To resolve conflicts, re-frame polar positions as optimization between undesirable extremes. But, sometimes there is no way to win.

February 18, 2012 by Dr. Ward in ACO Culture, Decision Analysis, Dr. Ward's Methods Notes | 2 Comments

In politics and professional life, achieving success requires the ability to resolve conflicts.  I’ve noticed that conflicts often become entrenched because the opposing parties both simplify the conflict in black and white terms. They conceptualize their own interest as moving in one direction. And, they conceptualize their opponent as wanting to move in the opposite, wrong direction. As a result, the argument between the parties generates no light, only heat.  Each side only acknowledges the advantages of their direction and the disadvantages of the opposing direction. Neither side seeks to really understand and learn from the arguments offered by the other side.

When I’ve had the opportunity to mediate such conflicts, I almost always used the same strategies.

  • Step One.  I try to move both parties to some common ground, moving back to some basic statement that seemingly nobody could disagree with.  This generates a tiny bit of agreement momentum.
  • Step Two. Apply the momentum generated in step one to getting the parties to agree that, if you took each party’s position to an extreme, the result would be undesirable. The parties are inherently agreeing to re-conceptualize the disagreement from being a choice between polar opposite positions to an optimization problem. The idea is to choose an agreeable value on some spectrum between undesirable extremes.  If the parties make this leap, we are half way to sustainable agreement.
  • Step Three.  Get the parties to agree to avoid talking about the answer, and focus on reaching consensus on the factors and assumptions that influence the selection of the optimal answer.  Sometimes, this can be done subjectively, simply listing the factors.  Other times, it is worthwhile to get quantitative, working together on assumptions and calculations to estimate the magnitude and uncertainty of the outcomes at various points along the spectrum of alternative answers.  This quantitative approach has been described as the “explicit method,” and an example of applying it to resolve fierce disagreements about mammography guidelines is described in an earlier post.
  • Step Four.  Finally, ask the parties to apply their values to propose and explain an optimum answer, from their point of view.  In this step, the important point is to insist that the parties acknowledge that they are no longer arguing about facts or assumptions, since consensus has already been achieved on those.  If not, then go back to step three. The objective is to untangle and separate factual, logical, scientific debates from the discussion of differences in values.  If those remain tangled up, the parties inevitably resort to talking at each other, rather than engaging in productive dialog.
  • Step Five.  Try to achieve a compromise answer.  In my experience, if you’ve really completed steps 1-3, this ends up being fairly easy.
  • Step Six.  Work to sustain the compromise.  Celebrating the agreement, praising the participants for the difficult work of compromise, documenting the process and assumptions, and appealing to people to not disown their participation in the process are all part of this ongoing work.   Passive aggressiveness is the standard operating model in many settings, part of the culture of many organizations.  And, it is a very difficult habit to break.

Of course, in the routine work of mediating conflicts, I don’t really explicitly go through these six steps. This conflict resolution approach is in the back of my mind. They are really more like habits than steps.

Sometimes this approach works. Sometimes, it does not.  It can break at any step.

Notice that break downs in most of the steps are basically people issues. People won’t change their conceptualization. They are unwilling to make their assumptions explicit. They are unwilling to acknowledge differences in values. They are unwilling to compromise.

But, sometimes, the process breaks because of the nature of the issue being debated. Sometimes, conceptualizing the debate as an optimization problem between two undesirable extremes fails because there are really not good choices along the spectrum.

For example, when debating the design of a program or policy, I have often encountered a no-win trade-off between keeping it simple vs. addressing each party’s unique circumstances.  If I keep it too simple, people complain that it as a “hammer,” failing to deal with their circumstances.  If I add complexity to deal with all the circumstances, people complain that it is a maze or a contraption.  If I select some middle level of complexity, the complaints are even worse because the pain of complexity kicks in before the value of complexity is achieved.

I’ve seen this no-way-to-win scenario in my own work, in the design of information systems, wellness and care management protocols, practice guidelines and protocols, analytic models, organizational structures, governance processes, contractual terms, and provider incentive programs.  And, I’ve seen this scenario in many public policy debates, such as debates about tax policy, tariffs, banking regulations, immigration, education, and health care reform.  In cases when the extremes are more desirable than the middle ground, the only approach I can think of is to bundle multiple issues together so that one party wins some and the other party wins others, to facilitate compromise.

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CBO: Bundled payments for bypass surgery saved 10%, but pay-for-performance and gain-sharing was not effective in 3 Medicare demonstrations

February 12, 2012 by Dr. Ward in ACO Reimbursement and Gain Sharing | Leave a comment

Lyle Nelson from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has been busy.

Two weeks ago, I commented on the results of Nelson’s review of 6 Medicare Care Management demonstration projects over the last decade. At the same time that report was released, Nelson also released a companion report on the 4 “Value-based Payment” CMS demonstrations over the same period. The following is my adaptation of the main results table in this new CBO report.

The most influential of these demonstrations was the Physician Group Practice Demonstration (PGP).  The ten PGP participants included 2 faculty group practices within academic medical centers, 5 non-academic integrated delivery systems, one freestanding group practice, and one network consisting of 60 small practices.  All had experience with care management programs before the demonstration, and all implemented care management programs in the Medicare population for the demonstration.    These care management programs mostly consisted of nurses serving as care managers, focusing primarily on patient education and monitoring for patients with CHF or diabetes or meeting other “high risk” criteria.  Most implemented chronic disease registries for use by the care managers, in addition to using electronic medical records systems that were already in place or in the process of being implemented before the start of the demonstration.

Two of the ten PGP participants received bonuses in the first year, since the Medicare expenditures were more than 2% below the expected expense.  Four participants received bonuses in the second year, five in the third and fourth years, and four in the fifth year.  A formal evaluation of the program conducted after the first two years concluded that the overall effectiveness of the PGP across the ten participants was about 1% gross savings in year two, and even lower in year one.  Net savings, after counting the cost of the bonuses paid to some of the participants, was only 0.1% in year two.

The CBO report points out that even this meager 0.1% net savings might be an over-estimate, because PGP participants changed their diagnostic coding practices, making their populations appear to be sicker, and therefore making the risk-adjusted cost targets artificially high.  Such revenue maximization efforts have been job one in Medicare Advantage plans for years.  The PGP participants succeeded in lifting their risk scores by 8%, which was 3 percentage points higher than the increase in the comparison population.  And, the savings might have been further overestimated because all four of the PGP participants that achieved reward payments in year two already had slower than normal growth in Medicare expenditures before the PGP demonstration began.  All the other PGP participants that did not earn year 2 bonuses had pre-demonstration Medicare growth that was no different than the comparison population.

Despite these discouraging results, the PGP demonstration was nevertheless used as the main evidence base supporting the design of the Medicare Shared Savings Program, calling for the establishment of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).  It is also the main evidence base for the associated Pioneer ACO program, for which 32 participating provider organizations have recently been selected.

The Premier Hospital Quality Demonstration focused on 5 disease states and made bonus payments that amounted to only 0.25% of the total Medicare payments for those disease states.  That’s two orders of magnitude less than the size of incentive payments thought to substantially influence performance.  With such a tiny prize, it is not surprising that the quality improvements were assessed to have only a 1-5% incremental impact of process of care quality metrics during a period of time when such process of care metrics were improving nationally.  And, the CBO report concluded that the demonstration had no effect on Medicare expenditures for inpatient hospital care.  In fact, taking into consideration the reward payments, the demonstration led to an increase of costs by 0.3%.

The most successful of the demonstration projects was the Medicare Participating Heart Bypass Center Demonstration, which was used as a model for similar provisions in the health care reform law (PPACA).  In this program, the hospitals negotiated their bundled payments up front, ensuring that Medicare received savings compared to typical fee-for-service cases.  Overall, the program saved Medicare 10%.

So, where did the savings come from?

It’s possible that  they just came from good negotiating by CMS with hospitals that wanted to get out in front of what they saw was an inevitable trend toward bundle payment.  But, let’s assume that the hospitals really had a plan to reduce their costs in proportion to the negotiated decline in their revenue.

In interviews with leaders of the participating hospitals, the important changes in their approaches to patient management that were intended to reduce their costs included:

  1. Greater involvement by surgeons in postoperative care
  2. Earlier discharge of patients from the intensive care unit
  3. Greater standardization of surgical protocols and supplies
  4. Substitution of less expensive drugs for more costly ones, and
  5. Greater reliance on critical nurse specialists for managing patients’ care in the hospital.

The participating hospitals substantially decreased their length of stay during the demonstration period, although length of stay for bypass surgery was dramatically decreasing nationally during that same time period.

However, probably more important than these process changes was the fact that all the participating hospitals created a physician reimbursement approach that established a fixed per case payment expected to cover all physician payments.  This amount was split in defined percentages among the four types of specialists involved in every bypass case — the thoracic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, and radiologist.  Any payments to other specialists was essentially payed from this pool, reducing the payments to the four core specialties. Therefore, the hospitals created a strong incentive for the core specialties to limit referrals to other specialists.  This undoubtedly led to a reduction in utilization of those other specialists and the tests and procedures they generate.  Therefore, some of the savings probably came from reducing revenue to non-core specialists.

My conclusions

  1. Don’t bother with incentives unless they are large enough to change behavior.  A 0.1% reward can’t work.  Nor can a 1% reward.  Try 10-20%.
  2. Don’t create asymmetrical up-side only incentives.  They are far weaker in terms of motivating change.  And, they create a problem with paying out undeserved rewards for lucky good results.
  3. Negotiate the savings up front, rather than just creating a game from which savings might be achieved.
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CMS Announces 32 Pioneer ACOs, including 3 in Michigan

December 19, 2011 by Dr. Ward in Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) | Leave a comment

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the final list of 32 health care provider organizations that are to participate in the “Pioneer ACO” program during 2012.

The Pioneer ACO program was intended to allow provider organizations that had experience and sophisticated population management and care coordination capabilities to get started under a gain-sharing arrangement for Medicare more quickly than the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP).  Compared to the MSSP participants, these Pioneer ACOs will take on greater risk and will be eligible to receive higher gain-sharing payments. They will then have an opportunity to move more rapidly from a gain-sharing to a population-based full-risk capitation payment model in year three, as long as they successfully earned shared savings awards during the first two years.  They will then be allowed to continue through an optional fourth and fifth year. The Pioneer ACOs all commit to negotiating “outcomes-based” reimbursement arrangements with other payers by the end of the second year.

Of the 32 Pioneer ACOs, more than one third are physician organizations, with the remainder being integrated delivery systems or other structures that include both hospital facilities and physicians.

The majority of the Pioneer ACOs are concentrated in 5 states, with California predictably leading the pack with 6 Pioneers, followed by Maine, Michigan, Minnesota and Texas.

The three Michigan-based ACOs include:

  • Genesys PHO: a collaboration between Genesys Health System and 160 primary care physicians with 400 participating specialist physicians who deliver health care services in Genesee, Lapeer, Shiawassee, Tuscola and northern Oakland counties.
  • Michigan Pioneer ACO: To be managed by the Detroit Medical Center PHO, a partnership of The Detroit Medical Center and its 1100 physicians, who include employed and faculty physicians, but consisting mostly of private practice primary care physicians. The Detroit Medical Center is a large academically integrated system in metropolitan Detroit, owned by Vanguard Health Systems and serving as a teaching and research site for the Wayne State University School of Medicine.
  • The University of Michigan Health System, which includes the U-M Faculty Group Practice, part of the U-M Medical School, includes all of the nearly 1,600 U-M faculty physicians who care for patients at the three U-M hospitals and 40 U-M health centers. Although U of M’s ACO was categorized by CMS as an “integrated delivery system,” the Pioneer ACO will also include participation by IHA Health Services Corporation, an Ann Arbor-based group practice that is part of Trinity Healthcare with 175 physicians in 32 practices.

The full list of Pioneer ACOs follows:

CMS released a fact sheet with more details about the Pioneer ACO program.

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The Humunculus is a metaphor for Clinical Process Improvement Frameworks

December 10, 2011 by Dr. Ward in Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), Clinical Practice Guidelines and Protocols, Clinical Process Improvement, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), Lean Thinking, Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) | Leave a comment

During the last 20 years, we have experienced wave after wave of new frameworks for improving health care.  Each had its own terminology, ardently promoted and enforced by its zealous advocates.  Each had a lifecycle that began with a long incubation period, followed by a period of explosive growth in popularity and influence, rapidly leading to unrealistic expectations, followed by a period of decline during which the framework was declared to have been ineffective.  We’ve been through health maintenance, outcomes management, clinical effectiveness, managed care, disease management, chronic care, care management, practice guidelines, care maps, evidence-based medicine, quality functional deployment, continuous quality improvement, re-engineering, total quality management, and six sigma.  We’re still in the thick of lean, patient-centered care,  value-based benefits, pay-for-performance and accountable care.

Four things I’ve noticed about this lifecycle of health care improvement frameworks:

  1. They are formulated by conceptual thinkers, but then get taken-over by more tactically-oriented people.  The tactical folks often focus too much on the tools, terminology and associated rituals.  The framework always gets “simplified” to be more suitable for mass consumption.  For example, continuous quality improvement somehow morphed into being primarily about assigning a timekeeper during team meetings and communicating progress on a felt-backed “story board,” rather than finding people with systems-thinking talent and applying that talent to understand sources of variation in complex processes.
  2. During the early part of the growth phase, the advocates are always desperate for examples of success, and shower a great deal of attention on early projects that are described using the terminology of the framework and that appear to have succeeded.  The desperation usually leads advocates to lower their standards of evidence during this phase.  This leads to over-promising and unrealistic expectations.  It stimulates lots of superficial imitation by people interested in hopping on the bandwagon.  And, it plants the seeds for the eventual decline, when people determine that their inflated expectations were not met.
  3. The decline phase, when the framework is declared to be ineffective, seems to always happen before the framework was ever really implemented in the way envisioned by the original formulators during the incubation phase.
  4. All the frameworks are really just restatements of the same underlying concepts, but with different terminology and tools, and different emphasis.  In other words, they all have the same anatomy, but different parts of the anatomy are emphasized.

This last point reminds me of the “humunculus,” also called the “little man.” When I was in medical school in the late 1980s, we used heavy text books that generally did a bad job of teaching the information. One notable exception was clinical neuroanatomy. We used a small, paperback text book playfully entitled “Clinical Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple” by Stephen Goldberg, MD. It contained a collection of clever drawings designed to explain the structures and functions of the brain and spinal cord. Perhaps the most famous of the drawings was the humunculus.

Cross section of somatosensory cortex, showing mapping to sensory input sources

This drawing was adapted from earlier work by an innovative neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield, who invented new surgical procedures for patients with epilepsy during the late 1930s.  During those procedures, he used electrodes to stimulate different points on the surface of the brain.  He drew diagrams similar to the drawing above showing that the surface of the brain contained a little man hanging upside down. The diagram shows that a disproportionate portion of the brain surface is dedicated to the sense of touch and muscle movements in certain parts of the body.  Lots of brain surface is dedicated to highly sensitive and nimble areas like the lips, tongue, hands and feet.  Very little brain surface is dedicated to the arms, legs and back.  Many anatomic illustrators have drawn the humunculus as a cartoon character showing how this disproportional emphasis on different parts of the body looks on the little man.

The Humunculus

The humunculus is a great teaching tool, making it easy to remember these aspects of clinical neuroanatomy.  But, I think the humunculus is also a useful metaphor for the distorted emphasis that various health care improvement frameworks have placed on various parts of the underlying anatomy of health care improvement.

Framework

Emphasis
Health maintenance Preventive services
Outcomes Management Measurement of function, patient experience and health status
Clinical Effectiveness Measurement of outcomes in real world settings, rather than laboratory controlled conditions
Managed Care Prospective review of appropriateness of referrals, procedures and expensive drugs, and retrospective review of cost of care
Disease Management Role of nurses in training patients to be more effective in self-management
Chronic Care Teamwork in primary care clinic and importance of organizational and community environment
Care Management Role of nurses in coordinating services delivered by different providers and in different settings
Practice Guidelines Consensus about which ambulatory services are appropriate in which situations
Care Maps Consensus about the sequence of inpatient services for different diagnoses
Evidence-based Medicine Weight of scientific evidence about efficacy of a service (without regard to cost)
Quality Functional Deployment Focus on the demands made by patients
Continuous quality improvement Small experiments to determine if incremental process changes are improvements
Re-engineering Designing new processes from scratch, rather than making incremental changes
Total Quality Management Importance of organizational culture and management processes
Six Sigma Focus on reducing frequency of defects
Lean Focus on eliminating non-value-adding process steps and reducing cycle time
Patient-centered care Focus on the needs of patients and the involvement of patients in their own care
Value-based Benefits Financial incentives to motivate patients to comply with recommended treatments that reduce overall cost
Pay-for-performance Financial incentives to motivate individual physicians to improve quality and reduce cost
Accountable care Financial incentives to motivate health care organizations to improve quality and reduce cost

Over the years, I have assimilated the concepts, terminology and tools from these various improvement frameworks into an approach that attempts to achieve balance, with each aspect of the framework shown without over-emphasis.

This framework puts the patient in the center, surrounded by the health care processes, which are surrounded by improvement processes.  It attempts to balance between focusing on care planning (the clinical decision-making regarding what services are needed) vs. focusing on care-delivery (the teamwork to execute the care plan and provide health care services to the patient).  It balances between measuring outcomes and measuring quality and cost performance.  It balances between implementing best practices through guidelines and protocols vs. improving practices through performance feedback and incentives. By avoiding a distorted over-emphasis on any one part of the anatomy, hopefully it can have greater lasting power than some of the more humunculus-like frameworks that have come and gone.   This framework is described more fully here.

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Health Care Heroes: Don Berwick, MD – Adapting industrial quality improvement principles to the improvement of health care processes

November 30, 2011 by Dr. Ward in ACO Culture, Clinical Process Improvement, Dr. Ward's Health Care Heroes | Leave a comment

Last week, Don Berwick, MD, announced his resignation as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).  Now is a good time to explain why Dr. Berwick is one of my all time health care heroes.

Don Berwick as one of the Notre Dame Four Horsemen on Ward's coffee mug

Apparently, I talk about Dr. Berwick a lot. A few years ago, I received one of my most treasured gifts from colleagues at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM).  It was a coffee mug featuring the famous photograph of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, a reference to my undergraduate alma mater.  My colleagues replaced the faces of three of the horsemen with the faces of three of my health care heroes, Drs. Paul Ellwood (the person who coined the terms “health management organization” and “outcomes management”), David Eddy (the clearest thinker on the topics of clinical practice policies and the rational allocation of health care resources), and Don Berwick. The face of the forth horseman they replaced with my own face.  I considered it a great honor to be associated with my heroes, at least on a coffee mug.

My team at BCBSM had heard me repeatedly explain Dr. Berwick’s important contribution to adapting the quality improvement  principles that had been successfully used in manufacturing to the health care field.  Others had been involved in promoting “continuous quality improvement,” “statistical process control,” and “total quality management” in health care. Paul Batalden, Brent James, Eugene Nelson, and Jack Billi come to mind, to name but a few. But, in my opinion, it has always been Berwick that has been the most eloquent and persuasive. He connected the statistical tools emphasized by James with the front line worker involvement emphasized by Batalden. And, he was able to describe how these approaches applied to clinical decision-making as well as care delivery.

At the heart of Dr. Berwick’s contribution was teaching us all to distinguish between the “Theory of Bad Apples” and the “Theory of Continuous Improvement.”

According to the Theory of Bad Apples, errors come from “shoddy work” by people with deficient work performance.  Leaders who uphold this theory focus on inspection to identify such deficient performance, indicated by the undesirable tail in the distribution of provider performance as shown on the left side of the diagram above.  Then, such leaders focus on holding the bad performers “accountable” by applying disciplinary measures intended to motivate improvement in performance and by pursuing other interventions intended to re-mediate the bad performance.  In the health care context, the workers are physicians and the shoddy work is poor quality health care. According to Berwick, the predictable defensive response by the physicians who are targeted for such remedial attention includes three elements: (1) kill the messenger, (2) distort the data and (3) blame somebody else.

Berwick advocates instead for the Theory of Continuous Improvement.  The basic principles of this theory are

  • Systems Thinking: Think of work as a process or a system with inputs and outputs
  • Continual Improvement: Assume that the effort to improve processes is never-ending
  • Customer Focus: Focus on the outcomes that matter to customers
  • Involve the Workforce: Respect the knowledge that front-line workers have, and assume workers are intrinsically motivated to do good work and serve the customers
  • Learn from Data and Variation to understand the causes of good and bad outcomes
  • Learn from Action: Conduct small-scale experiments using the “Plan-Do-Study-Act” (PDSA) approach to learn which process changes are improvements
  • Key Role of Leaders: Create a culture that drives out fear, seeks truth, respects and inspires people, and continually strives for improvement

T-Shirt of "Berwickians" -- the staff of epidemiologists and biostatisticians at BCBSM

Berwick argued the point made by Dr. Deming:  if we  can reduce fear, people will not try to distort the data.  When learning is guided by accurate information and sound rules of inference, when suppliers of service remain in dialog with those that depend upon them, and “when the hearts and talents of workers are enlisted in the pursuit of better ways, the potential for improvement in quality in nearly boundless.”

I first was influenced by Dr. Berwick back in the 1980′s when he championed these ideas during his tenure at the Harvard Community Health Plan, and subsequently during the 1990′s when he led the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.  His face was already on my coffee mug at the time he was nominated to lead CMS.  I was thrilled that someone from our community of people dedicated to clinical process improvement had been recognized and would be serving in a position of such influence.

The Irony of the Political Opposition to Berwick’s Role as CMS Administrator

Dr. Berwick’s candidacy as CMS Administrator faced stiff opposition from Republican leaders who were angry about anything connected to the health care reform law or, for that matter, the Obama administration itself.  The President made the decision to evade this opposition by making a recess appointment of Dr. Berwick.  But, such recess appointments have a limited lifespan.  As the deadline for making a formal, congressionally sanctioned appointment approached at the end of the 2011 legislative session, 42 Republican senators signed a letter reiterating their disapproval of Dr. Berwick as CMS Administrator.   The arguments against Dr. Berwick’s  candidacy, both at the time of his original nomination and again over the last few months, centered around comments that Dr. Berwick has made praising the British health care system.  They concluded from his comments that he was in favor of redistributing wealth to the poor and of rationing, the dreaded “R” word, the thing done by “death panels!”  He was, therefore both a bleeding heart and heartless at the same time.  Dr. Berwick denied these charges, but the opposition was unconvinced and unwilling to back down from a position of persistent opposition to anything connected to “Obamacare.”

The irony is that, of the heroes on my coffee mug, Dr. Berwick is not the one deserving of praise for having insight and bravery concerning the basic tenets of health economics. Instead, it was Dr. David Eddy’s mug that was on my coffee mug because he was brave enough to publish numerous papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association explaining why rationing was the right thing to do (e.g. this one and another one).  Eddy argued that creating evidence-based “practice policies” that rationally allocated health care resources using “explicit methods” was favorable to using implicit methods supported only by “global subjective judgement.”  What a radical thought!

Despite my great admiration for Dr. Berwick, he was the hero that disappointed me as a rationing denier.  In fact, in a 2009 paper published in Health Affairs entitled “What ‘Patient-Centered’ Should Mean: Confessions of an Extremist,” he eloquently argued that we should give any patient whatever they wanted, regardless of the cost and regardless of the evidence of effectiveness.  He discounted the role of the physician as a steward of resources.  I felt the argument was heartfelt and humanistic.  But, I felt it was a cop out.  How strange, then, that the Republican opposition hoisted him on the rationing petard.

Looking Forward to Berwick’s Next Journey

Although it is disappointing to me that Dr. Berwick will no longer be leading CMS, I am eager to see what he chooses to do next.  I’m sure he will continue to make a great contribution to our field.  Without all the administrative and political duties to clog up his day, perhaps we are about to witness a surge in his ongoing contributions to improving health care.

More information: See Health Affairs article and associated Health Affairs Blog Post praising Dr. Berwick.

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Primary care physicians acknowledge over-utilization and blame it on the lawyers.

November 5, 2011 by Dr. Ward in ACO Culture, Behavior Change | Leave a comment

Catching up on some reading, I came across this article in Medical News Today, describing the results of survey research conducted by Brenda E. Sirovich, MD, MS, and colleagues from the VA Outcomes Group (White River Junction, Vermont), and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.   They surveyed primary care physicians and published their results in the Archives of internal Medicine.  They documented that primary care physicians acknowledge over-utilizationof services received by their patients.

Their #1 theory of causation?  ”It’s because of malpractice lawyers!” That is not surprising to me, and is consistent with many conversations with both front line PCPs and leaders of primary care physician organizations.

However, I personally believe that this is really the #1 rationalization of the over-utilization.  I feel that there are two main causes:

  1. Low fee-for-service reimbursement, creating the need for many short visits each day to generate enough revenue to make a good living (i.e. the “hamster wheel”).  When visits need to be short, prescriptions and referrals are important to make the patient feel satisfied that their problem is really being addressed.
  2. Lack of effective clinical leadership or even peer interaction over the actual clinical decision-making (i.e. “care-planning”) done on a day-to-day basis by the vast majority of primary care physicians

Beyond the medical school and residency stage, physicians’ care planning occurs all alone, with no-one looking over their shoulder — at least no one with sufficient quantity and quality of information to make any real assessment of clinical decision-making.  Health plans have tried to do so with utilization management programs, but the poor quality of information and the relationship distance between the physician and the health plan are too great to generate much more than antipathy.

If you eliminated malpractice worries and paid primary care physicians a monthly per-capita fixed fee, would wasteful over-utilization go down without also providing deeper clinical leadership and peer review enabled by better care planning data?  Perhaps.  But I would worry that, in that scenario, physicians would still stick with their old habits of hitting the order & referral button out of habit to please the patients who have been habituated to think of “lots of orders and referrals” as good primary care.

The “mindfulness” thing in the invited commentary by Calvin Chou, MD, PhD, from the University of California, San Francisco, is a bit much — trying too hard to coin a term.  I’ve heard that presented before, and I categorized it with “stages of change,” “empowerment,” “self-actualization,” “motivational interviewing,” and “patient activation.”   I’m not saying that such popular psychological/sociological concepts have no merit.  I’m just a Mid-Westerner who starts with more conventional theories of behavior.

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HHS Releases Final ACO Rule

October 20, 2011 by Dr. Ward in ACO Reimbursement and Gain Sharing, Care Relationship Derivation (Attribution) | Leave a comment

The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) today released the final rule for accountable care organizations (ACO).

The new rule includes a number of changes designed to make the Medicare Shared Savings Program more palatable for health care providers who had a largely negative response to the draft rule released last March. The changes include the following:

  • Allow providers to choose to participate without any downside financial risk during the initial contract period, rather than requiring all participants to take downside risk during the third year of the contract period
  • Provide up front financial support to physician-owned ACOs to support investments in building ACO capabilities, to be repaid through gain sharing rewards in subsequent years
  • Reduce the up front investment needed by eliminating the requirement for meaningful use of electronic health records
  • Reduce the number of quality measures from 65 to 33
  • Allow providers to choose from a number of available start dates throughout 2012
  • Allow community health centers and rural health clinics to serve as ACOs
  • Prospective identification of the Medicare beneficiaries for whom the ACO will be held accountable, rather than deriving such care relationships after the accountability period
  • Eliminates the mandatory anti-trust review for newly-formed ACOs
  • Puts the burden on the federal government, rather than nascent ACOs, to gather data regarding local market share
The  text of the rule is available here, and the associated final waiver rules are available here.

In my opinion, the elimination of the requirement to accept downside risk is likely to substantially increase the willingness of providers to participate in the program, while simultaneously reducing the likelihood that participation will lead to meaningful transformation of the care process within those participants.  But, given the strong opposition to the draft rule, CMS had little choice but to dilute the requirements to at least get some players to take the field.

 

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2 min video of Harold Miller saying hospitals need to be offered a “glide path” to handle revenue reduction anticipated from new payment models

October 1, 2011 by Dr. Ward in ACO Reimbursement and Gain Sharing | Leave a comment

In this 2 minute video, Harold Miller, Executive Director, Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform,talks about the changes that hospitals will face during the transition to new payment models. His remarks were part of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s program, “A Path to Accountable Care Organizations: How Do We Get There From Here?”, held on Sept. 13, 2011.

He argues that savings won’t necessarily come from reducing the revenues of specialist physicians, but that they are likely to come from reducing revenue to hospitals, device manufacturers and others.  He says hospitals need to anticipate getting smaller, and payers need to create a good “glidepath” to make that happen without being too disruptive.

I agree wholeheartedly with this principle. More generally, I am a big fan of Dr. Miller’s work. He thinks clearly about health care structures and processes, and is an effective communicator. His early framing of Accountable Care remains very useful.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/aeF9mLzCrN4

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How do we reduce errors in software and data analysis? Culture of Accountability vs. Culture of Learning

September 24, 2011 by Dr. Ward in ACO Culture, Dr. Ward's Methods Notes | 1 Comment

A young colleague recently wrote to me complaining of frustration from having to deal with a high rate of errors in software development and data analysis.  Any time you are innovating in a knowledge-intensive field such as health care, you will need to develop new software and analyze data in new ways.  Errors will inevitably result.  There’s no easy way to avoid them. Therefore, reducing errors in software development and analysis is a lifelong battle for healthcare innovators.

The conventional philosophy of reducing errors is the following:

  1. Make sure everyone clearly knows what they are responsible for
  2. Make sure you use a tightly controlled development process with clear steps, checkpoints, milestones and gates
  3. Make sure you have everything well documented, using documents created from highly detailed templates designed to assure that nothing is forgotten
  4. Make sure you have detailed testing scenarios designed in advance, and that you do “regression testing” to assure that changes to one part of a system or analysis do not cause the testing scenarios to fail
  5. Make sure everyone understands the consequences of errors, both to the organization and to them personally

These are the pillars of rigorous project management.

But, unfortunately, experience teaches that sometimes this philosophy can have some unintended consequences.  Sometimes, errors still occur. Little errors, like bugs.  And big errors, like creating something that nobody needs or wants.   For example, when you have a tightly controlled process, sometimes that communicates to people that you intend for the process to be linear, rather than iterative.  Even when you say “let’s do this iteratively,” all the steps, milestones and gates tell people that you really mean the opposite.  When you create a highly detailed template, intended to assure that nothing is forgotten, you unintentionally are switching people into a mode of “filling out the form,” rather than the much harder and more valuable work of figuring out how to effectively teach the most important concepts to the reader.  And, you unintentionally convert your quality assurance process to one that emphasizes adherence to the template, rather than the quality of the underlying ideas being taught.  When you create detailed testing scenarios, you unintentionally encourage the team to treat “passing the tests” as quality, rather than having them challenging the software or the analytic results to tests that are designed based on insights about how the software or the analytic calculations are actually structured and what types of errors might be more likely.  A software developer I know describes that as “testing smarter.” Finally, when you communicate to people the consequences to them personally of messing up, intending to increase their motivation to do error-free work, you unintentionally are telling them to allocate more of their time to avoiding blame and documentating plausible deniability.  And, you are unwittingly telling them to bury the problems that could provide the insights needed to drive real improvement.

W Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming famously advocated for “driving out fear.”  In his landmark book, “Out of the Crisis,” published back in 1982, Deming explains that people fear new knowledge because it could reveal their failings and because it could lead to changes that could threaten their security.  Focusing on motivating people might be a good idea if the problem is inadequate motivation.  But, in my experience, poor performance is usually not an issue of motivation, especially in professional settings. More likely, poor performance is an issue of poor tools, poor training (leading to inadequate knowledge or skills), or having the wrong talent mix for the job.

That last one — talent — is a tricky one.  We consider it enlightened to assume that everyone could do a great job if only they received the right tools and training. Saying someone lacks the necessary talent for a particular job can be considered arrogant and wrong.  I think this may be because  talent is an unchangeable characteristic, and we are taught that it is wrong to consider other unchangeable characteristics such as gender or race.  But, each person was given their own unique mix of talents.  They will make their best contribution and achieve their highest satisfaction if they are in a role that is a good fit for their talents.  On the other hand, it is devilishly hard to tell the difference between unchangeable talents vs. changeable skills and knowledge.  And, developing people’s skills and knowledge is hard work and requires patience. As a result, it is too easy for leaders to get lazy and waste real talent.  Finding the right balance between optimism and realism about peoples’ potential requires maturity, effort and some intuition.  If in doubt, take Deming’s advice and error on the side of optimism.

I’m not arguing against processes, documentation, test scenarios or accountability.  But, I am suggesting to be careful about the unintended consequences of taking those things too far and relying on them too much.

My advice to my colleague was to focus more on the following:

  1. Make sure you hire really talented people, and then invest heavily is developing their knowledge and skills
  2. Make sure you are actually analyzing data the moment you start capturing it, rather than waiting a long time to accumulate lots of data only to discover later that it was messed up all along
  3. Make sure you do analysis and develop software iteratively, with early iterations focused on the hardest and most complex part of the work to make sure you don’t discover late in the game that your approach can’t handle the difficulty and complexity
  4. Most importantly, create a culture of learning, where people feel comfortable sharing their best ideas, talking about errors and problems, taking risks, and making improvements
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What can we learn from the managed care backlash of the 1990s? Can we avoid an ACO backlash?

September 10, 2011 by Dr. Ward in ACO Culture, ACO Strategy, ACO Structure & Governance | Leave a comment

Advocates of “accountable care organizations” (ACOs) are careful to avoid the terminology of “managed care,” which is widely viewed as a failed model from the 1980s and 1990s.  But, there are obvious similarities between ACOs and managed care.  Both involve an organization taking responsibility for the quality and cost of care for a defined population.  Both emphasize the importance of primary care as the foundation of a coordinated and efficient health care delivery system.  Both involve economic incentives to physicians to improve quality and slow the upward trend in total cost of care.

But, we all remember the strong backlash against managed care during the late 1990s.   Although almost 10% of the U.S. population are still served by HMOs, the managed care vision has been largely in exile for more than a decade now.   PPOs are now the dominant model, with relatively small financial incentives to patients to seek their care from providers within relatively large provider networks.  Many PPOs have dabbled in “pay for performance,” but the physician incentives involved have been relatively small and the performance bar set relatively low.  The use of more heavy-handed managed care approaches has declined significantly.  For example, plans usually don’t require a referral authorization by a “gatekeeper” primary care physician before granting access to specialists.  And the use of pre-authorization by health plan staff for many expensive procedures has declined significantly.   Health plans did not drop these heavy-handed approached because they became convinced they were ineffective.  They dropped them because they feared they would face a consumer backlash and lose membership.

So, what can we learn from the managed care backlash?  And what can we do differently to avoid an “ACO backlash?”

I went back to some research done during the height of the managed care backlash to refresh my memory of how bad it was, and why it happened.  Most helpful was a paper from 1997 in Health Affairs by Robert Blenden and other researchers at Harvard and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Blenden reported survey results showing that Americans hated managed care companies even more than they hated banks and oil companies.

Blenden’s survey results showed that a significant proportion of Americans experienced hassles and other problems with managed care plans.  These common, minor problems were hypothesized to serve as the seeds of stronger dissatisfaction and distrust.  The survey also showed that the public overestimated the frequency of rare events that are dramatic and threatening.  For example 66% thought that HMOs sometimes or often hold back on a child’s cancer treatment.  73% thought that HMOs send newborn babies home after just one day, in spite of mothers’ concerns about their children’s health.  As shown in the following graph, there was a dose-response relationship with the “heaviness” of the health plan and the degree of mistrust that the health plan would do the right thing if they got sick.

Blenden concluded that the backlash against managed care was primarily driven by mistrust and fear, leading to calls for government regulation and reducing the market demand for managed care.  I created the following “cause-effect” diagram to illustrate this theory.

So, what can we do differently this time around?  We must do a far better job of building trust. That will require actually being trustworthy.  And, it will require being more proactive about communicating trustworthiness.

This topic is so central to the success of ACOs that it deserves a lot more attention by people who have expertise in public opinion, market communication, and brand development.  But, here is my proposed starting point for developing a strategy to build trust in ACOs and other innovative models of health care finance and delivery.

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