Under the Influence

By Kim Bellard, March 18, 2016

A new analysis by ProPublica found that doctors who receive money from drug companies do, in fact, tend to prescribe more brand name drugs, and that the more money they got, the more brand name prescribing they did.

ProPublica looked at prescribing patterns from five specialties -- cardiovascular, family medicine, internal medicine, ophthalmology, and psychiatry -- with the restriction that individual physicians had to have had at least 1,000 Part D prescriptions in the study period (2014).  Overall, about three-fourths of physicians took some money from a drug company, although there was wide variation by specialty and geography -- e.g., nearly 9 of 10 cardiologists took payments, just as around 90% of physicians took such payments in Nevada, Kentucky, Alabama, and South Carolina. 

Conversely, in Minnesota and Vermont the percentage was closer to 25%.

The amount of the payments appeared to have an impact.  Internists who received no payments had brand-name prescribing rates of about 20%, while those getting more than $5,000 had rates of around 30%.

The defenses from physician organizations and the drug industry make for fun reading.  Dr. Richard Baron, the president and chief executive of the America Board of Internal Medicine, protested that doctors almost have to go out of their way to avoid taking these kinds of payments.

The president of the American College of Cardiology suggested the patterns were re-enforcing; the more they learn about a drug, the more they tend to use it, and the more they use it, the more drug companies pay them to be speakers and consultants.

Seriously, these are their defenses?

We've been learning a lot more about how pervasive industry payments -- not just pharmaceutical companies but also medical device and other health care suppliers -- are since the advent of the Open Payments initiative.  We're talking about over $6.5b in payments in 2014, made to over 600,000 physicians and 1100 hospitals.  I wrote about this last summer, and the new ProPublica analysis certainly should rattle any remaining doubts anyone might have had about the potential impact of such payments. 

True to form, last fall the AMA called for a ban on DTC advertising.   That's right, they don't seem disturbed about the $6.5b physicians are getting, but they think that the ads that we see are bad.  There's a certain logic to that; it has long been suspected that these ads help drive consumer demand.

Austin Frakt, of The New York Times, recently challenged this conventional wisdom.  For one thing, he notes that while drug ads do cause an increase in sales for the advertised drug, they also increase sales of other drugs in the same class, using Prozac as an example.  Seeing drug ads may help "normalize" the condition being treated, making getting treatment for it more acceptable, and may also help encourage patients to continue with existing prescriptions.  

Mr. Frakt points out that it is not only the drug companies who benefit from drug advertising, but also physicians.  Every $28 in drug advertising results in an additional doctor visit; someone has to do the prescribing, after all.  And, of course, the DTC spending is dwarfed by the direct-to-physician "promotions" -- Mr. Frakt estimates drug companies spend seven times more on these than on DTC advertising. 

So we're back to the ProPublica analysis. 

It simply is not plausible to maintain that these efforts are not influencing physicians' decisions, and that they may not always be in the best interests of patients.  As Bloomberg put it last summer: the payments "seek to convince doctors that second choice is OK."
 
Well, I don't know about you, but that is not OK with me. 

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

Et Tu, Oscar?

By Kim Bellard, February 25, 2016

Things seem to be going well for Oscar Health, the health insurance start-up that has been wowing investors and the media since it was founded in 2012.  Forbes reports that Oscar just raised $400 million in an investment round led by Fidelity, which effectively values Oscar at about $2.7b.  So why do I fear that perhaps they are taking the wrong path?

I've previously expressed my concern that Oscar and some of its fellow health insurance start-ups might be more about repackaging than reinventing.  I'm more concerned than ever after Bloomberg reported that Oscar is adopting a new network strategy: moving to "tight, exclusive networks with hospitals."  

There's no secret why Oscar is taking this approach.  It's about cost, with the expectations that narrower networks yield cost savings Closer relationships with providers and the ability to offer lower premiums without hurting quality.  If that's what Oscar is after with its new network strategy, what's not to like?

Well, plenty.  For one, with this strategy Oscar isn't innovating; it is buying into the strategy that most other health plans are trying to adopt.  That doesn't make it a bad strategy, but playing follow-the-leaders certainly doesn't fit the cool yet disruptive image that Oscar has so carefully cultivated. 

More importantly, it is the wrong strategy.  For Oscar.  For any health plan.  It is a strategy rooted in the 1990's, if not earlier.  The argument for networks, especially narrow networks, is that health plans can drive better bargains by promising more volume to specific providers.  I don't have a problem with health plans driving hard bargains with providers, especially if those bargains are performance-based.  What I do have a problem with is forcing consumers to use those, and only those. 

I think it is great when a health plan tries to find the highest quality providers, and to get a good deal with them.  What I wish they would do, though, is say, "here's the data that demonstrates their quality, and here's how much we're willing to pay them to take care of you.  If you can find providers that are better, that's great; go to them, and we'll still pay the same as we'd pay the providers we recommend.  No hard feelings." 

In other words, let the health plan act as the concierge, not the gatekeeper.

If a consumer goes to providers who charge more than the health plan would pay their designated providers, well, there's a price for choice; consumers might have to pay extra.  On the flip side, maybe the consumer should pocket some of the savings if they manage to find less expensive providers.

This approach might sound like reference pricing, because reference pricing is a start to where I think we need to go.  I'd rather we put more effort into that than in narrowing consumer's choices.  
Noah Lang, CEO of Stride Health, told Fast Company, "Oscar is primarily a consumer experience company."  I don't think restricting choice of providers is a very good consumer experience for any health plan, and especially not for one like Oscar who prides itself on its member experience.

Oscar thinks this new approach is their future.  If so, their future may be as just another health plan.  And that'd be too bad.

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

Doing Different Differently

By Kim Bellard, January 28, 2016

I was all set to write about bacteriophages, then I realized that what appealed to me about them was as an example of attacking mainstream problems with non-mainstream solutions. So I decided to write more generally about how organizations are trying to encourage that.

Let's start with IBM. Big Blue is trying to reinvent itself as a company that uses "design thinking" to develop products and services.

Their design principles emphasize "making users your North Star," using collaborative multidisciplinary teams, "restless reinvention," and a continuous loop of "observe/reflect/make."

So far, about 10,000 employees have gone through the design bootcamp, and around 100 products have been developed using design thinking. Those are drops in the bucket for IBM, but the approach is an audacious and long overdue attempt for IBM to stay relevant in a millennium in which Apple has reminded companies about the importance of design.

Or take Microsoft. If there is any doubt that Microsoft is well on its way to doing things differently, look at the Surface Book or Surface Pro, each of which has won rave reviews. CEO Satya Nadella has been shaking things up ever since he took over two years ago.

One of Mr. Nadella's actions was to break up Microsoft's Research group, which had been kept separate from the day-to-day action. Bloomberg reports that Mr. Nadella has insisted that the research teams work hand-in-hand with the product teams to get new ideas into actual products quicker.

Mr. Nadella has emphasized, "we need to be open to new ideas, and Microsoft Research is where they will come from." This attitude led to Skype Translator becoming an actual product within three months of Mr. Nadella learning about the underlying research.

Venture capitalist Anshu Storm has a theory -- "stack fallacy" -- that he believes explains why so many big companies fail to innovate. The theory posits that many companies suffer from the "mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours." 

He cites how Apple has built great devices but also has missed on simple apps, or IBM's classic blindspot about letting Microsoft own the OS layer that ran their PCs.

In his view, "Product management is the art of knowing what to build." The trouble is that too many companies focus on the how and not enough on the "why."

For example, think about hospitals. They're trying hard to position themselves as patient-centered health systems, but no one who has been in a hospital can believe that hospitals see patients as the customer. Hospital gowns? Waking patients up in the middle of the night to take vitals? Corridors upon winding corridors?

We need the health care experience to be less like health care and more like things we actually like. Nick de la Mare suggests that hospitals (and schools) "should be more like theme parks," and that designers should be aiming for "magical experiences."

That's the attitude we need to be taking as we try to innovate; it's not just doing more, but really rethinking the overall consumer experience. I was particularly struck by Mr. de la Mare's caution: 

The trick is to deploy technology strategically and sparingly, since new tools tend to introduce unintended complexities....A hospital patient may feel similarly overwhelmed by impersonal and bureaucratic processes that seem to serve the health care provider at their expense. Just because we have the technology to do something, doesn’t mean we should.

There is cool innovation going on within health care. David Chase, for example, raves about how Zoom+ (which I've written about before) has revamped the ER experience, and there is no shortage of other health care companies hoping to be disruptive (e.g., Becker's list of 30).

There is plenty of incremental innovation going on, and health care sure can use it, but I continue to be on the lookout for breath-taking innovation -- innovations that surprise, excite, and delight.

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

Oh, And It Is Also An EHR

By Kim Bellard, December 18, 2015

You wouldn't -- I hope -- still drive your car while trying to read a paper map.  Hopefully you're not holding up your phone to follow directions on its screen either.  Chances are if you need directions while you are driving, you'll be listening to them via Bluetooth.  Or maybe you're just riding in a self-driving car.

But when it comes to your doctor examining you, he's usually pretty much trying to do so while fumbling with a map, namely, your health record.  And we don't like it.

A study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that patients were much more likely to rate their care as excellent when their physician didn't spend much time looking at their EHR while with them; 83% rated it as excellent, versus only 48% for patients whose doctors spent more time looking at their device's screen.  The study's authors speculate that patients may feel slighted when their doctor looks too much at the screen, or that the doctors may actually be missing important visual cues.

Indeed, a 2014 study found that physicians using EHRs during exams spent about a third of the time during patient exams looking at their screen instead of at the patient. 

As one physician told the WSJ, "I have a love-hate relationship with the computer, with the hate maybe being stronger than the love." 

The problem is that we forget that the record is not the point.  Figuring out what is wrong with a patient and what to do about it is the point.

Let's picture a different approach, one that doesn't start with paper records as its premise.  Let's start with the premise that we're trying to help the physician improve patient care by giving him/her the information they need at point of care, when they need it, but without getting in the way of the physician/patient interaction.

Let's talk virtual reality.

Picture the physician walking into the office not holding a clipboard or a computer or even a tablet.  Instead, the physician might be wearing something that looks like Google Glass or OrCam. There might be an earbud.  And there will be the health version of Siri, Cortana or OK Google, AI assistants that can pull up information based on oral requests or self-generated algorithms, transcribe oral inputs, and present information either orally or visually. 

When the physician looks at the patient, he/she sees a summary of key information -- such as diabetic, pacemaker, recent knee surgery -- overlaid on the corresponding portion of the patient's body.  Any significant changes in blood pressure, weight, and other vitals are highlighted.  The physician can call up more information by making an oral request to the AI or by using a hand gesture over a particular body part.  List of meds?  Date of that last surgery?  Immunization record?  No problem.

The physician can indicate, via voice command or hand gesture, what should be recorded.  It shouldn't take too long before an AI can recognize on its own what needs to be captured; the advances in AI learning capabilities -- like now recognizing handwriting -- are coming so quickly that this is surely feasible.

Building better EHRs is certainly possible.  Improving how physicians use them, especially when with patients, is also possible.  But it's a little like trying to make a map you can fold better while driving.  It misses the point. 

We need a whole different technology that subsumes what EHRs do while getting to the real goal: helping deliver better care to patients.

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

Someone Must Be On Drugs

By Kim Bellard, November 11, 2015

As is probably true for many of you, I'm busy looking at health plan open enrollment options for 2016. The past few years I've been guilty of just sticking with the same plan, so it has been too long since I've had to shop. Plus, I'm helping my mother pick her Medicare options for next year. All in all, I'm awash with health plan options.

I've got different levels of HMO, POS, and PPO options, from multiple carriers. My mother has many choices of Medicare Supplements, with Part D options, as well as Medicare Advantage options (both HMO and PPO), each from multiple health insurers.

It's not that there aren't plenty of options. It's just that, well, the options are so damn confusing.

Austin Frakt recently wrote in The New York Times about this problem. He cited a few studies specifically on point about health insurance, such as:
 

• One study found that 71% of consumers couldn't identify basic cost-sharing features;
• Less than a third of consumers in another study could correctly answer questions about their current coverage;
• Researchers found that consumers tended to choose plans labeled "gold" -- even when the researchers switched the "gold" and "bronze" designations, keeping all other plan details the same.

Many consumers tend to stick with their existing choice even when better options are available, simply because switching or even shopping is perceived as too complicated.

I'm most frustrated with prescription drug coverage. Not that long ago, the only variables were the copays for generic versus brand drugs. Now there are often five or six different tiers of coverage -- such as preferred generic, other generic, preferred brand, other brand, and "specialty" -- with different copays or coinsurance at each tier, each of which can also vary by retail versus mail order, and for "preferred pharmacies." 

Moreover, the health plan's formulary, which determines what tier a drug is in, can change at any time. Plus, as has been illustrated recently, the prices of any specific drug can change without notice, sometimes dramatically. If either of those happens to one of your drugs, say goodbye to your budget.

It's all enough to make your head spin.

The health plans would no doubt argue that their various approaches to prescription drug coverage are necessary in their efforts to control ever-rising costs for prescription drug costs. Well, they aren't working.

Prescription drug prices continue to soar, even for generic drugs. They have become a political issue, with the Senate now launching a bipartisan investigation into prescription drug pricing and the Presidential hopefuls from both parties being forced to take positions on how they would control them. For once, politicians are in sync with their constituents; the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that affordability of prescription drugs tops their priority list for Congress and the President.

I've long thought that the pharmaceutical industry was ahead of the rest of the health care industry. They were doing electronic submission of claims over forty years ago. They pushed for direct-to-consumer advertising in the late 1980's, and quickly jumped on that bandwagon. While providers only grudgingly adopted EHRs, they quickly moved to e-prescribing.  Other health providers had to move away from discounted charges twenty years ago, whereas drug companies still mostly use that approach and are only starting to tip-toe into more "value-based" approaches, as with the recent Harvard Pilgrim-Amgen deal.

And the backroom rebate deals between drug manufacturers and payors put a lie to any claim that at least drug pricing is transparent.

It's not only prescription drug coverage that is increasingly complicated, what with narrow networks, gatekeepers, different copays for different types of medical services, bundled pricing, or numerous other gimmicks used in health plan designs.  The collateral damage in the ongoing payor-provider arms race is consumer understanding. 

Making things more complicated for consumers is not the answer.

In typical fashion, the health care industry has tried to address the confusion by creating a new industry that doesn't actually solve the problem but does manage to introduce new costs. Many enrollment sites --the Medicare plan finder, public exchanges, private exchanges, broker sites like ehealth, or health insurer sites -- offer tools that purport to estimate your costs under your various health plan options. Yet consumers still don't understand their options.

We keep treating health care as a multi-party arrangement between providers/health plans/employers/government/consumers, which is why everything ends up so complicated. Drug company rebates or medical device manufacturers' payments to providers are prime examples of the kind of insider trading that goes on. It's usually the consumers that come last. And that's the problem.

I think back to 1990's cell phone plans. Consumers never knew what their next bill would bring, between peak/non-peak minutes and the infamous roaming charges. No one liked it, no one understood it, and for several years no one did anything about it. Then AT&T came out with a flat rate plan that essentially said, "we'll worry about all those for you," and soon all carriers had to adopt a version of it.

I keep hoping for that kind of breakthrough with health insurance.

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

I'm Shocked, Shocked

By Kim Bellard, October 22, 2015

Some new research on the effect of physician practice arrangement has on spending offer some disappointing -- but not entirely surprising -- results.

Take physician groups. The death of the independent physician practice, working solo or in a small practice, has long been predicted. Honestly: would you rather be treated by a doctor practicing alone, or by one at the Mayo Clinic? Physician groups allow for things like development of best practices, administrative efficiencies, and, in this era of Big Data, larger data sets that can be used to improve patient care. When it comes to physician groups, bigger would seem to be better.

If physician groups are good, the theory goes, then integrating them clinically and financially with hospitals, such as through partnerships or common ownership, should even better.

The AMA says solo practice physicians now are only 17% of all physicians, down from 40% in 1983, and that physician ownership of their practice has declined from 76% in 1983 to just over 50% now. Our health care system, it would seem, is destined to be made up of large physician groups, many of which will be owned by hospitals.

Too bad both larger groups and hospital ownership apparently end up costing us more.

A new study in Health Affairs found that as physicians concentrate in larger groups, prices tend to go up, at least for the 15 high volume, high cost procedures the authors looked at. It might seem that whatever savings might be gained by becoming part of a group are not being passed on to consumers (or their health plans), and/or larger size allows groups to bargain for better reimbursement rates from payors.

An earlier survey, by one of the lead authors of the new study, found that more competition among physicians did, in fact, result in lower prices, at least for office visits. The moral appears to be, if you don't want to compete with them, join them!

Then there is the hospital ownership effect. A study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that increased hospital/physician financial integration led to greater spending, primarily in outpatient care and almost entirely due to higher prices, not higher utilization. The AHA protests that the study "is not reflective of the changes happening in today’s health-care market," citing newer value-based payment arrangements and hospital price increases that are at historically low levels.

Maybe the AHA is right. Maybe once we move more fully into the wonderland of value-based payment arrangements everything will work out: better quality for same or lower costs.

I've lived through DRGs, RBRVS, capitation, global capitation, staff model HMOs, IPAs, and an array of cost/quality incentive programs -- each of which was supposed to be the next magic bullet -- so I'm not holding my breath that payors will finally be able to outsmart providers when it comes to controlling revenue.

Don't get me wrong: I've long been a believer both in large physician groups and in clinical integration. But I worry that those strategies to improve health care delivery are now being used more as tactics to maintain and even improve revenue.

As I've written before, when you have to create a new model that is supposed to be patient-centered, and providers demand to get paid more just for participating it in, it's a pretty clear indication that our health care system isn't about patients but rather is about the providers.

The problem isn't the structures themselves but rather their focus.

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

Can Slick Trump Sick?

By Kim Bellard, September 24, 2015

Health insurance is getting some love from investors.  A lot of that money is going to companies that make it easier to deal with health insurance, but some is going to start-ups -- like Oscar, Clover Health, and Zoom+ -- that actually hope to reinvent the nitty-gritty, often grimy business of providing health insurance.

Oscar, of course, has long been a media darling.  Google just put in another $32 million that ups their valuation to $1.75b.  All this for a company that only has 40,000 members, is offered only in New York/New Jersey (with plans to expand to California and Texas), and which in 2014 lost $28 million on $57 million in revenue.  But never mind all that; they've got a nice website.

That's not really fair, of course.  They've focused on using technology to improve the customer experience, are ahead of the industry curve on use of technology like fitness trackers and telehealth, and are working to use data to match patients with the best physicians for their conditions.

Clover Health, which just raised $100 million in a funding round through some impressive lead investors, has a somewhat different strategy.  It focuses on the Medicare population, putting their primary emphasis on using data to improve patient outcomes.

Clover uses their algorithms to identify high-risk patients, sends nurse practitioners to their homes to develop personalized care plans, and continually loops in new data to update patient profiles. So far Clover (headquartered in San Francisco) is only available in six New Jersey counties, but they claim to have 50% fewer hospital admissions and 34% fewer readmissions than the average for Medicare patients in those counties.  Most of their competitors would claim to have similar efforts for high-risk patients, so we'll have to see if their model scales.

Then there is Zoom+, or, rather, "Zoom+ Performance Health Insurance."  It is the outgrowth of ZoomCare, a network of retail clinics in Portland (OR).    Zoom+ claims to be "the nation’s first health insurance system built from the ground up to enhance human performance," and thinks of itself as "Kaiser 4.0."

Hmm.

Zoom+ has focused heavily on the user experience, wanting "health care to be more like visiting an Apple store," according to Fast Company Design's profile of them.  Zoom+ features not just cool retail centers but also mobile capabilities, a Personal Performance Path, and a Zoom+ Guru, among other services.  It is not your mother's health insurance, and right now can't be yours either unless you happen to live in Portland.

I'm all for reinventing health insurance.  I'm all for making the customer experience much, much better in health insurance and in health care generally.  But I do worry that some of these upstarts may be taking advantage -- perhaps inadvertently -- of one of the underlying problems with health insurance: risk selection beats execution.

Health insurers can market features that are more likely to appeal to younger, healthier customers, like snazzy websites, fitness trackers, or training advice.  None of those are only of interest to "healthy" people, but, it doesn't take much of a shift in the risk profile to have noticeable impacts on costs.

Health insurance needs more consumer-focused technology, more effective use of data, and more focus on promoting health.  However, I'm not getting too excited until I see a health insurer that does away with provider networks, refuses to be complicit in outlandish provider charges, and offers a plan of benefits that consumers can actually understand.

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

More About Us, Less About Them

By Kim Bellard, September 1, 2015

Something Amazon just did is worth those of us in health care paying attention to.  It was the layoff of "dozens" of engineers at Lab126, Amazon's hardware development center, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.  These were the first layoffs in the division's history.

Lab126 is responsible for Amazon's consumer devices, including their very successful Kindle e-reader and the new Fire TV. What makes this is a cautionary tale for the rest of us is that even Amazon -- which is noted for their prowess with their online consumer experience -- can't necessarily get the physical consumer experience right.  I think Wired captured the problem best, asserting that Amazon's consumer devices would have been more successful "if Amazon focused more on consumers, and less on consuming."

Now perhaps the relevance to health care may be clearer.

Consumer devices are all the rage in health care.  The global mHealth market is predicted to be $49b by 2020, with some 73 million units shipped in 2015 and an eye-opening CAGR of 47.9% expected from 2013 to 2020 (although other analysts already see slowing demand).

At the core of Amazon's devices is the goal to, well, get consumers to buy more stuff from Amazon.  
So I wonder: what is the goal of consumer devices in health care?  Are they intended to help us achieve better health -- or to consume more health care services?  I hope for the former but I fear it may end up being the latter.

I was struck a couple of weeks ago by an opinion piece in JAMA: "Obstacles to Developing Cost-Lowering Health Technology."  It's authors, doctors Kellerman and Desai, note that:

The inventor’s dilemma is that creating a product that improves health is not enough; the product must also be able to generate a healthy return on investment. In the United States, the surest way to generate a healthy return on investment is to increase health care spending, not reduce it.

Think about the terminology used in health care.  It speaks volumes about the underlying culture and its attitudes towards us.  Health care providers call us "patients."  Health plans call us "members."  Medicare and Medicaid call us "beneficiaries."    The name for one of the newest fads -- "patient centered medical homes" -- serves to remind us that we're not normally considered the center of our health care, and that the focus is on our medical care, not our health.

At least "consumer-directed health plans" pay lip service to us being in charge.

I'm all for people and organizations making money in health care, but I don't like to be seen as some kind of ATM for them either.  The health care industry needs to realize that we don't really want to be its customers, don't want to need to consume their services, and certainly don't want to have to be unduly patient about it when we do. 

What we want is to be healthy.  Give us the devices, services, and experiences that make that as simple as possible and then you can call us whatever you want.

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

Nag On My Shoulder

By Kim Bellard, July 15, 2015

We seem to like to have help with our health.  In addition to doctors, we might have a case manager, a health coach, a pharmacist, a personal trainer, or a nutritionist, to name a few.  But we soon may be able to have all of their expertise whispering in our ear 24/7.

Whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled an interesting company called OrCam.  OrCam's origins were in helping visually impaired individuals.  A small wearable camera processes surrounding images -- faces, steps, even handwriting -- on the fly and informs the user, almost as if they were seeing the objects directly.  Now OrCam is testing what they bill as a digital personal assistant -- Casie -- to add even more value.

I can see all sorts of potential for health care.

The WSJ article gives the example of you walking down the street, and Casie recognizes the face of one of your Linkedin contacts.  

If OrCam can recognize your Linkedin contacts, I would bet that it can recognize a donut, or a cigarette, and remind you about the health risks before you get either in your mouth.  
Such a digital assistant might also notice you haven't taken your morning pills.  Lack of adherence to taking medication has been labeled a $300b problem.

Maybe it could be trained to look at that rash on your arm and offer an informed diagnosis, taking teledermatology to the next level.

Pack a portable ultrasound into the device -- this technology is already here -- and suddenly whole new worlds of things your digital assistant could help you with really open up, especially if paired with a Watson type of AI.

Ideally, one would like to be able to tell your digital assistant how you are feeling, much like you might tell your doctor or try to do with an online symptom checker, and get a diagnosis.

Fitness trackers are all the rage, but the attrition rate on the use is terrible; a third stop using after six months.  Perhaps something like Casie could have better luck keeping you engaged.  

Smart glasses have faced adoption resistance for a variety of reasons: people think current models look goofy, there are concerns about privacy when everything in sight is suddenly a picture/video, or perhaps it has just been lack of a perceived killer app. 

OrCam addresses the first objection by being a fairly inconspicuous clip-on, and the second by deleting audio and video content after it has been processed and analyzed, sort of like Snapchat does for messages.  

And maybe digital health assistant will be the killer retail app.

I think the concept of "augmented reality" raises the bar for digital assistants.  Instead of just warning you about eating that donut, the digital health assistant might flash a picture of you with an extra thirty pounds just to re-enforce the risks it poses. It'd be like the health care version of "scared straight."

OrCam is a reminder that our digital future doesn't necessarily lie in smart phones or smart watches or even smart glasses. This is why companies like Facebook and Google are pouring so much money into virtual reality -- not just to escape reality but to augment it.

People talk about "the digital doctor," but what really makes that concept interesting is that it may not involve a doctor at all.  I just hope my digital assistant knows when to be quiet and when to make me listen.

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

Jurassic Park: Rise of the Health Insurers

By Kim Bellard, June 26, 2015

If you want to see dinosaurs fighting, stalking, and even mating, you don't need to go see Jurassic World.  Just pick up the business pages and see what is going on with the big health insurers, who seem intent on getting even bigger.

Whether anything actually comes of all the merger mania, or whether such mergers prove good for consumers, remains to be seen.

Everyone seems to be in play.  The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthem has made overtures to Cigna, while United is interested in Aetna, with Humana still attractive to Aetna and Cigna.  You can't make this stuff up. It would be ironic if Humana was one left standing in this game of musical chairs, but many feel their assets are too inviting to be left out. 

One conventional wisdom is that these kinds of mergers/acquisitions have to do with scale. Bigger means more lives to spread such costs over.  The other culprit often cited is a desire to gain more clout with providers,

The trouble is, no matter how big health plans get, if they face markets where there is, in essence, only one provider with which to negotiate, size doesn't really matter. Bigger isn't always better.

You can make dinosaurs bigger, but that doesn't make them more agile or better prepared to deal with new risks.  I'm wondering when we're going to see not bigger health insurers, but truly different models for them.

We've seen true integrated provider/health plan models like Kaiser, Group Health Cooperative, or Geisinger for decades now, and they're generally successful in their core markets, but that model hasn't proved easily replicable. 

We've also seem health system building their own health plans, such as Intermountain Healthcare, Sentara, or UPMC.   We've even seen health plans buying/building their own health systems, such as UPMC's bitter rival Highmark Health.

If Anthem buys Cigna or United buys Aetna, it wouldn't be all that interesting, nor would it be novel.  Those are dinosaurs getting bigger but not evolving.  

If Humana and HCA got back together, that would be interesting.  That would be provider/payor integration writ large, and maybe produce something new. 

And if, say, CVS or Walgreens chose to merge with a health insurer, that would something even more unique.  I don't know how they'd change the health insurer, but it might be fun to find out.

Honestly, though, what I'd really love to see is a company from an entirely different sector, hopefully one with a strong consumer focus, buy into the health insurance business.  Maybe Humana should get back together with the Virgin Group, or perhaps Walmart would be interested in taking over a Medicaid managed care or Medicare Advantage plan.  Wouldn't you love to see Walmart take on the health care supply chain?  I bet they could squeeze better value out for its customers.

Jurassic World seems to be raking in the money despite being just another sequel about rogue dinosaurs.  Let's hope we see something with health insurers that isn't just another sequel as well.

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

Not One Penny More

By Kim Bellard, May 21, 2015

If you've been to a doctor's office or seen some other health care provider, chances are you've had to sign a patient consent form that, among other things, makes you promise that whatever they end up doing to you, and however much they choose to charge you for it, you're responsible for paying.  If your health plan happens to get you a negotiated rate and perhaps covers some of the expenses, that's great, but the provider is still looking to you for payment.

Maybe you shouldn't be so quick to sign.

I don't know which is worse: that providers don't think they should tell you in advance what they plan to do to you, or that they don't want to admit how much they will try to charge for it.  Honestly, why do we keep falling for this?

I thought about this when reading Kaiser Health News' Radical Approach to Huge Hospital Bills: Set Your Own Price.  It profiles benefits consulting company ELAP Services, which goes beyond traditional services like benefits design, direct contracting, and medical bill reviews by also vowing to go to court if necessary to support their customers in disputes over medical bills.

The KHN article cited the example where an employee of one of ELAP's clients had back surgery and was billed $600,000 by the hospital.  ELAP analyzed the hospital's Medicare's cost reports, and advised the client to pay a much lower amount.  "We wrote a check to the hospital for $28,900 and we never heard from them again," said the client's CFO.

ELAP CEO Steve Kelly says "overwhelmingly, the providers just accept the payment."  ELAP has clients write their process for determining reimbursements into benefit plan documents to give greater legal weight.  They already have a federal court ruling in support of their process.  The contract requires them to defend patients from any collections efforts, in return for a percentage of the savings.

Most health plans base their out-of-network payments on "reasonable charges," which is how most health insurance plans worked prior to the advent of network plans like PPOs, when negotiated payment rates became the norm.  

Whether it has worked as intended is not entirely clear, but what is clear is that providers can come after patients for amounts not paid out-of-network by the health plans, all the way up to billed charges, not just to the "reasonable charges."

What I want to know is, if health plans truly believe their limits on charges are reasonable, why don't more of them act like ELAP when providers' charges exceed them?   ELAP makes it clear whose side they are on; health plans, not so much.

I view the charge structure of most providers as a pernicious symptom of much of what is wrong with our health care system.  They rarely have much to do with either actual costs or market forces, and they reflect an arrogant attitude that consumers are there to be gouged as much as possible.  Or, more charitably, if not arrogance, then a certain benign neglect to patients' financial well-being.  

I'd love to see a health plan whose EOBs not only detailed how much they were paying and how much of the remaining balance the consumer had to pay, but also said, "by the way, we think $X is the most your provider should charge you for this service, and we don't think you should pay a penny more.  If they try to charge you more, let us know and we'll help you fight it."

Now that would be a health plan that consumers would think more of, one that is truly on their side.

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

Does Patient Satisfaction Matter?

By Kim Bellard, April 24, 2015 

In a provocative article for The Atlantic, Alexandra Robbins posits that we may have a "problem with satisfied patients."  Ah, only in health care...

Ms. Robbins fears that hospitals may be focusing too much on making patients happier, rather than on making them well.  She cites how hospitals are rushing to provide "extra amenities such as valet parking, live music, custom-order room-service meals, and flat-screen televisions," which may help patients have a better experience but which mean resources not going directly to patient care.

She may have a point.

Ms. Robbins' analysis found that hospitals that do poorly on three or more categories of patient outcome measures actually score above average on patient satisfaction.  In her words: "Many hospitals seem to be highly focused on pixie-dusted sleight of hand because they believe they can trick patients into thinking they got better care."

Ouch.

Ms. Robbins cited a 2012 study by Fenton, et. alia, that further quantified the patient satisfaction "problem."   According to their research, patients with the highest satisfaction also have higher odds of inpatient admissions, greater prescription drug expenditures, higher overall expenditures, and higher mortality.

Patient satisfaction is clearly in vogue, as evidenced by CMS unveiling its star ratings on Hospital Compare last week, based on HCAHPS results, and by Medicare's increased focus on value-based payments.  The 2015 HIMSS Leadership Survey found that 87% of respondents listed patient satisfaction as their organization's top priority, higher than even sustaining financial viability (85%).

AHA's official response to the CMS ratings was cautionary: "There's a risk to oversimplifying the complexity of quality care or misinterpreting what is important to a particular patient, especially since patients seek care for many different reasons."

OK, fair enough...so what does AHA propose instead?

Another study on patient satisfaction, by Vanguard Communications, looked at patient reviews of physicians, and also found some unexpected results: "Ironically, the analysis indicates that generally as a doctor’s level of education and training increases, patient satisfaction actually decreases."

I didn't see that one coming.

Vanguard believes that the ratings reflect more about customer service than clinical quality.  Ron Harmon King, Vanguard's CEO, says:  "Does that mean more highly trained specialists deliver poorer customer service? We can’t say with any certainty, although we found a correlation."

The Physicians Foundation 2014 survey found that 42% of respondents did, indeed, list a customer-service related reason for why they were satisfied with their family physician, way ahead of actual treatment related reasons (26%).  

 
Ms. Robbins is thus not alone in being skeptical about patient satisfaction scores.  She backed up her skepticism with a quote from nurse Amy Bozeman: "The patient is NOT always right. They just don’t have the knowledge and training."  

I hate to break it to either of them, but even with all our health care professionals' knowledge and training, our health system's record on quality is pretty dismal.

Look, patient satisfaction is not a perfect measure, nor should it ever be the only measure used, but it has to be an important measure.  I can see patients being initially swayed by amenities or even simple courtesy, neither of which have typically been in abundance in our health system.  But we can't afford to forgo the burgeoning effort to focus on improving patient satisfaction.  At some point we have to trust that patients will see through smiles and nicer waiting rooms, and judge quality based on whether they are actually getting better.

And, in fact, research from Johns Hopkins suggests that patients may not fall for "pixie dusted sleight-of-hand" tricks after all.  The study concluded that:

"Patients responded positively to pleasing surroundings and comfort, but were able to discriminate their experiences with the hospital environment from those with physicians and nurses...Hospital administrators should not use outdated facilities as an excuse for suboptimal provider satisfaction scores."   

As Abraham Lincoln famously said: "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time."

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

Looking for the Future in the Past

By Kim Bellard, March 25, 2015

I don't get smartwatches.

Yes, I know; they're all the rage. Apple unveiled its Apple Watch earlier this month, to generally good if not entirely ecstatic reviews. Not to be outdone, Google announced a collaboration with TAG Heuer and Intel for a "Swiss Smartwatch." Samsung and Sony are close behind with their own versions.

Poor Fitbit, which held the early lead in wrist wearables, is now desperately trying to broaden its product line, including the new Surge. They must feel a little like Garmin or Nikon did when mobile phones began to incorporate GPS tracking and digital phones.

I have to wonder why the focus on the wrist. It isn't the ideal place to track, say, your heartbeat, your sleep, or your steps, and as a result fitness trackers have been faulted about their accuracy.  I'm not sure who is clamoring to add more features to a watch.

It's as if Timex and Casio, not to mention TAG Heuer, are conspiring to create a demand so that they don't go the way of Kodak.

It's not that I think they are a bad idea. If you want to wear one, more power to you, and I hope it helps you with your health goals. My problem with them is that I think they are an example of our trying to create the future by looking in the past.

Shouldn't we be developing truly new technologies and uses for them?

I can't help but think about EHRs in this context. Health care providers insisted on being subsidized for what would be normal business process improvement investments for any other industry. What we got for all the federal spending were products that physicians don't really like, that more often hinder than help with patient care, that patients rarely have access to, and that can't easily share data.

We need tools that are more collaborative, more interactive, and more proactive.

Congress is already starting to ask what it has gotten for its $35b HITECH investment, even holding hearings to demand answers. EHRs used to have bipartisan support and now have fairly bipartisan disappointment.

We don't even have an agreed upon way to figure out if providers have the same patient, much less share their data about that patient. The financial services industry solved similar customer-identification problems decades ago. They did it because it made business sense.

In theory, that kind of change will happen once we make that big move to "value-based" care, but as long as our baseline is our current level of spending, I'm skeptical. We need approaches that attempt not just to reduce increases in spending but that aim to take big chunks out of spending. There's no shortage of waste, duplication and unnecessary care that could be eliminated.

Smartwatches, EHRs, or proton beam therapy, to name a few examples, are not likely to help accomplish that.

I want to see those kinds of new technologies in health care, not a smartwatch. Technologies that help change how we think about "health" and how we treat problems with it. I challenge health care technology gurus: show us something not just that we haven't seen before; show us something we hadn't even thought of before

As Alan Kay famously said: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

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

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

Making the Old New Again

By Kim Bellard, January 22, 2015

I always love it when someone looks at something familiar in a completely new way.  I only wish health care had more examples of that.

The example of this kind of totally fresh thinking that caught my eye concerns traffic lights.  If researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, led by Professor Ozan Tonguz, have their way, those familiar yellow boxes with the lights could become unnecessary.

The CMU researchers have developed "virtual traffic lights" (not to be confused with the separate CMU "smart traffic signals" project).  Instead of using physical traffic lights, lights would show up on the driver's dashboard as needed.  As Professor Tonguz told CNN: "With this technology, traffic lights will be created on demand when [two cars] are trying to cross this intersection, and they will be turned down as soon as we don't need it,"

The researchers claim the virtual, on-demand signal could reduce commuting times by 40%, as well as reduce carbon emissions and accidents.  And, of course, we wouldn't need all those physical lights; think of the savings on new lights, poles, and wires, plus on ongoing maintenance.

All that would be required is that every car -- and that means, every car -- is equipped with the required vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology.  No small task!  Some think this could happen in a year or two, others a decade or two.  Either way, it's mind-blowing to think that such a familiar part of our driving experience could be so utterly transformed by what seems, in retrospect, such an obvious solution.

Let's contrast this kind of thinking with health care.  Yes, I know -- health care has plenty of new technology and many kinds of improved treatments, but I'm not sure we're getting a lot of reinventing.  Where are our virtual traffic lights?

One small -- well, maybe not so small at that -- health care example is a new patient tracking system called PatientStormTracker, developed by Lyntek Medical.  As the name suggests, PatientStormTracker borrows from weather tracking to present patient monitoring data as systemic color monitoring.  Instead of trying to follow the usual rows and rows of data, clinicians can actually see a patient's status -- color-coded -- and watch it progress in real time, including which body systems are currently being impacted and how much.  

Lyntek's founder and CEO, Dr. Laurence Lynn, told The Columbus Dispatch that traditional patient monitoring is like a fire alarm -- either on or off.  As he said: "We have this simple fire alarm idea that existed from the 1980s, and it didn’t evolve, it didn’t improve."  Dr. Lynn wants to monitor patterns and detect trends earlier, when interventions are more likely to be effective.  PatientStormTracker is in clinical trials.  

One proponent of radical changes in health care has long been Dr. Eric Topol, who happens to have a new book out (The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is In Your Hands).  I have not yet read his book, but I did read his related op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.  His version of virtual traffic lights, if you will, is the smartphone.

Dr. Topol outlines not just increasingly common functions like virtual visits or monitoring using a smartphone, but also apps that assist with testing and even diagnosis.  I especially like his prediction that wearable sensors will make it possible that "...except for ICUs, operating rooms and emergency rooms, hospitals of the future are likely to be roomless data surveillance centers for remote patient monitoring."  That would certainly upend how we view hospitals...finally.

Perhaps those remote patient monitors will use something like PatientStormTracker.

The smartphone technology options are cool, but what Dr. Topol sees as an even more important trend in putting all the newly-captured data in the cloud, mining it, and using it to target interventions.

Changes are going to come at us from seemingly left field.  We can never be quite sure where they will lead. It just takes some innovator to see the familiar in a different way -- and then manage to convince us, and the medical-industrial complex, to change.  

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

The Future Is Still Not Here

By Kim Bellard, November 13, 2014

US News & World Report had some fun looking back at what experts in 2004 predicted for health care in 2014.  Not surprisingly, they found that we're not quite there yet, but might be by 2025.  The future, it would appear, is always ten years away. 

Those 2004 pundits expected that health care would be one of the industries most impacted in these past ten years; specifically:

2004 prediction: In 10 years, the increasing use of online medical resources will yield substantial improvement in many of the pervasive problems now facing healthcare—including rising healthcare costs, poor customer service, the high prevalence of medical mistakes, malpractice concerns, and lack of access to medical care for many Americans.

Whoops.

To be sure, there have been several important changes in our health care system over the past ten years.  Some of the more important ones would have to include:

• PPACA has assisted several million more people to obtain coverage.
• HITECH has spurred EHR adoption.
• Share of coverage through employers has dropped significantly.
• Provider consolidation continues relentlessly.  

In terms of realizing those predictions about controlling costs, improving customer service, reducing medical mistakes, or addressing malpractice concerns: well, not so much.

The absolute number of the uninsured has only dropped from 42.0 million in 2004 to 40.7 in 1Q 2014.  Increases in spending have moderated, thank goodness, but most experts attribute this to the recent economic downturn rather than to any structural changes.  Half of Americans now have a chronic disease, and our life expectancy rates still lag most other developed nations -- and may be declining.

If this is progress, I'm not sure we can take much more of it.

By way of contrast, think about the technology world in 2004:

• Apple was selling the heck out of iPods, with the iTunes Music only a year old.  The iPhone, iPad, and App Store were only gleams in Steve Job's mind.
• Google had just gone public.  Google Maps had yet to debut (2005) and its Android mobile platform was years away (2007).  
• Most mobile phones did not have cameras, the Motorola RAZR was the cool phone, and the Blackberry still set the standard for what passed as smartphone, with the Palm Treo giving it a run for its money.
• Facebook was still limited to university users, and Twitter was two years away from its first tweet.   
• YouTube did not exist (2005), and Netflix hadn't started streaming (2007).

Why isn't health care seeing those kinds of radical changes in the landscape? 

Certainly there have been plenty of important clinical innovations in the last ten years.  Still, I'm hard pressed to think of changes that have become part of people's everyday lives the way that the above tech changes have, 

Critics might claim that smartphones, social media and video streaming don't improve the quality of life, but just dare to try to take them away from people.  By contrast, if you offered to swap health insurance plans from 2004 with today's, I bet most people would jump at the chance, since they cost about 40% less and typically had much lower cost sharing requirements (Kaiser Family Foundation).

I'm also waiting for reports of either physicians or patients being delighted by all those EHRs.

The U.S. News & World Report article mentioned telemedicine as an example that many (still) predict as a key part of the future.  Honestly, if a big breakthrough for 2024 is wider use of telemedicine, I'll be disappointed. 

Don't get me wrong: I'm a big proponent of telemedicine, but in ten years shouldn't we be hoping for something more radical -- like, say, holographic or virtual reality visits?

Or maybe the future is wearables, as everyone is trying to get in on the expected gold rush.  I suspect that wearables in 2024 will bear as much resemblance to today's as our mobile phones do to 2004's, but the real problem won't be the technology as how we'll use all that data.  By 2024 we should be using real-time data to prevent hospitalizations and other acute episodes, but who will pay for, and act on, the monitoring and interventions?

Some people might argue that other ACA initiatives, like ACOs or value-based purchasing, simply haven't had enough time to prove their worth.  That may be valid, but I'm still not seeing the where-did-that-come-from aspects of either.

If in ten years we're all getting care through integrated delivery systems like Kaiser, that might be better for us, but it wouldn't be a breakthrough.

As I wrote in Getting Our Piece of the Pie, I want to see health care's versions of Napster: innovations that are willing to wreck the system in order to reshape it.  I want to see something that connects us to our health in the way that Facebook has connected us with our social circle, that democratizes health information and even treatments like Wikipedia has done for reference, or that untethers us in the way smartphones and YouTube have.&

Let's not wait ten years.

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

Google Wants to Helpout Your Health

by Kim Bellard, October 21, 2014

I suppose it was inevitable that I'd end up writing something about Google's interest in health, since recent posts have focused on efforts from Facebook and Amazon, as well as the general gold rush for health IT.  Fortunately Google has obliged me by introducing a neat health-related wrinkle on their Helpouts service.

Google's new service pops up an offer to do a video chat with one of their Helpouts physicians when you are doing health-related searches, in case you want more expert opinions and advice.  It certainly beats getting an ad for a pill or a health aid (although I don't imagine Google will stop presenting those as well).

Let's back up.  For those of you not previously familiar with it (and count me among those), Helpouts is a Google service, launched last November, that allows consumers to connect with applicable experts via live video chats. 

The new feature connects the service to search results.  You may not have Google Helpouts top-of-mind when looking for health information, but it's a pretty safe bet that you might use Google search in doing your research.  Pew says 72% of Internet users searched for health information within the past year, with 77% of them starting with a search engine. 

"Google Docs" takes on a whole new meaning now, doesn't it?

The telemedicine aspect of Helpouts is not strikingly new.  What distinguishes Google's effort, of course, that it is pro-active.  It doesn't wait for you to decide things are serious enough to seek out a doctor, but, rather, uses your search activity to trigger the offer of a consult.  I think this will be an important part of our health system's future -- not merely reacting but being proactive.  All these remote monitoring devices are pretty pointless if we don't use them to try to intervene early, instead of waiting for an acute event or an office visit to trigger care.

I have a couple of suggestions, or at least questions, on the new Helpouts feature:

• It's not clear to me how specific the type of physician available is to the search request.  If you are searching on angina, for example, it'd be nice if you got a cardiologist to talk with rather than a dermatologist.
• It's not clear to me if the experts are always physicians, or if they triage the experts based on the severity of the information being searched for.  

On the second point, I've written before about personal health assistants -- including Better from The Mayo Clinic -- as well as potentially using AI to provide such a service.  I think it'd be even cooler if Helpouts gave you a personal health assistant, starting with an AI agent and progressing to a specific human team if necessary, with physicians available for the most complex needs.  Maybe that's Helpouts 2.0.

Of course, Google's health interests don't end with the current Helpouts approach.  They are already pushing Google Fit as a way for Android developers to connect their health apps, and it'd be a great next step if Google could tie Helpouts to those apps, using the data mined from them to trigger an offer of a consult -- or an intervention, depending on the urgency of the need.

It'd be even better if you could opt-in your own physician(s) and health system to the Helpouts service instead of relying on Google's set of physicians.  

As long as I'm already trying to come up with more things Google could do in health, I might as well add that I'd love to see them get into the transparency business.  They try to help consumers find the best prices for other goods, and certainly health care can use all the help it can get in this regard.

Google is thinking bigger than these more modest expansions, like their "moonshot" to genetically map a healthy human body, or their new health and well-being company Calico, which has already announced the building of a major research facility.  I like that they are taking the long view, focusing on prevention and cures rather than simply more treatments, but there's still plenty of ways they can help the health care system in the short term as well.

Hmm, Google loves robots: maybe robotic surgery -- or doctors -- is next.

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

Put Your Money Where Your Scalpel Is

By Kim Bellard, September 22, 2014

I propose taking value-based purchasing from the payor-provider contractual backroom and putting it in the health plan benefit design, where consumers directly see and are impacted by it.

One of the most troubling things about our health care system is the lack of accountability. Providers get paid pretty much regardless of how patients actually fare under their care, and often even if demonstrable errors are committed.

Patients don't get a pass when it comes to blame either.  They don't often take good care of themselves, they don't always follow instructions, and they sometimes opt for high risk and/or unproven procedures with limited chance of success.

The mantra to combat all this is "value-based purchasing," a phrase whose meaning, like beauty, is largely in the eye of the beholder.  In theory, it involves adding performance-based financial incentives to payment arrangements, and may also include bundled payments, shared savings programs, pay-for-performance, or even penalties.

Frankly, I think none of these go far enough, nor do they adequately involve the patients.

I want to accomplish a few things with my proposed plan design approach.  One, I want to more directly relate provider payment to patient outcome -- not in the aggregate, as many incentive programs try to do, but at individual patient level.  Second, I want to reduce how much other health plan subscribers have to subsidize care that is of little benefit.  And third, I want to stop rewarding providers for care that has little or no positive impact.<

The following chart outlines how these might be accomplished (assume the "base" plan design was 80/20):

					Estimated Prevalence
	Percent of Allowable Charges:
	Insurer	Patient	Provider
Condition much improved	100	25	0		50%
Condition a little better	80	20	0		25%
Condition no better	60	15	0		10%
Condition a little worse	40	10	0		10%
Condition much worse			-100		5%
					100%
	Total Weighted Costs
	80	20	-5

In other words, a surgical procedure whose allowable charges were $10,000 would pay the provider $12,500 (125%) if things went really well for the patient, only $7,500 (75%) if the patient was no better after it -- and the provider would actually owe the patient $10,000 if he/she ended up much worse after the surgery.  Providers would not be able to balance bill patients for any of the reductions.

If I've done my math right, with the assumed prevalence rates shown above, the payouts are revenue neutral for payors (weighted cost of 80) and patients (weighted cost of 20), prior to the provider payback. 

Health plans and providers who want to test this approach would probably want to do at least a year of data collection so they can fine-tune the final payment levels for the different stages, based on the measured prevalences.  I think we might be surprised by what we'd learn.

There is good evidence that direct engagement by physicians can boost patient use of portals, and I can't

think of anything that would give physicians more incentive to do so than directly tying their payments to such use. 

Ideally, I'd like to see this approach applied not just to the surgeon's fees, but to bundled payments including the hospital/facility and any ancillary providers.  The more providers who have a direct financial stake in the actual outcome, the better.

What we need is a surgical practice and/or health system that has enough confidence in its outcomes to bet on it, and a health plan (or self-funded employer plan) who are willing to take not just the financial risk but also the risk of how to communicate the approach to members.

The question is -- is anyone bold enough to try?

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

What Is Amazon Up To?

By Kim Bellard, August 27, 2014

Back in April, PwC and HRI issued a report that asked what new entrants might be healthcare's Amazon.com.  Now it appears that it might just be Amazon itself.

What we "know" is that unnamed "Amazon leadership" met in late July with Howard Sklamberg, FDA's deputy chief for global regulatory operations and policy, and other unnamed "various FDA leadership."

That's it; everything else is speculation.  Not much of a story perhaps, but, hey, without speculation there would be no point of blogs, and then I'd have to spend my time doing something else.

Still, the speculation is interesting, especially with a company like Amazon that has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to disrupt markets.

They already outsource their cloud services (Amazon Web Services, or AWS), their distribution capabilities, and their payment systems, the latter now being expanded to in-store payments, going up against the likes of Visa and Mastercard.  In a smartphone world dominated by Apple, Samsung and other established manufacturers, they fearlessly have introduced their own version, the Fire.  I could go on in various other spheres, but the point is clear -- they're not afraid of anyone.

So now health care?

Here are three ways that I would love to see if Amazon could add value to health care:

Reviews: OK, all you Amazon shoppers -- and there are a lot of us -- how many of you buy a product (even if not on Amazon) without first checking out the Amazon reviews?

Their reviews already cover various medical supplies/devices sold on Amazon, but wouldn't you love it if those reviews applied to, say, physicians or hospitals?

Recommendations: Amazon is noted for their personalized shopping recommendations, based on user's shopping and purchase history on the site and a lot of Big Data collaborative filtering.  Whether it is a recommended item, the "also viewed" products, or the "frequently bought together" combo suggestions, the recommendations are pretty effective in helping boost Amazon's sales.

Imagine if Amazon applied this to health care products, services, and even providers, recommending ones that they believe might best fit you, and possibly helping map out the various steps of a treatment plan (as they are "frequently bought together").

Medical tourism:  No, I don't mean the out-of-country packages of lower-cost health care services often thought of as medical tourism (although I'm not excluding them).  I mean more broadly making services or packages of something that consumers actively shop for, and breaking the traditional pick-the-closest doctor/hospital mindset that most consumers have gotten used to.

It's fun to speculate what Amazon might do, but the real benefit of them coming into health care in a bigger way would be that they might do something truly unexpected and unique, without health care industry blinders limiting their creativity.

They haven't asked for my advice -- and please feel free to get word to them that they should -- but what I'd urge Amazon

• Keep it retail: Amazon made its reputation as a retail company, and yet health care has stubbornly resisted being truly retail -- Remember your roots!

• Make people mad: I hope the AMA, AHA, and the state medical boards are furious, that individual health systems and health care professionals are scared to death, and there generally is a lot of arm-waving and teeth gnashing.

If everyone is applauding, Amazon didn't go far enough.

If all Amazon wants to do in health care is to make it easier for us to buy even more of the things we already buy too much of, and pay too much for, I wouldn't be surprised, but I will be disappointed.  We have plenty of companies who can help us tinker around the edges of the status quo, but all too few companies

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