November 25th, 2009

U.S. health IT money going to community colleges

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:58 am

Categories: General, Government, Hospital IT, Medical IT, Medical Office IT, Medical Records, Physician Information, U.S.

Tags: Information Technology, Health Care, Training, Workforce Management, Vertical Industries, Training And Certification, Benefits, Healthcare, Human Resources, Dana Blankenhorn

National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (NCHIT) David Blumenthal has launched his own blog, where he announced this week $80 million in grants for health IT training, mainly to community colleges.

The money was authorized as part of the Obama stimulus, specifically the $19.2 billion HITECH Act.

Administrators can apply for a total of $70 million in community college grants, which would go into programs aiming to train health IT professionals. The hope is that 10,500 people can be trained annually in the use of health IT systems through the program.

These are not programming jobs. Among the “exciting job opportunities” the money hopes to create are:

• Practice workflow and information management redesign specialists;
• Clinician/practitioner consultants;
• Implementation support specialists;
• Implementation managers;
• Technical/software support staff;
• Trainers

This follows common medical practice, where a hospital or medical practice has a number of people trained at different levels of depth to perform different roles.

In addition to the training money, there’s $10 million available to create the training materials for these programs.

It will be interesting to find out just what is going to be taught, given the wide differences among all the various EHR systems now on the market.

Will Community Colleges align themselves with specific vendors in order to stretch their dollars, thereby giving those products market advantages? Or will the curriculum be more general, based on technical standards and legal requirements?

Stay tuned to Blumenthal’s blog for more. We’ve put it on our blogroll.

November 23rd, 2009

Who wants tea with their turkey?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:59 am

Categories: Finance, General, Government, U.S.

Tags: Sen., Tea, Republican, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Human Resources, Dana Blankenhorn

Whenever I had Thanksgiving dinner with my in-laws in Texas, there was always tea at the table.

Usually sweet tea. (Still from an anti-reform video by the Tax Tea Party.)

There’s going to be a lot of unsweet tea at a lot of American tables this Thanksgiving, as Republicans and other health reform opponents launch an all-out media blitz to keep the Senate from getting 60 votes to end debate on S. 3590, on which debate has officially begun.

The Republican ads are targeting moderates like Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (above), whose deals for supporting debate are being called “back-room” bribe agreements reached “in the dead of night.”

Maybe they were, although the vote to start debate was at 8 PM on Saturday.

The problem is the condemnation won’t end for these Senators no matter how they vote. Republicans successfully targeted both Democratic supporters and opponents of health reform in 1994.

The threats would have more meaning if Republican voters were willing to embrace party-switchers, like Sen. Joe Lieberman. (They accepted several in 1994 and one, Sen. Richard Shelby, remains in the Senate.)

But polls show grassroots Republicans think little of such converts. As a Republican Lieberman might even lose a primary to Cliff Clavin (played on Cheers by John Ratzenberger, left.)

One thing Republicans can do in the coming debate is support conservative amendments, in which case the magic number becomes 11. Any amendment getting solid Republican support and 11 Democrats goes into the bill that must then get 60 votes to come up for a final vote.

Democratic leaders will spend the holiday negotiating to see what amendments might win the support of people like Sen. Landrieu on final passage without antagonizing the liberal majority. Republicans will try to win 11 Democrats to amendments liberals will detest enough to turn against their own bill.

Good thing, then, that the football games this weekend are going to be lousy. Take Green Bay, Dallas, New York, and Harry Reid. Give the points.

November 19th, 2009

Reid promises 60 on Saturday

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:18 am

Categories: General, Government, U.S.

Tags: Democrat, Vote, Reid, Taxes, Free Trade, Homeland Security, Personal Finance, Leadership, Financial Planning, Finance

Senate Democrats released their final leadership bill on health reform yesterday, believing there will be 60 votes to start debate on Saturday.

The measure, now known as S. 3590, runs to 2,074 pages, includes a public option, and carries a “CBO Score” claiming a $130 billion reduction in the federal deficit over 10 years.

Democrats who trooped to MSNBC microphones last night expressed confidence the 60 votes needed to beat a Republican filibuster will be there, not only to start debate but to close it and move toward final passage.

Sen. Tom Harkin told Rachel Maddow that a cloture vote to stop a filibuster has to be won, because a bill under the “reconciliation” process would have to come through the Budget Committee, and would thus lose all the money-saving and wellness provisions in the final bill.

Thus while President Bush could push though his tax cuts on a simple majority, Democrats will need unanimity in their 60-member caucus to push this bill through.

This gives enormous power to conservative Democrats who could withhold the crucial 60th vote, such as Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

The big smiles on the faces of Democratic leaders like Charles Schumer of New York seemed to indicate Lieberman doesn’t want to lose the chairmanship of his Homeland Security Committee, that polls showing a majority of Arkansans want a public option may sway Lincoln, and that Landrieu is not up for re-election until 2014.

This leaves Nelson of Nebraska. He’s up for re-election in 2012, but Fivethirtyeight.com says voters there oppose a public option 47-39. (Other polls disagree.)

So why the happy faces?

It might be the lesson Obama adviser David Axelrod draws from the loss by Creigh Deeds in Virginia (above). Failure to secure base Democrats makes you a loser, the thinking goes, and base Democrats are big supporters of a strong public option.

In a polarized nation strategic voting does not work. If people want conservatism there’s an app for that. Anyone in the middle of the road gets run over.

Here is what is most likely. Reid gets his 60 votes to start debate. Amendments are offered and the bill becomes more conservative to assure the 60 votes needed to end debate. Then it’s on to a House-Senate conference and my New Year’s Resolution is no more political posts here in 2010.

November 18th, 2009

Why electronic health records have far to go

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:30 am

Categories: Finance, General, Government, Hospital IT, IT Management, Internet, Medical IT, Medical Office IT, Medical Records, Physician Information, U.S.

Tags: Electronic Health Record, Training, Health Internet, Moore, E-health, Healthcare, Dana Blankenhorn

It’s easy to seize on word that electronic health records (EHR) are not yet saving money and call everything the Obama Administration is doing in health care bogus.

That would be unfair to the technology.

Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health offered the report this week as a scene-setter for the school’s Public Health and Technology (PHAT) conference, whose speakers’ list is a who’s who of EHR advocates. (Picture from Dr. Ashish Jah’s home page at Harvard.)

Rather than being a hit piece at the current Administration’s aims, the report focuses on the best practices of groups like Kaiser Permanente and the Cleveland Clinic, which have spent years adapting their work to the technology. Do these things and you can make things work, as proven in areas like heart care, he writes.

Rather than focusing on paying for the computers and software, he says, emphasis should be placed on training people, and adapting practices to take advantage of what the data can do. As in any business a failure to adapt means you’re wasting money.

Dr. Jha made this point in the School of Public Health’s in-house publication last month. Speaking at a University-sponsored public forum in September, he said this:

The money in the stimulus bill is going to help a lot in terms of getting systems adopted. You’re going to see this entire field change dramatically in the next several years. You’re going to see new vendors getting into this field who haven’t been there before. I’m hopeful this will mean better products that will require less training. There’s no doubt in my mind that five years from now, we are going to have far more widespread use of electronic health records.

Whether we are going to get to 90% as President Obama has said he wants, I’m not sure. But the bottom line is that this train has left the station. We’re moving towards electronic records. The only question is whether we can do it well. The big challenge for us is to make sure we adopt these systems effectively, that we remember the prize is not electronic records; the prize is higher quality at lower cost. And that’s only going to happen if we really think through how to adopt these systems in a more organized and effective way.

Those are the words of an EHR enthusiast, not a skeptic, and certainly not a cynic.

Fact is the EHR revolution has barely begun. The Health Internet is still being implemented. Barely one hospital in 10 has a functioning EHR system. Moore’s Law of Training (there is no Moore’s Law of Training, we learn as fast as we learn) has barely kicked in.

The health IT revolution will not happen like the turning on of a light switch, as people in every other industry that has been touched by computers, including journalism, will tell you.

It’s a long-term process.

November 17th, 2009

Keep your genes to yourself after this weekend

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:03 am

Categories: Curioisities, Ethics, General, Government, IT Management, Medical Records, U.S., genetics

Tags: Insurance Company, Health Care, Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, Family History, Insurance, Vertical Industries, Healthcare, Benefits, Business Operations, Corporate Insurance

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) goes into force this weekend, and the regulations will impact more than the mere collection of genomes.

The Act was passed last year and signed by then-President Bush.

It makes it illegal to base insurance eligibility or even rates on genetic data, including family histories. Some insurers had been giving discounts to people who completed family history questionnaires. No more.

Employers are already complaining. Some say common health risk assessments will no longer be legitimate. Some complain that wellness programs will be hurt.

Some employer groups and insurers wanted the law’s implementation delayed. Lawyers are already going ka-ching. People who don’t like lawyers are wringing their hands.

The American Medical Association has told its members that physicians should no longer participate with insurers on genetic testing, and even limit disclosures of genetic data to law enforcement.

Basically the new law puts your family history, including your genetic make-up, under requirements similar to those of HIPAA. Just as doctors can’t share your medical data with outsiders, they can’t share your family history either. This may require changes to Electronic Health Record (EHR) software, especially on the server side.

The New York Times says the law will have some unintended consequences. If a CEO’s father and grandfather died of heart attacks at age 50, and the board refuses to promote him to the top chair at age 49, he could have a tort.

Some data can still be collected. There’s a “water cooler” exception, so if you tell the boss about your mom’s breast cancer they can hear that. Or if they later read her obituary in the paper. Or if they ask why you took family leave and you say it’s because your dad has pancreatic cancer.

GINA may be impacting you right now, because many companies are engaged in “open enrollment programs” for next year’s health insurance. There are no longer discounts for giving the insurer data. Some analysts think the new law is America’s definitive statement that they don’t want insurers playing their present expansive role in the health care system.

As with everything, there are unintended consequences. Some baseball teams have used genetic tests to identify (and set the age for) players from Latin America. One basketball team refused to re-sign a player without a genetic test. Perhaps, as Roberto Duran once said, no mas.

One more thing. The blog Queerty notes that if they ever find the the “gay gene” employers can’t test for it, nor discriminate against you based on it. They’ll have to rely on finding your two tickets to “Gypsy”, or meeting your companion at the company picnic. (Hey, I love “Gypsy.”)

November 17th, 2009

The emergency room myth busted

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:11 am

Categories: Curioisities, Ethics, General, Government, U.S.

Tags: Tort, Emergency Room, Insurance, Financial Planning, Business Operations, Corporate Insurance, Finance, Dana Blankenhorn

One of the more interesting aspects of watching the health reform debate evolve is looking closely at the arguments of reform opponents.

1. Tort reform, they shout. OK, want to federalize insurance torts? No way. Then how do you put tort reform into this bill?
2. Buy across states, they shout. OK, want to federalize insurance regulation? No way. Then how can you overrule state regulations?
3. Let the poor die. OK, but what about our being a Christian nation? Let charities take care of it. And when they’re inadequate, as they are?
4. The poor can go to emergency rooms.

It’s this last one that got the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers. So they combed through data from The National Trauma Data Bank, which has 2.7 million cases from over 900 trauma centers.

Guess what they found? As reported in the Archives of Surgery, uninsured people had higher risks of death, even adjusted for age, sex, type of injury, etc. In some cases, like operating rooms, they were nearly twice as likely to die as insured patients, from the same injuries.

Brent Eastman, newly-elected chair of the American College of Surgeons, which runs the journal in question, added a tut-tutting commentary, calling the findings disturbing.

Opponents of reform can hang their hats on this. One of the authors of the new study, Dr. Atul Gawande (above), is known to be very much in favor of health reform.

He authored the piece in The New Yorker describing why costs in McAllen, Texas are much, much higher than elsewhere in the state, pointing to conflicts of interests among doctors who own hospitals.

In Gawande’s latest article, for The New York Times, he got together “positive outliers,” people from cities whose results and costs are better than average. Just by copying their best practices, he writes, we could save $1,500 per Medicare patient, slow inflation to 3% per year, yet improve quality.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled trolling.

November 13th, 2009

I'm in a nanny state state of mind

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:45 am

Categories: Consumer Information, Curioisities, General, Government, Home Health Care, Internet, U.S., Wellness, state government

Tags: State, Tobacco Company, Rates, Taxes, Free Trade, Financial Planning, Finance, Dana Blankenhorn

The headline is that the U.S. smoking rate has stalled at over 20%, but the news is those places that have the strongest “nanny state” policies against smoking and smokers are still making progress, while those that don’t are not.

In other words, the nanny state works.

The government broke out its numbers by age, race and education, as well as by state.

Rates are highest among native Americans (more than one-third), among those with limited education (nearly half of those with a Graduate Equivalency Diploma (GED) smoke), and in coal country (rates are highest in Kentucky and West Virginia).

Rates are lowest where elements of social control are strong (Utah leads at 11%), and where policies aggressively fight smoking (California is second at 14%). The rate in New York, where the state tax for each pack of cigarettes is now $2.75, dropped from 18.3% in 2007 to 16.8% in 2008.

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing over 1,000 people each day, the CDC said, with 1 in 10 of those deaths being caused by second-hand smoke.

The real scandal, shown in the chart above, is that only 3% of the excise taxes and settlement dollars collected by states go to smoking cessation programs. While $24.9 billion is available, the states spend just $75 million. Tobacco companies spent $13 billion in advertising in 2006.

In other words, we’re being outgunned better than 13-1 even though we’re putting out twice as much money to fight smoking as the tobacco companies are laying out to keep it around. That’s Halliburton-like efficiency.

If you want to save money on health care, in other words, maybe you too need to get into a nanny state state of mind. Or just become a little more personally intolerant of having smokers around you, so you don’t wind up among the 100 non-smokers killed by cigarettes each day.

November 11th, 2009

Why not pay for what works?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:44 am

Categories: Drugs, Gadgets, General, Government, Home Health Care Equipment, Hospital Equipment, Insurance IT, Medical Equipment, Medical IT, Medical Office Equipment, Rehabilitation, U.S., state government

Tags: Patient, Health Care, McCaughey, Insurance, Financial Planning, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Business Operations, Corporate Insurance

In all the hullabaloo over health reform, Charles Silver and David Hyman write at The Health Care Blog, a key point of cost control has been lost.

Paying only for what works.

Silver and Hyman are law professors, not doctors. They point to a RAND Corp. study saying that “one-third or more of all procedures performed in the United States are of questionable benefit.” (The illustration is from the study.)

What happened to this simple idea?

The way to enforce it is through comparative effectiveness. Analyze data from millions of patients, develop best practices, and move physicians toward the most cost-effective solution.

This is what every other country does, regardless of how they pay for care. Formularies drive care, based on cost effectiveness. Anyone who wants to go outside what works had better have a good explanation. Often, going outside what works is simply forbidden, or patients are told to buy it with their own money.

Isn’t that how you set priorities? Why should governments or insurance companies act differently?

Unfortunately this was one of the first dominoes to fall in the debate. Reform opponents like Betsy McCaughey called this “getting between a patient and their doctor.”

This happened in conjunction with the debate over the Obama stimulus, and the subject was health IT. The purpose of the HITECH Act’s $19.2 billion in stimulus was to collect the data that would drive decisions on what to pay for.

McCaughey’s scare worked. Explicit promises were made not to use comparative effectiveness in any way to deny care, not to use evidence to decide what we should pay for.

The alternative to evidence is politics. Silver and Hyman note that millions of insurance dollars are spent annually on entirely non-medical treatments like Christian Science, but there’s more:

Lobbying from providers and supportive patients explains why many states already mandate coverage of elective services like in-vitro fertilization, massage therapy, and visits to athletic trainers. Concerns about the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of treatments are washed away by a stream of campaign contributions, and sad stories about patients who can only obtain the “necessary” services if the insurer will pay for them.

This is what is wrong with the present system. State regulation of insurance is based on politics, so your coverage includes any procedure that becomes politically powerful in your state. That’s why insurance costs are rising through the roof.

There is nothing wrong with paying for prayer but it’s not medicine, they write. There’s nothing wrong with in-vitro fertilization but it’s optional, not something everyone should have to cover.

Thus, by tossing away evidence as a way to rule-out certain coverages, you pay for a lot of stuff you don’t need.

Silver and Hyman wrote to argue against a politically-motivated individual mandate. Any mandate should be based on science, not politics, and by giving up on comparative effectiveness early in the process, it became impossible to set that standard, either through the federal government or through the states.

If this was Betsy McCaughey’s intent, she is fiendishly clever. Health care will remain a growth industry, because Americans will keep having to pay for stuff that doesn’t work, regardless of whether reform passes or fails.

November 11th, 2009

CCHIT going on almost as if nothing happened

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:53 am

Categories: General, Hospital IT, IT Management, Medical IT, Medical Office IT, Medical Records, Physician Information, U.S.

Tags: U.S. Department Of Health And Human Services, Electronic Health Record, Health Care, Standards, CCHIT, Blumenthal, E-health, Quality, Healthcare, Vertical Industries

One of the big controversies early this year was over the role CCHIT was playing, certifying vendors to sell Electronic Health Record (EHR) software.

CCHIT (Certification Commission for Health Information Technology) was formed in 2004 out of HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), an industry group, and began certifying EHR systems in 2006. Until this year you entered the EHR market by first undergoing CCHIT certification.

Was their approach right, or was it too rigid? Was it really helping buyers, or just pointing them toward expensive solutions from members of the HIMSS industry group?

When we last left the story the good guys seemed to have won. The standards under which software will be approved for stimulus cash are functional, requiring meaningful use. They’re not programmatic. It’s not what the software does, but whether it’s used, and for what, that counts.

So what happened to CCHIT? They’re going along pretty much as before.

In an extended interview with Healthcare Informatics, CCHIT head Mark Leavitt (above) said the group has added a new Preliminary ARRA 2011 Certification to its suite of products.

“It doesn’t really matter” what the National Coordinator of Health IT, David Blumenthal, or his policy committee come up with, Leavitt told Anthony Guerra.  CCHIT’s “Get Certified” seminar in October drew an overflow crowd.

Blumenthal’s policy committee called its government standard “HHS certification.” Leavitt called the same set of criteria “Preliminary ARRA Certification” because the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) may give it yet-another name, and because the rules on all this don’t go out until next month in any case.

Even after that there will be time for CCHIT and others to comment, and for those comments to be digested, before they are final. Then certifying authorities must be appointed, and CCHIT has applied to be one. Meanwhile hospitals and doctors are having to make decisions that may haunt them through their professional lifetimes.

In his interview, Leavitt called the ARRA rules “basic” and his own rules “comprehensive,” but in fact one is the government standard and the other CCHIT’s private one.

What has happened is that CCHIT has been forced to take a step back, from being the gatekeeper of market entry to being one of perhaps several groups looking to be certification authorities under the new rules.

This is not Leavitt’s spin on the matter:

We’ve heard from provider groups, we’ve heard from the specialties that the marketplace was not making adequate progress in making the products they needed with all the features they needed.

There’s more than just federal standards, there are other requirements they have as providers, such as supporting workflows and maintaining a legally adequate record. They really thought CCHIT was a way to have a community conversation and move the entire marketplace forward.

We’re not a gatekeeper. We’re a community conversation. The CCHIT “comprehensive” standards aren’t for the  “sophisticated CIO,” in Leavitt’s words, but for small hospitals, for small practices, the people who need help in making an informed choice.

Maybe, but these same customers also have the most constrained budgets, and fairly basic needs. Do they need something a private industry group has deemed meets “comprehensive” standards or not?

That is a question the market will have to decide. Will hospital administrators and practice managers insist on the comprehensive CCHIT-approved label, or will they accept any solution that brings them that sweet, sweet stimulus cash?

November 9th, 2009

Health reform now in Senate hands

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:54 am

Categories: General, Government, U.S.

Tags: Bill, Democrat, Republican, Health Care, U.S. Senate, Cao, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Leadership

As expected, the House passed a version of health reform on Saturday, 220-215, with Louisiana Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao (right) joining the Democrats.

Cao was elected unexpectedly last year to replace the indicted William Jefferson, who was later convicted of bribery. His majority-black district is heavily Democratic, thus he was torn between loyalty to party and the desires of constituents.

He chose self-preservation while sitting between Republican leaders who were leaning on him to make their opposition unanimous, making his choice known after the 218 majority had been achieved.

Cao’s support was mostly symbolic. This is a Democratic bill, just as the Senate Finance Committee bill endorsed by Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine is a Democratic bill. But any break in Republican unity is seen by Democrats as a big deal.

The bill passed by the House includes a public option, but prohibits any coverage for abortion, even within the proposed health exchange, when a patient is buying with a subsidy. This provision was added to the bill through an amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, who said conservative Democrats would not vote for the bill without it.

Cao, a Catholic and former seminarian, credited the Stupak Amendment with securing his vote.

All this goes to the Senate, which appears to lack the votes to beat a filibuster on a leadership bill containing the public option.

Majority Leader Harry Reid has indicated his body may not pass a bill until next year, after which both Houses will hold a conference to come up with a single bill both must then pass without amendment before the President can sign it.

So the show goes on.