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The Electronic Health Record Problem
It’s no secret that many physicians are unhappy with their electronic health records (EHRs). They say they spend too much time keying in data and too little making eye contact with patients. They say their electronic records are clunky, poorly designed, hard to navigate, and cluttered with useless detail that colleagues have cut and pasted to meet documentation requirements. Meanwhile, the data they really need are buried almost beyond retrieval.
Not all physicians feel this way. Two-thirds of primary care physicians say there are satisfied with their current EHRs, according to a 2018 survey by The Harris Poll. But the critics have a point. Current EHRs are not well-designed to meet the needs of users. And they don’t do enough to make clinicians smarter and more efficient. This doesn’t mean we would be better off in the paper world of 10 years ago. But it does mean that EHRs need improvement.
As we think about improving them, we need to broaden the discussion of EHRs and their role. We need to reckon with the underlying causes of EHRs’ problems, how to correct them, and how to ensure that their enormous potential benefits are understood and realized.
The Causes
EHRs are a technology. Like most technologies, they can be used in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes. Their human masters decide.
In our current health system, EHRs have one critical performance requirement: generating clinical revenues. In the fee-for-service world, this means supporting providers’ billing and documentation to generate as much revenue as possible for each clinical service. EHRs also must help providers meet regulatory requirements that may have financial or accreditation implications.
This means that current EHRs were not created to support many of the things that physicians, patients, and policymakers value: better care experiences, reduced costs, or improved care quality and population health management. They were not created to make physicians better diagnosticians or more cost-effective prescribers. The reason: our health care system has mostly not rewarded these activities. They have not been mission-critical for providers or, therefore, EHR designers.
For that reason, EHRs have only the most minimal capabilities related to clinical decision support, which has been proven to increase the quality of care, or to the collection of information on duplicate and unnecessary testing, or on the aggregate health of providers’ patient populations.
To put it simply, improving EHRs will require changing the priorities governing their design. That means moving away from fee-for-service payment toward risk-sharing by providers and, ultimately, some form of prospective compensation. Until then, optimizing the usability and value of EHRs will be an uphill struggle.
EHRs’ Undervalued Benefits: Empowering Patients and Advancing Human Health
Because the benefits of EHRs may be less visible than their burdens, some of their contributions are overlooked and undervalued.
One of these benefits is giving patients access to their medical information. Meaningful-use requirements spurred the adoption of patient portals, which, though sometimes clunky, have enabled patients for the first time to routinely see their test and procedure results. Patients can also now download their entire digital record and share it with third parties that can analyze its contents and educate them on their significance. Apple, for example, has agreements with over 100 health systems and practices to perform this function, which is likely to spawn a deluge of consumer-friendly health care applications based on patients’ own information.
Another underrated EHR benefit is that, by capturing billions of patient encounters worldwide, electronic records are generating a vast store of digital health data that are available for novel uses, including research into the causes and cures of disease and the detection and prevention of threats to public health.
Think of these data as the equivalent of a new natural resource, like water or minerals; they sit in the cloud, ready for extraction, refinement, and application. Their value is increasingly understood by technology companies, new startups as well as old stalwarts, that are pouring billions into exploiting them. There are obvious privacy and security issues raised by this development. But never before in human history have we had access to this novel (un)natural resource.
In entering all that data at the point of clinical care, health professionals and patients are creating a public good. But they get little tangible in return — at least in the short run. This maldistribution of benefit and cost lies at the heart of the current EHR controversy.
What Next?
To make health professionals’ work easier, and to exploit the vast potential of EHRs, a number of interventions make sense.
The most important is unrelated to the technology. Clinicians unhappy with EHRs have a huge stake in moving from fee-for-service to value-based payment, so that providers and their EHR vendors start to prioritize the production of health and the reduction of waste in health systems. This will reduce documentation requirements, spur the creation of decision support and information exchange that make clinicians’ lives better, and focus attention on getting value from the information so laboriously recorded by doctors and other health professionals.
A second requirement will be to lower the burden of data entry. Many providers have started using scribes to take notes during visits. While many physicians love scribes, they are expensive. A better long-term solution would be to use natural language processing and artificial intelligence to enable clinicians’ conversations with patients and their subsequent assessment and treatment plan to be recorded in real time. Given the increasing power of these technologies, such applications will soon be available.
Another approach to assisting data entry is to systematically redesign records for ease of use and to prune away unnecessary recording requirements. A recent New England Journal of Medicine commentary provided an excellent example of the benefits of this intervention.
A third requirement for EHR improvement falls to health professionals. When I was a medical student, I spent hundreds of hours learning how to take notes in the paper world. More experienced clinicians reviewed and graded these write-ups. Later, as a young physician, I observed the notes of clinicians I admired, and emulated them. This process of professional education in record-keeping unfolded over years and forever shaped my note-writing habits. If physicians are unhappy with how their colleagues use EHRs, they should start educating young physicians — and their peers — on how to properly keep records in the electronic world. What and how data get recorded are ultimately a professional responsibility.
Lastly, we need to find a way to correct the maldistribution of costs and benefits that now plagues the use of EHRs. By creating vast troves of electronic data and enabling patient empowerment, clinicians and their patients perform a valuable public service that has thus far been unrecognized and unrewarded. Reducing the cost of data entry will help, but as the benefits of EHRs and their data become monetized — as they will — some way to share those gains with clinicians and patients at the frontlines should be considered. This could be accomplished in a variety of ways such as voluntary contributions from businesses that rely on EHR data to an EHR innovation fund and/or directing a share of the taxes paid by these businesses to EHR improvement. But at least until EHRs become much more user friendly, this problem of unfair allocation of benefit and cost needs attention.
We are not going back to the paper world, but EHRs need to work better. As they pursue this goal, clinicians, policymakers, managers, and vendors need to understand and address the root causes of the problem they are trying to solve, and the full array of options for addressing it.
The impossibility of bipartisan health-care compromise
https://theweek.com/articles/811962/impossibility-bipartisan-healthcare-compromise
If there’s one thing political centrists claim to value, it’s compromise. It’s “the way Washington is supposed to work,” writes Third Way’s Bill Schneider. “Centrists, or moderates, are really people who are willing to compromise,” The Moderate Voice‘s Robert Levine tells Vice.
What does this mean when it comes to health care and the developing lefty push for Medicare-for-all? The fresh new centrist health-care organization, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), says it is a “diverse, patient-focused coalition committed to pragmatic solutions to strengthen our nation’s health-care system.” In keeping with the moderate #brand, PAHCF may not support Medicare-for-all. But perhaps they might support a quarter-measure compromise, like allowing people under 65 to buy into Medicare?
Haha, of course not. Their offer is this: nothing.
Valuing compromise in itself in politics is actually a rather strange notion. It would make a lot more sense to determine the optimal policy structure through some kind of moral reasoning, and then work to obtain an outcome as close as possible to that. Compromise is necessary because of the anachronistic (and visibly malfunctioning) American constitutional system, but it is only good insofar as it avoids a breakdown of democratic functioning that would be even worse.
However, “moderation” is routinely not even that, but instead a cynical veneer over raw privilege and self-interest. The American health-care system, as I have written on many occasions, is a titanic maelstrom of waste, fraud, and outright predation — ripping off the American people to the tune of $1 trillion annually.
And so, Adam Cancryn reports on the centrist Democrats plotting with Big Medical to strangle the Medicare-for-all effort:
Deep-pocketed hospital, insurance, and other lobbies are plotting to crush progressives’ hopes of expanding the government’s role in health care once they take control of the House. The private-sector interests, backed in some cases by key Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign alumni, are now focused on beating back another prospective health-care overhaul, including plans that would allow people under 65 to buy into Medicare.
Behind the preposterously named “PAHCF” stands a huge complex of institutions that benefit from the wretched status quo. This includes the PhRMA drug lobby (Americans spend twice what comparable countries do on drugs, almost entirely because of price-gouging), the Federation of American Hospitals (Americans overpay on almost every medical procedure by roughly 2- to 10-fold), the American Medical Association (U.S. doctors, especially specialists, make far more than in comparable nations), America’s Health Insurance Plans, and BlueCross BlueShield (the cost of average employer-provided insurance for a family of four has increased by almost $5,000 since 2014, to $28,166).
The human carnage inflicted by this bloody quagmire of corruption and waste is nigh unimaginable. Perhaps 30,000 people die annually from lack of insurance, and 250,000 annually from medical error. America is a country where insurance can cost $24,000 before it covers anything, where doctors can conspire to attend each other’s surgeries so they can send pointless six-figure balance bills, where hospitals can charge the uninsured 10 times the actual cost of care, where gangster drug companies can buy up old patents and jack up the price by 57,500 percent, and on and on.
One might think this is all a bit risky. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to accept some sensible reforms, so these institutions don’t get completely driven out of business?
But wealthy elites almost never behave this way. John Kenneth Galbraith, explaining the French Revolution, once outlined one of the firmer rules of history: “People of privilege almost always prefer to risk total destruction rather than surrender any part of their privileges.” One reason is “the invariable feeling that privilege, however egregious, is a basic right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a small thing as compared with that of the rich.”
And so we see with the Big Medical lobby. The vast ziggurat of corpses piled up every year from horrific health-care dysfunction is just a minor side issue compared to the similar-sized piles of profits these companies accumulate — which they will fight like crazed badgers to preserve.
As Paul Waldman points out, this means a big resistance to the prospect of doing anything at all, let alone Medicare-for-all. However, the political implication is clear. If compromise is impossible, then liberals and leftists who want to improve the quality and justice of American health care should write off the corrupt pseudo-centrists, and go for broke. Democrats should write a health-care reform bill so aggressive that it drastically weakens the profitability of Big Medical, and drives many of them out of business entirely. If you cannot join them, beat them.
Financial updates from Banner, Kaiser, Mayo + 3 other health systems
The following six health systems recently released their financial statements for the nine-month period ended Sept. 30:
1. Phoenix-based Banner Health’s revenue climbed 7.2 percent year over year to $6.3 billion in the first nine months of 2018. The system ended the first nine months of this year with operating income of $122.1 million, down 37 percent from $192.9 million in the same period a year earlier.
2. Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente’s revenue climbed to $59.7 billion in the first nine months of 2018, up 9.6 percent from revenue of $54.5 billion in the same period of 2017. Kaiser ended the first nine months of this year with operating income of $2.03 billion, compared to $2.33 billion in the same period of 2017.
3. Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic ended the first nine months of 2018 with revenue of $9.5 billion, compared to $8.8 billion in the same period of 2017. The system reported operating income of $601 million in the nine months ended Sept. 30, up 32 percent from the same period of 2017.
4. Bronx, N.Y.-based Montefiore Health System recorded revenue of $4.4 billion in the nine months ended Sept. 30, up from $4.1 billion in the same period a year earlier. The system ended the first nine months of this year with operating income of $59.6 million, up from $37.7 million in the same period of the year prior.
5. Arlington-based Texas Health Resources recorded revenue of $3.5 billion in the first nine months of 2018, up from $3.4 billion in the same period a year earlier. The system ended the first nine months of this year with operating income of $168.7 million, down from $174.5 million in the same period of 2017.
6. Pittsburgh-based UPMC reported revenue of $13.9 billion in the first nine months of this year, up from $11.4 billion in the same period of 2017. The system ended the first nine months of 2018 with operating income of $190 million, down from $196 million in the same period of 2017.
Pennsylvania health system, CEO will pay $12.5M to resolve billing probe
Allentown, Pa.-based Coordinated Health and its founder and CEO Emil DiIorio, MD, have entered into an agreement with the federal government to settle False Claims Act allegations, according to the Department of Justice.
The settlement resolves allegations that Coordinated Health inflated payments from federal payers by unbundling claims for reimbursement for orthopedic surgeries, including many for total joint replacement, from 2007 through mid-2014.
Instead of stopping the illegal unbundling, Dr. DiIorio changed how he wrote operative reports to enable Coordinated Health billers to maximize improperly unbundled reimbursements, according to the Justice Department.
Two outside coding consultants identified the improper unbundling during audits in 2011 and 2013 and told top Coordinated Health executives about the problem. “Motivated by its bottom line, Coordinated Health simply ignored the consultants’ recommendations and continued abusing Modifier 59 to improperly unbundle orthopedic surgery claims until mid-2014,” states a Justice Department press release.
Coordinated Health will pay $11.25 million and Dr. DiIorio will pay $1.25 million to settle the allegations. In addition to the monetary settlement, Coordinated Health entered into a corporate integrity agreement with HHS that will require monitoring of its billing practices for five years.
Regarding the settlement, Coordinated Health released the following statement: “We are pleased to have come to a resolution with the federal government regarding allegations of our past use of a specific Medicare billing modifier, involving a complex Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule, which does not relate to the quality of patient care. We have already updated our billing practice to resolve the issue in question, and have taken a number of decisive actions to reduce the potential for issues in the future. Our focus has been and always will be providing the best possible patient care in the communities we serve.”
CMS updates hospital price transparency requirement — again
CMS published an additional FAQ document that provides guidance for hospitals required to post their standard charges online.
In August, CMS finalized a rule requiring hospitals to publish a list of their standard charges online in a machine-readable format and to update this information at least annually. Over the past few months, CMS has attempted to answer questions about the new requirement before it kicks in Jan. 1.
CMS posted a document in September that provided the definition of “machine readable” and answered five other frequently asked questions about the price transparency rule.
CMS recently published an additional document that expanded on the rule. The agency answered seven questions about the new requirement, including one about whether hospitals are required to post information online that isn’t included in their chargemasters. CMS clarified that even if a hospital’s chargemaster does not include standard charges for drugs, biologicals, or other items and services it provides, those charges must be posted online.
Cartoon – Welcome to the Team
Cartoon – The Vortex of Failure
HENRY KOTULA 