Round Up the Usual Suspects

By Kim Bellard, September 11, 2012

Two recent reports have added more empirical support to the widely held belief that our health care system wastes significant amounts of money.  I’m shocked, shocked!  As Captain Renauld said in Casablanca, round up the usual suspects. 

The first report, published in Health Affairs, was from UnitedHealth Group.  The authors examined data from 250,000 physicians around the country, focusing on the privately insured population.  Consistent with the years of data from the Dartmouth Atlas on the Medicare population, it showed widespread variation.  The authors report episode costs for procedures vary 2.5 times, while episode costs for chronic conditions vary 15-fold.  Overall, the report concludes that costs could be 14% lower if delivered by physicians meeting certain quality and cost-efficiency designations. 

An even more assertive claim was made by the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM).  Their report, Best Care at Lower Cost, believes that as much as a third of spending is wasted – some $750 billion based on 2009 health spending.  The IOM is no stranger to big claims, including the oft-quoted 98,000 deaths annually due to medical error in their landmark report To Err is Human.  In their new report, they conclude that 75,000 deaths could be avoided if every state delivered care as well as the best performing state.  The IOM was more granular than simply claiming the waste is all unnecessary care: $210 billion in unnecessary services, $190 billion in excessive administrative costs, $130 billion from inefficiently delivered services, $105 billion due to prices that are too high, $75 billion in fraud, and $55 billion in missed prevention opportunities.  That’s a lot of targets of opportunity.

The IOM notes some lessons from other industries, and believe significant improvement is possible, on a variety of fronts: using information technology more effectively, creating systems to manage complexity, more focus on making health care safer, improving transparency of costs, quality and outcomes, promoting teamwork and communication between providers, partnering with patients, and decreasing waste/improving efficiency. They believe that the technology is here to support all these, and the problem is better application of it to health care systems and processes.  No mention was made of “death panels” (!), although I’m waiting for someone to bring up that specter.

There are too many examples that illustrate the flaws in the current system.  For example, Johns Hopkins recently reported that as many as a quarter of adult patients in ICUs may die as a result of missed or incorrect diagnoses, resulting in some 40,500 deaths annually.  The authors note that is more people who die each year from breast cancer.  One would think that ICU patients are getting pretty close attention, more than other patients, which make these results all the more troubling (to be fair, of course, they likely have complicated sets of conditions, making diagnosis harder).

More troubling are recent allegations and lawsuits about unnecessary heart surgeries aimed at increasing hospital revenue/physician income, including HCA and St. Joseph-London in Kentucky.  If these allegations are shown to be valid, these practices may just be the tip of the iceberg.  Throw in recent warnings about the overuse of well-intended but over-used diagnostic tests like screenings for ovarian cancer or prostate cancer, or the cost-benefits from increased exposure to radiation via increased imaging, and it makes one wonder if treatment recommendations should come with a warning label. 

The IOM cited technology as a tool to help support improvement in how the health system performs, and there is data which suggest this hope is not in vain.  The CDC reports that 55% of physicians had an electronic health record in 2011, and half of the remaining physicians expected to be using one in the next year.  Clearly, HITECH has helped spur this adoption, as has the trend of health systems purchasing physician practices.  Solo practitioners significantly lag in adoption (29%), and CDC reports a statistically significant difference in adoption from physicians over 50: 49% versus 64%.  More importantly, about three-quarters of adopters believe that the EHR both enhances patient care and meets Meaningful Use criteria. 

Also encouraging is a report from Medpage Today on physician technology use.  They report 9 out of 10 physicians experienced an increase in the use of the Internet in their practice: 71% spend 3 or more hours a day on a computer, 24% use a mobile device 3+ hours a day, and 18% use a tablet 3+ hours per days, all in support of their practice.  Unlike the CDC results, though, they see very little impact of age on technology adoption, except in use of a smartphone.  The Medpage respondents are a stressed bunch, seeing more patients each day and, as a result, seeing fewer drug reps, spending less time with each patient, and reading fewer medical journals/attending fewer conferences.  The last point is particularly concerning to build the nimble “learning” culture that the IOM advocates, which helps account for the finding that almost all respondents are using their devices to keep up-to-date on clinical news and medical education. 

I’ve often been critical of physicians’ reluctance to adopt technology solutions, but I’m increasingly coming to the point of view that it is technology that is failing them.  We’ve laboriously endeavored to get medical records into an electronic state, when the real challenge is deciding what health data we want tracked, and what views/inputs are needed by different types of users – including patients.   I’ll point to a nice column by Shahid Shah that details some of the kind of patient-centered forward thinking we need, as well as to a recent study by Hripcsak and Albers that reminds us that poorly designed data going in has damaging effects on the usefulness of that data. 

Maybe we need to scrap all those legacy practice management systems and EMRs and study what modern CRM systems in other industries can teach us about tracking and knowing patients, as well as take advantage of lessons learned from just-in-time manufacturing to improve care delivery efficiencies.  Add to those all the real-time data that mobile tracking apps and other monitoring devices can provide on patients’ health and we have a shot at disruptive innovation. 

Job number one in improving our health system has to be measuring who is doing what to which patients, and what impact it is having on those patients’ health.  Without better data on those, we’ll still just be rounding up those usual suspects.