A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure

Background
Wait times for both routine and urgent dermatology appointments typically exceed 3 to 4 weeks. Many factors affecting physician workforce adequacy and patient access have been explored, but little is known about the impact of increasing numbers of doctors offering cosmetic services.

Objective
We sought to evaluate access to dermatologists for patients requesting cosmetic services.

Methods
Scripted patient telephone calls were made to 898 dermatologists in 12 metropolitan areas to assess wait times for an appointment to receive cosmetic botulinum toxin injections. The areas chosen were surveyed completely, and respondents represented about one tenth of practicing dermatologists in the United States. The methodology was identical to that used in a previous study of wait times for evaluation of a changing mole (a possible indicator of malignancy).

Results
Half of dermatologist respondents (455, 50.7%) offered appointments for botulinum toxin injections, and the median wait time was 8 days. Acceptance rates and wait times varied greatly by geographic area (range of median wait times 6.0-32.5 days), with dermatologists in Miami, Fla, and Orange County, California, most likely to provide a botulinum toxin appointment with a short wait time. Many dermatologists (241, 27%) employed physician extenders, and 39% of these extenders also offered appointments for botulinum toxin injections (median wait time 6 days). In comparison with a previous study showing median wait times of 26 days for evaluation of a changing mole in these communities, wait times for cosmetic injections were significantly shorter (P < .001). Limitations The metropolitan areas surveyed contain no highly rural areas and do not represent a random sample of all US dermatology practice sites. The cosmetic and medical studies were not conducted concurrently, but were carried out in the same metropolitan areas. Conclusions Patients seeking a cosmetic botulinum toxin injection have more rapid access to dermatologists than has been previously reported for patients seeking urgent consultation for a changing mole. This study cannot differentiate between many possible explanations for the observed differences in wait times. Because physicians in many other specialties with physician shortages are also offering cosmetic services, further studies are needed to assess the broader policy implications of these findings.

When we talk about health care reform, we are really talking about dozens of different issues. Is health care reform about covering the uninsured, or about cutting costs for employers? It is about having a publicly-funded health plan, or changing reimbursements to doctors? Is it about longer life expectancies or creating insurance cooperatives? Is it about caps on medical malpractice awards, or comparative effectiveness? Is it about healthier lifestyles, or cutting the cost of prescription drugs? Is it about cutting administrative waste, or incentives for more people to go to medical school? Is it about implementing new health care IT, or preventing insurers from making excessive profits?

It’s about all of these things, and more. And that’s the problem, if you’re an ambitious reformer. There is no simple way to get all of these things under one roof.

Well, until Atul Gawande introduced us to McAllen......

......The problems of McAllen make easy talking points. But they are also a convenient way of avoiding dealing with the enormous complexity of the health care system. There are nearly 650,000 doctors in America, millions of patients, thousands of hospitals, tens of thousands of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, hundreds of thousands of employers who provide health benefits, and thousands of other charities, academics, consultants, government agencies and others who have strongly held views about our system. Too often, their voices are not being heard in all the loud talking about McAllen.

Labels: future of medicine, health care reform, Hope and Change

My Late Take on Gawande...

I know I'm late with this.... McAllen, Texas is a city with a population of 101,604 people in the city proper and about 569,00 in the metropolitan area (2000 census numbers). It also has the cost for health care in the U.S. This was a topic of a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande who examines the situation.

McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.
So why is this? Gawande compares McAllen to another Texas City, El Paso:

Yet public-health statistics show that cardiovascular-disease rates in the
county are actually lower than average, probably because its smoking rates are
quite low. Rates of asthma, H.I.V., infant mortality, cancer, and injury are
lower, too. El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially
the same demographics. Both counties have a population of roughly seven hundred
thousand, similar public-health statistics, and similar percentages of
non-English speakers, illegal immigrants, and the unemployed. Yet in 2006
Medicare expenditures (our best approximation of over-all spending patterns) in
El Paso were $7,504 per enrollee—half as much as in McAllen. An unhealthy
population couldn’t possibly be the reason that McAllen’s health-care costs are
so high.

McAllen has a lot of nice stuff:

I was impressed. The place had virtually all the technology that you’d find at
Harvard and Stanford and the Mayo Clinic, and, as I walked through that hospital
on a dusty road in South Texas, this struck me as a remarkable thing. Rich towns
get the new school buildings, fire trucks, and roads, not to mention the better
teachers and police officers and civil engineers. Poor towns don’t. But that
rule doesn’t hold for health care. At McAllen Medical Center, I saw an
orthopedic surgeon work under an operating microscope to remove a tumor that had
wrapped around the spinal cord of a fourteen-year-old. At a home-health agency,
I spoke to a nurse who could provide intravenous-drug therapy for patients with
congestive heart failure. At McAllen Heart Hospital, I watched Dyke and a team
of six do a coronary-artery bypass using technologies that didn’t exist a few
years ago. At Renaissance, I talked with a neonatologist who trained at my
hospital, in Boston, and brought McAllen new skills and technologies for
premature babies. “I’ve had nurses come up to me and say, ‘I never knew these
babies could survive,’ ” he said.
But don't get much from their investment:
And yet there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available
at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual
reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso
offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac
services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the
supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the
national average. Nor does the care given in McAllen stand out for its quality.
Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of
these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El
Paso’s. McAllen costs Medicare seven thousand dollars more per person each year
than does the average city in America. But not, as far as one can tell, because
it’s delivering better health care.

Apparently the divergence in expenditures began in 1992, prior to that McAllen was in line with the national average. Dr. Gawande has dinner with several physicians in town. They are unaware of the cost difference, and come up with the usual suspects as to why: malpractice, sicker patients, and then:

“Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are
bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said,
were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures. The surgeon
came to McAllen in the mid-nineties, and since then, he said, “the way to
practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good
job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’ ”

But Dr. Gawande makes his point with an unusual example:

The surgeon gave me an example. General surgeons are often asked to see patients
with pain from gallstones. If there aren’t any complications—and there usually
aren’t—the pain goes away on its own or with pain medication. With instruction
on eating a lower-fat diet, most patients experience no further difficulties.
But some have recurrent episodes, and need surgery to remove their gallbladder.
Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires
some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and
want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and
diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow
up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient
wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going
to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred
dollars.

I am unaware of this being a usual way of approaching this. If a patient is sent to me for a consultation to consider cholecystectomy, if they have been worked up adequately, and are a candidate, they get set up for their cholecystectomy. If I don't then the patient will find someone who will, and the next time the referring physician will send them to someone else. So the $700 dollars isn't saved overall, someone else just gets it. A similar example is the primary care physician who refuses antibiotics; the guy down the street will be happy to prescribe them and has just gained a new patient. Anyway, the citizenry of McAllen do seem to be voracious consumers of medicine:

The Medicare payment data provided the most detail. Between 2001 and 2005,
critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist
visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or
more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen
received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more
bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography,
two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel
syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to
diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more
gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes.
They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable
defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and
coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse
visits. The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the
across-the-board overuse of medicine.

He writes of discussions with hospital administrators that are either ignorant of or are in denial of the facts on the ground. The culprit seems to be the physicians themselves:

“That is interesting,” she said, by which she did not mean, “Uh-oh, you’ve
caught us” but, rather, “That is actually interesting.” The problem of McAllen’s
outlandish costs was new to her. She puzzled over the numbers. She was certain
that her doctors performed surgery only when it was necessary. It had to be one
of the other hospitals. And she had one in mind—Doctors Hospital at Renaissance,
the hospital in Edinburg that I had toured.... .....It was a depressing
conversation—not because I thought the executives were being evasive but because
they weren’t being evasive. The data on McAllen’s costs were clearly new to
them. They were defending McAllen reflexively. But they really didn’t know the
big picture of what was happening. And, I realized, few people in their position
do. Local executives for hospitals and clinics and home-health agencies
understand their growth rate and their market share; they know whether they are
losing money or making money. They know that if their doctors bring in enough
business—surgery, imaging, home-nursing referrals—they make money; and if they
get the doctors to bring in more, they make more. But they have only the vaguest
notion of whether the doctors are making their communities as healthy as they
can, or whether they are more or less efficient than their counterparts
elsewhere. A doctor sees a patient in clinic, and has her check into a McAllen
hospital for a CT scan, an ultrasound, three rounds of blood tests, another
ultrasound, and then surgery to have her gallbladder removed. How is Lawrence
Gelman or Gilda Romero to know whether all that is essential, let alone the best
possible treatment for the patient? It isn’t what they are responsible or
accountable for. Health-care costs ultimately arise from the accumulation of
individual decisions doctors make about which services and treatments to write
an order for. The most expensive piece of medical equipment, as the saying goes,
is a doctor’s pen. And, as a rule, hospital executives don’t own the pen caps.
Doctors do.

A book of medical quotations given to me years ago had one that was appropriate for this discussion: "There is a difference between a physician and an entrepreneur with an MD". McAllen seems to have more of the latter:

“In El Paso, if you took a random doctor and looked at his tax returns
eighty-five per cent of his income would come from the usual practice of
medicine,” he said. But in McAllen, the administrator thought, that percentage
would be a lot less. He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves,
apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the
hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said.
They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from
patient care. “There’s no lack of work ethic,” he said. But he had often seen
financial considerations drive the decisions doctors made for patients—the tests
they ordered, the doctors and hospitals they recommended—and it bothered him.
Several doctors who were unhappy about the direction medicine had taken in
McAllen told me the same thing. “It’s a machine, my friend,” one surgeon
explained..... ...Others think of the money as a means of improving what they
do. They think about how to use the insurance money to maybe install electronic
health records with colleagues, or provide easier phone and e-mail access, or
offer expanded hours. They hire an extra nurse to monitor diabetic patients more
closely, and to make sure that patients don’t miss their mammograms and pap
smears and colonoscopies. Then there are the physicians who see their practice
primarily as a revenue stream. They instruct their secretary to have patients
who call with follow-up questions schedule an appointment, because insurers
don’t pay for phone calls, only office visits. They consider providing Botox
injections for cash. They take a Doppler ultrasound course, buy a machine, and
start doing their patients’ scans themselves, so that the insurance payments go
to them rather than to the hospital. They figure out ways to increase their
high-margin work and decrease their low-margin work. This is a business, after
all. In every community, you’ll find a mixture of these views among physicians,
but one or another tends to predominate. McAllen seems simply to be the
community at one extreme.

But would the situation be such if the payment for an office visit were sufficient. What if phone calls and emails were compensated in a fair manner? Would there be less incentive to pursue these other revenue streams? Again, treated like tradesmen and commoditized, physicians begin to act the role of tradesmen, often with great benefit. And what role do patients play in this? Undoubtedly there is some demand by the patients, a large number of them on government programs, for these services. Would things be better if patients had some "skin in the game”? Probably not:

The third class of health-cost proposals, I explained, would push people to use
medical savings accounts and hold high-deductible insurance policies: “They’d
have more of their own money on the line, and that’d drive them to bargain with
you and other surgeons, right?” He gave me a quizzical look. We tried to imagine
the scenario. A cardiologist tells an elderly woman that she needs bypass
surgery and has Dr. Dyke see her. They discuss the blockages in her heart, the
operation, the risks. And now they’re supposed to haggle over the price as if he
were selling a rug in a souk? “I’ll do three vessels for thirty thousand, but if
you take four I’ll throw in an extra night in the I.C.U.”—that sort of thing?
Dyke shook his head. “Who comes up with this stuff?” he asked. “Any plan that
relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure.”

Gawande compares the practice of medicine in McAllen to that at the Mayo Clinic, where all physicians are salaried, and Grand Junction, Colorado, where physicians have set up uniform payment schedules, peer review, and information sharing systems. While these have improved quality and reduced costs, in these economic times, the financial question becomes larger:

Something even more worrisome is going on as well. In the war over the culture
of medicine—the war over whether our country’s anchor model will be Mayo or
McAllen—the Mayo model is losing. In the sharpest economic downturn that our
health system has faced in half a century, many people in medicine don’t see why
they should do the hard work of organizing themselves in ways that reduce waste
and improve quality if it means sacrificing revenue. In El Paso, the for-profit
health-care executive told me, a few leading physicians recently followed
McAllen’s lead and opened their own centers for surgery and imaging. When I was
in Tulsa a few months ago, a fellow-surgeon explained how he had made up for
lost revenue by shifting his operations for well-insured patients to a specialty
hospital that he partially owned while keeping his poor and uninsured patients
at a nonprofit hospital in town. Even in Grand Junction, Michael Pramenko told
me, “some of the doctors are beginning to complain about ‘leaving money on the
table.’ "

An excellent analysis of the demographics that can explain the differences can be found here. The Buckeye Surgeon does excellent analysis here, here, here, and, here. With a comment by Gawande himself!!

Labels: future of medicine, health care reform, Hope and Change

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.