Sessions and Themes
- Shifting the paradigm: Vikas Saini
- Magical thinking and Modern medicine: Harvey Fineberg
- What makes us do it?
- What will it take to get us there?: Don Berwick
- What are the knowledge gaps in avoiding avoidable care?
- Case discussions
- What are the ethical issues?
- Medical journals and the issue of avoidable care
- The schizophrenic life of the hospital CEO
- A reason to change: Shannon Brownlee
- Social responsibility of physicians: Bernard Lown
- Behavior-changing Best practices
- Global dimensions of unnecessary care: Julio Frenk
- Payment mechanisms and the Culture of medicine
- Choosing wisely and beyond: What are the next steps?
- How can patients help drive the needed change?
Shannon Brownlee’s ethics panel introduction
Below is Shannon Brownlee’s introductory speech from the ‘What are the ethical issues’ panel.
Thank you all for being here today – distinguished panelists and participants.
I want to tell you a story. That’s what writers do, tell stories. It’s not my story, it is Diane Meier’s, and I hope I tell it correctly. She told it to me years ago, and it haunts still, which is why I want to relate it to you.
The patient was an elderly Hispanic man. He barely spoke English, and he was dying of lung cancer when Diane met him. Mr. S., as she calls him, had watched his wife succumb to lung cancer three years earlier. When he was diagnosed with the same disease, he wanted no part of the side effects his wife had gone through. He declined chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, saying he wanted to die at home, surrounded by his family.
The hospital sent him home, but a few months later, Mr. S. was brought in to the emergency room by his grown children. He was delirious and suffering seizures from metastases in his brain. The hospital admitted him to the neurology department, where he was stabilized.
When Diane entered his room, she found a frail, emaciated man. He had a nasogastric feeding tube, and he was thrashing was in his bed, yelling unintelligibly, and pinned down in 4-point restraints.
Diane went to find the neurology resident in charge, and asked him what was going on. The resident told her that Mr. S. had pulled out his feeding tube repeatedly, and that was why he was in restraints. And then, the young doctor looked at Diane, with enormous distress in his eyes, and said, “ ‘If I don’t keep Mr. S. in restraints, he’ll die.’ ”
There’s a concept in the medical ethics literature called moral distress — it’s a description of how one feels when you know what is ethically appropriate, but you are unable to do what’s right because of obstacles that are inherent in the situation. Moral distress was first described in 1984 in a book on nursing ethics and the term is mostly used in relation to nurses, who often feel trapped between the doctor’s orders and the suffering of patients.
Obviously moral distress is not limited to nurses. Diane’s story about the dying man haunts me because there was suffering on both ends of the stethoscope. The story of Mr. S gave me some insight into clinicians’ struggles, and it a measure of compassion – a way to integrate my own conflicting feelings about the role clinicians play in the delivery of unnecessary care.
Here is the conflict. On the one hand, it was a physician who wrote the orders for Mr. S to be put in 4-point restraints. It is, after all, always a clinician who writes an order for an unnecessary drug, who performs an unneeded catheterization, who admits a patient to the ICU when what the patient really wants is to die at home.
On the other hand, many clinicians feel trapped in a system that often pushes them to do the wrong thing. A system that makes it easy to do harm. And just like that young neurology resident, they feel a terrible distress.
Clearly the prime directive of medicine, primum non nocere, which I think would sound a lot better if it were pronounced with an Italian accent, is inadequate to the task of helping clinicians perform the balancing act that is inherent in the practice of medicine. Of balancing the potential for harm from not doing enough, which is where thinking about medical ethics has tended to dwell, against the harm from doing too much.
This leads us to many questions, a few of which I’ll name here:
1.Why do we perceive errors of commission as lesser sins than errors of omission?
2. And why do we not consider it an error, or at least unethical, to fail to inform patients about the true costs, both financial and physical, of medical care, and its limitations?
3. How can it be ethical to use a shiny, new, and often very expensive technology, like a robot, or a drug-eluting stent, or a new surgical technique, as a marketing tool to bring in paying customers? And how can we continue to use it without bothering to find out if it actually works?
I’ll stop there.
My request to this panel is the answer to an admittedly blunt question: Do we need a new medical ethic? Because clearly, just saying no to harm is not enough.
I won’t go into lengthy introductions. Please read this panel’s bios. Diane Meier, Howard Brody, and Jerry Hoffman are highly accomplished, recognized in their fields, but they are here today because they also have thought deeply about the meaning of professionalism. Howard Brody has the added distinction of being a bioethicist by training.
Jerry Hoffman will lead off with some overarching principles. Howard Brody will bring an ethicist’s perspective, and Diane Meier will bring us full circle to the this problem of moral distress.
The role of patients and families – Jessie Gruman
The Role of Patients and Families in Avoiding Avoidable Care
Jessie Gruman
www.cfah.org
The speakers and discussants at this Avoiding Avoidable Care Meeting have not attributed to patients and families a significant role in curbing unecessary care and overtreatment. Thank goodness.
Indeed, we have heard little about “consumers” and “empowered patients,” the benign, egalitarian words that are so often used to disguise shifts onto patients risks and responsibilities that rightfully belong to clinicians and institutions. While some of us will be able to shoulder those new responsibilities, many of us will not. We are sick, we lack the time and resources, the cognitive skills or the confidence to take them on. This means we will be an unreliable force in challenging the status quo in which avoidable care is so common.
A Primary Care Perspective – Allan H. Goroll
Payment Reform for Achieving Reduction in Unnecessary Care
The Primary Care Perspective – Key Issues
Allan H. Goroll, MD, MACP
Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School
The predominant system for physician payment in the U.S., Medicare’s fee-for-service (FFS) RBRVS model as interpreted for CMS by the AMA’s RBRVS Update Committee [RUC], has had several adverse, counterproductive effects on primary care:
• Incented high volumes of short visits by paying only for face-to-face care and assigning a very low rate for evaluation and management services
• Compromised time for proper diagnosis, patient education, counseling, and care management/shared decision making (Ludmerer: “No Time to Heal”)
• Reduced the diagnostic confidence of primary physicians, who feel too rushed to make a firm diagnosis and who compensate by resorting to excessive test ordering and low thresholds for specialty referral both for patient safety and for reducing liability risk
• Discouraged prospective new medical graduates from going into primary care due to financial penalty ($3.5M lifetime pay disparity) and poor work environment (the “hamster wheel”), leading to a national work force crisis in primary care
• Depleted primary care practices of the capital needed to implement the teams and technology necessary to achieve current high-performance standards
Needed: Fundamental reform of payment for primary care, including
• Elimination of the “volume imperative,” (i.e., eliminating the predominance of FFS)
• Realignment of payment to support desired outcomes (e.g., achievement of desired Triple Aim goals); if comprehensive care is desired, pay should be comprehensive rather than piecemeal.
• Assuring sufficient financial resources for the necessary teams and technology essential to high-performance practice
• Paying for work that creates value beyond the face-to-face encounter, including payment for care management and population management
• Powerful, validated risk adjustment that protects against cherry-picking patients.
• Incentives for collaborative care with other providers
• Ability to negotiate payment within integrated systems of care to assure payment is proportional to risk and responsibility undertaken and consistent with overall goals
Managing Costs by Keeping Patients Healthy
HMOs–a bad word in health reform circles–flourished and then declined 20 years ago. But were they entirely worthless? Often they were bullies that took no patient or provider input into their decisions, and their cost control strategies could be brutal. Their payment schemes to providers could cause unscrupulous doctors to skimp on care, but they did bend the cost curve for a few years.
Their best feature was that their payment schemes did address overutilization. This had the potential to save lives and reduce morbidity. Nothing good can come to a patient who is subjected to a test or procedure that he doesn’t really need, and a great deal of risk comes with every medical intervention. I see countless instances of overutilization every day: repair of fractures that don’t really need it, shoulder and knee scopes for vague or non-existent indications, MRIs ordered for pain without any physical findings. Our current reimbursement schemes reward all of this.
If we knew then what we know now regarding patient satisfaction, physician strategies to improve patient outcomes, the importance of good communication and physician empathy, would the HMO payment model have had more success? Could we have kept patients satisfied, feeling well cared for, and been given good care while eliminating the financial incentives for dangerous overutilization? What if HMOs had understood the precepts of patient centered medicine as we currently understand it. Could primary care doctors have told their patients “no” without causing a backlash?
Now, I’m not suggesting that we return to HMOs, but alternative payment strategies that deliver just the care that patients really need can succeed so long as they are coupled with doctors practicing patient centered care. Office visits, especially to primary care docs, will need to be better reimbursed to make this model attractive to general practitioners, but HMOs floundered primarily due to poor patient satisfaction rates, and we know enough now to manage costs better and keep our patients healthy and happy with their care.
Commentary on Payment Mechanisms – Dolores Mitchell
Dolores Mitchell, Executive Director, Group Insurance Commission
Purchasers are under enormous pressure to reduce health care costs that increase the cost of their products and services, making companies non competitive and wages stagnant. Purchasers also lack the ability to affect overuse except with tools that often just pass the rising costs to consumers. Utilization review mechanisms breed resentment from employees as well as providers and are only marginally effective. Criticizing doctors or hospitals sis considered taboo,particularly in areas where the medical/pharmaceutical/medical device industries create jobs, even if they have a negative effect on job growth in other sectors of the economy. Purchasers welcome leadership in addressing issues of overuse by physician organizations such as the IOM, THE ABIM and the Lown Foundation.
RESTRICTING COVERAGE WITH DESIGNED DELAYS FOR RIGOROUS EVALUATION
from Malcolm Maclure, Prof & BC Chair in Patient Safety, University of British Columbia
I have one suggestion based on experience in British Columbia: when restrictions on coverage must be implemented, use design delays (staggered implementation.)
Ideally these would be randomized control groups, but controlled time series designs, especially with matching, are almost as rigorous as RCTs in my experience, and institutionally they seem to be more feasible.
I was inspired by my interview with Tom Chalmers almost 20 years ago, to advocate within the British Columbia Ministry of Health for control groups to be used when the public drug plan (‘PharmaCare’) introduced restrictions on drug coverage. I call this approach ‘designed delays’ because delays are the norm, and ‘designed’ feels like adding orderliness to the process, whereas ‘randomized’ feels like adding chaos to a program that is already complex.
Chalmers told me he had urged the Veterans Health Administration to pair-match hospitals and randomly select one of each pair to be first with a new service while the other hospital was delayed as a control. Despite his close connections with the VHA, he thrice failed to convince the VHA to use designed delays — for Coronary Care Units, for CAT scans and for MRIs. He was very frustrated by the experience and stymied on how to routinize randomization.
In British Columbia, we now routinely implement prescribing education initiatives with randomized delays but our success in using designed delays for changes in drug coverage has been much more limited. Our main success in using designed delays was in 1999 when we partially restricted coverage of nebulized medications. It went so smoothly that the method of designed delays was endorsed for 2 other drug restriction policies (but the restrictions were never introduced for other reasons.)
In contrast, designed delays when ADDING coverage of a new medication seems to be much more difficult. The hope (or hype) that the new drug will yield better outcomes, makes delays unacceptable. On the other hand, SUBTRACTING a medication or service that is believed by many (but not everyone) to be of little value, is made easier by promising rigorous evaluation by use of delays controls.
The most vehement critic and the strongest proponent of the policy AGREED that randomized delay was a good idea. They were both convinced that rigorous evaluation would prove they were right. Commitment to rigorous evaluation thus instantly refuted the criticism that the government was only interested in cost control, not patient outcomes.
A university ethics committee had no difficulty with randomized delays of the restriction because it eventually would apply to everyone, unless the evaluation showed the restriction was harmful (in which case the drug plan director was committed to reassessing the policy.) In contrast, another ethics committee was critical of our proposal for delayed coverage of a NEW medication.
My hypothesis is that when a health organization is forced to restrict services (e.g. the UK National Health Service must cut 20 billion pounds in the next four years), there will be many opportunities to evaluate the balance of benefits versus harms of the restrictions by using delayed controls.
Although Tom Chalmers’s advice mostly fell on deaf ears during times of plenty, I predict his advice will become more appealing to decision makers as cost pressures increase.
(These comments are my own opinions and observations in my academic capacity as Chair in Patient Safety at UBC. That appointment includes my continuation half-time as Co-Director of Research and Evidence Development, an advisory role in the Pharmaceutical Services Division of the BC Ministry of Health. I wish to stress that my opinions are not to be interpreted as representing the Ministry’s positions on these matters.)
A new hip for an 87 year old: the surgeon’s Siren song
I saw an elder gent a month ago; his hip pain was getting worse …. He’d seen a surgeon.
“You’ll be out of the hospital and rehab, home in 3 weeks” the surgeon said.
“You’ll be doing nothing but rehab and exercises for 3 MONTHS; you’ll be at limited power for six months; it will be a year to be 95%” I said.
He came in today for a preop evaluation. Even though he’s been out mowing his lawn and doing most of what he wants, he thinks surgery will make him “better.” He has “good insurance” and has chosen to proceed.
I’m reasonably confident he will “do well” perioperatively but I’m dubious that he’ll be “better” in the long run.
– excerpt from this afternoon’s office hours
Ted Herwig MD, family physician
Teaching Appropriate Utilization in Medical School
To some extent appropriate utilization can be taught to senior medical students by committed physicians who are knowledgeable about the negative consequences of not avoiding avoidable care. Included among likely instructors would be primary care physicians, internists (including medical subspecialists), pediatricians, surgeons and radiologists.
A six week curriculum with both didactic lectures and case presentations could form the substrate for the course. But there would have to be involvement from other knowledgeable individuals in each medical school who would educate the students about the economic, sociological and public health issues intrinsic to the topic.
Where could the time be found? The fourth year of medical school is in many ways a wasteland, (pun intended). It is in large measure a waste of time with allotments of weeks to meaningless requirements often merely to allocate treasured hours to satisfy the special desires of powerful actors who can influence curriculum assignments. It is a waste of money – both for the hours spent without a sound education focus and most specifically for the long and costly interview process incurred by students as they seek internship and residency positions.
Why should a student travel around the country on his or her dime to interview at the home site of a prospective training site in accordance with schedules which serve the convenience of Program Directors? And these odysseys occur predominantly in December and January when travel is most difficult.
Why not change the process? Program Directors could evaluate the applicant without a visit to the medical center. For example, law school is also a three year commitment
(like many residencies). Site visits to them are not mandatory, let alone necessary. In truth, applicants to medical training programs for the most part are more interested in the environs of the hospital, (the neighborhood and the city) than the structural character of the hospital or its amenities. Such information can be gleaned by web site displays and other material most programs now readily provide.
Or for small and moderate sized internships and residencies, interviews could be held at one or two locations nationally so that all applicants and interviewers come together for one week or so allowing for multiple interactions in a short time. These visits are secured by lower cost and lessened time away for both students and Program Directors than by customary visits at the behest and convenience of potential hirers. Podiatry does this now. Why can’t residency programs in medical specialties do it as well?
The time freed up in December and January can then be made to accommodate an uninterrupted course of study at the home base. The curriculum could be focused and sustained, devoted to the important mission of educating students about the specifics of appropriate rather than excessive care which is too often a product of the sensibilities of contemporary American medical graduates.