatically lower in cost, and that is not generally the case.  San Francisco public radio station KQED did a report “Why Isn’t Kaiser Less Expensive?” last spring.  In their report, critics accuse Kaiser of shadow-pricing, while Kaiser’s CEO George Halvorson insists they don’t and are usually at least 10% cheaper.  That’s nothing to brag about: with even 1% lower annual trend, they should have gotten 10% cheaper in these early years of the 21^st century alone.

All this is not to pick at Kaiser.  I have long admired models like Kaiser, Geisinger Health System, Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, Intermountain Healthcare, or The Mayo Clinic.  It just seems intuitively obvious that like an integrated system, without the same incentives to overtreat that are pervasive elsewhere, should produce better results.  Each of the systems has been fairly successful in their core markets, although less so the further away from home they get, yet none are delivering radically different cost or quality results than other providers.

And, really, why should they?  They only have to be a little better each year than their competition.  The new mantra in health care is “value-based purchasing,” but we’re a long way from there.  The Catalyst for Payment Reform reports that only 11% of payments to doctors and hospitals are based on performance, while the Commonwealth Fund reports that less than 1% of health insurance premiums was spent on quality improvement in 2011.  This is disappointing but hardly surprising.  Most purchasers are buying with essentially house money; that is, someone else’s money. 

The biggest sources of health coverage are Medicaid, Medicare, and employer-sponsored health insurance.  The persons covered under all of these are largely shielded from the true cost of that coverage.  Medicaid is funded entirely by taxes, Medicare is also largely tax-funded, even when considering beneficiaries’ lifetime contributions, and, of course, employer coverage has the tax preference.  The “tax expenditure” for employer health insurance is, by far, the largest such expenditure – more than twice as large as the mortgage deduction, for example.  It’s all just compensation to employers; money “contributed” to employee benefits is simply money not spent on employee wages.  The tax preference helps shield employees from how much is being spent on their behalf, and it creates a huge disparity with people buying individual coverage, who receive no tax break.

ACA doesn’t equalize the tax preference, but it does introduce a vast set of new subsidies for individual coverage.  The Society of Actuaries has recently reported that individual premiums may be 32% higher due to ACA, joining the chorus of warnings about what may start happening in 2014.  Even HHS Secretary Sebelius now acknowledges they may be higher, but notes that the new subsidies will offset much of these.  While I think it is good public policy for more people to be covered and for economically disadvantaged people to get assistance in making coverage affordable, I worry greatly about creating a large new class of people sheltered from the true cost of health insurance.  It’s making a bad situation much, much worse.

Steve Brill has gotten much deserved attention for his lengthy and insight Time article “Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.”  Brill painstaking walks through the crazy world of health care prices, especially their inconsistency between payors.  Some have used his work to call for single payor or other rate-setting, while I would argue that the system is a symptom of what happens when no one is paying enough attention to prices.

Frankly, I question whether the ACO/integrated delivery system is going to be the solution to our health care mess.  Hospitals are like factories: full of capital-intensive equipment and expensive to operate unless run at capacity.  Yet they aren’t really run like modern factories in terms of management practices, as a recent study in JAMA pointed out.  Similarly, physicians and other health care providers have some definite income expectations and fixed overhead obligations. 

All too often, combining hospitals and other providers in integrated delivery systems may be more about consolidating market power or assuring current revenue levels than about improving the cost and quality of the care for patients.  One AEI scholar recently pointed to the “humongous monopoly problem in health care,” and that’s with ACOs still in an early stage.  AEI is not the first to cite this issue, as I’ve written about previously, but I still don’t think enough attention is being paid.

We’re moving quickly to a health care system that features geographic provider monopolies or cartels, consumers too shielded from costs, and a regulatory environment that creates larger barriers to entry for new competitors in either delivery or financing of care.  That’s the perfect storm for a disaster. 

For radically different results, we’ll need radically different approaches.  Clayton Christian wrote about disruptive innovation in health care over ten years ago, and yet we’re still waiting to see it.  It may mean breaking the health/medical connection that HMOs led us to try to integrate in health coverage, giving consumers more fiscal accountability for the former while still protecting them from catastrophic expenses that can result from intensive medical interventions.  It should mean putting more of the data and technology – like mobile apps -- in the consumers’ hands, as advocated by people like Eric Topl (The Creative Destruction of Medicine) or Joe Flowers, and using that data to measure performance and help prescribe treatment. 

We’ve had a very paternalistic health care system, with health care experts telling us what care we need and other experts choosing coverage for us.  Let’s hope we can change that.  We need consumers engaged, taking responsibility, and demanding accountability from providers.  We need new types of competitors, using 21^st century technology and science, to help consumers manage and finance their health needs.

We have to make sure that legislation and regulations focus on what’s best for the patient, not necessarily for existing health system entities, in order to help ensure we don’t stifle innovation (e.g., FDA regulation of mHealth).  The facts that traditional Medicare benefit design is still largely based on 1960’s Blue Cross Blue Shield designs, or that, generally speaking, you can’t use telemedicine to consult with an expert physician in a different state due to licensing or coverage restrictions, amply illustrate the problem. 

Whatever the future health system looks like, it won’t look like what we have today.  Dinosaurs were remarkable effective for hundreds of millions of years, but the environment dramatically changed and they became extinct.  A lot of the dinosaurs that have historically been the basis for our health care system will become extinct in the new health care environment, or evolve beyond recognition.  As with evolution, it will be messy, proceed with many false starts, and produce unexpected winners.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what the future looks like.

Involved But Not Committed

By Kim Bellard, February 28, 2013

There’s an old joke about the difference between bacon and eggs: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.  Perhaps the problem in health care is that when it comes to being engaged in our own health, most of us are chicken.  Maybe the wrong people have been cooking.

Patient engagement -- along with its many synonyms, such as shared decision-making or consumer-directed care – continues to be a favorite strategy for many health pundits.  I am biased towards it myself, although exactly what it means, or will mean in the future, is not entirely clear.

The prestigious journal Health Affairs recently devoted an entire issue to the topic.  In one study, Judith Hibbert and colleagues reported that patient activation scores help predict costs: lower activation levels were tied to higher costs, even after adjusting for risk.  A separate study, also by Hibbert, reviewed the literature and concluded that patients with higher activation levels had better health outcomes and care experiences, although the evidence was more inconclusive about the effect on costs. 

The trick, of course, is how to “activate” patients – is it all self-motivation, or can providers and other third parties (such as employers) encourage it?

One common method to influence patient engagement is an employer wellness program.  A recent National Business Group on Health survey reports that almost 90% of employers offer wellness-based incentives, spending an average of over $500 per employee on the programs.  Employers are getting tough too: 15% directly tie health plan eligibility to a health activity such as taking a risk assessment or biometric screening.  Almost two-thirds already tie employee contributions to completing such activities.  And 41% include, or plan to include, outcomes-based measures (e.g., lowering blood pressure) as part of the program.

Another strategy employers are using is increased employee cost-sharing, such as in consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs).  Critics accuse them of simply shifting costs to employees, but there are plenty of studies that indicate they may actually change employee behavior and help control costs.  For example, Cigna recently claimed that their CDHP members improved their health risk profile 12% while their health cost trend was 13% lower than traditional members.  Cigna CDHP members were also more likely to take health risk assessments, to use cost and quality tools, to choose generic drugs, and to seek preventive care. 

Consumers may be starting to take cost into account, but they don’t like it.  A study by Sommers, et. alia, reported on focus groups of insured patients.  The focus groups indicated that patients don’t like cost considerations to be part of health care decisions, and revealed that several stereotypes remain all-too-common, including that more expensive care is better care, and choosing more expensive care is some sort of victory over insurance companies (not realizing that, in the end, they and other insureds pay for that care).  Patients still don’t really know how to weigh risk versus cost. 

We treat health care costs much like we treat the deficit: costs come from other people, cuts should come from other people, other people should pay, and, oh-by-the-way, let’s think about it tomorrow.  That has to change. 

One thing that offers new hope for patient engagement is that the options for it have never been broader or more robust – mobile, electronic records, telemedicine, and social media, to name a few.

There are estimated 40,000 mobile health apps.  It seems you can get an app to do just about anything you can think of, plus many things you probably hadn’t.  The health apps vary widely not only in purpose but also in audience and quality.  A company called Happtique has just introduced a certification for health apps that will hopefully give consumers a better comfort about which apps to use, or for physicians to know which to recommend to patients.  They see the program not as a rating mechanism but as kind of like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, assuring that at least a set of minimum standards have been met.  This could spur adoption.

It does appear that physicians are joining the mobile revolution, according to CompTIA.  Their recent survey indicated that one in five physicians is using a medical or health-related app daily, and 62% expect to be regular users with a year.  The trick will be how they incorporate them into their practice, for patient care and/or patient engagement.

EHR/PHRs provide yet another option to engage consumers.  To date, consumer adoption of PHRs have been disappointing, to say the least – even when they are available.  A recent study by Ritu Agarwal and colleagues, aptly titled “If We Offer it, Will They Accept?”, explores this issue and concludes that use depends on a number of factors – not just existing consumer preferences but also satisfaction with the patient-provider relationship, provider support for patient use of the PHR, and specific communication strategies to encourage use.  HITECH funding and “meaningful use” requirements may drive availability of patient EHRs, but persuading patients to use them will require some effort.

Telemedicine seems be exploding, both in terms of easing of regulation and in terms of payor coverage, so it is not surprising that there are a plethora of companies making their mark in this space.  These include American Well, Cardiocom, HealthSpot, NowClinic, or Virtuwell, to name just a few.  These may not provide your personal physician, but they offer physician expertise at your convenience – 24/7, from your house or even mobile device, not restricted to a physician’s hours.  That’s got to help improve patient engagement.

The IOM just hosted a workshop on partnering with patients, and one of the conclusions was that physicians and health systems need help in developing those skills, plus they may need additional incentives to engage in the kind of dialogue patient engagement requires (why am I not surprised?).  When you think about it, though, relying on physicians, or even nurses, to drive patient engagement doesn’t seem realistic.  We can spend time and resources on training them, but we still face the barrier of the projected shortages in both professions (physician, nurse), especially with the baby boomers just starting to crash the Medicare barrier.  Primary care providers may just be too scarce, especially in rural and other already underserved areas.  Not everyone agrees with these dire forecasts, but the point remains, though: the health professional to patient ratio doesn’t scale well into an era of higher patient engagement.

And maybe it doesn’t need to.  Maybe it really is up to us as patients to take responsibility.  Fortunately, we still don’t have to go it alone.

Social media, for example, may not even rely on a provider-patient model.  Health care providers are still trying to figure out social media.  An infographic by Demi & Cooper advertising/DC Interactive Group suggests that only 26% of hospitals use social media (most commonly Facebook), while over 80% of individuals 18-24, and 45% of those 45-54, would share health information via social media.  Meanwhile, Patientslikeme has been breaking new ground for social media use in health care for many years now, using patient-to-patient expertise and experience.  We’re only begun to scratch the surface of what patient engagement looks like in a social media world.

Artificial intelligence could be the real game changer in patient engagement.  IBM has made a big bet on AI in health care via Watson, and a recent study from Indiana University reaffirms that use of AI has the potential to both improve outcomes and lower costs.  Widely available health content on the Internet started this ball rolling, but health care professionals start to look like just another option – a preferred option, to be sure, but no longer the only option – to getting health information, advice, perhaps even diagnoses.  And I’ll have to save discussion of robotic surgery for another blog…

We’re already got a mobile stethoscope app, remote monitoring options for conditions like diabetes or blood pressure, medication and other reminder apps, and increasing ability for AI to evaluate and diagnose.  Who needs health coaches or even physicians to drive patient engagement?  Maybe in the not-too-distant future the model for patient engagement will increasing look like patients simply using their mobile devices: i.e., when Siri marries Watson.

At the end of the day, the person who has to be committed to patient engagement has to be the patient.