Category: Quality

Residency Is Thinly Veiled Healthcare Rationing!

Apparently, we’re still $376 million dollars short in funding just to meet the 2003 ACGME work hours regulations, in terms of hiring additional staff, etc.  So, of course, there should be no problem getting the remaining $1.4 billion needed to bring us up to date with the new rules.  And there’s still the matter of these authors saying that’s still not good enough.

They also say, more stick, less carrot.  For patients!  Think of the children!

Of course, they’re probably right.  A lot of EM training is stressful, but it isn’t barbaric.  We have enough off-service rotations to realize we’re one of the relatively coddled residencies in brute terms of sleep deprivation and time away from the hospital.  My sister just finished her PGY-1 in general surgery by going Q2 into the break before 2nd year.  We’re not in compliance, we’re not operating at our peak abilities, and we’re not exhaustively supervised.  Patients are harmed, no doubt.

But that’s the reality of the funding situation and the budgets proscribed by Congress.

Now, if you want go out and inflame a mob, you could invoke this as part of healthcare “rationing”, letting undertrained, barely-doctors practice on the sickest patients because we choose to allow a few people to be harmed to save money.

“Implementing the 2009 Institute of Medicine recommendations on resident physician work hours, supervision, and safety.”
http://www.dovepress.com/implementing-the-2009-institute-of-medicine-recommendations-on-residen-peer-reviewed-article-NSS

Video Education For Emergency Departments

I know you can’t get published if you say something like “Our intervention is probably not useful and serves only as a cautionary tale for other wayward sailors”, but it still bothers me when you stretch the conclusions out by saying that an intervention that is probably not better than the control group “appears promising”.

This is a group that looked at the best way to improve parent education in pediatric asthma encounters in the Emergency Department.  They compared a video-based education program to a written handout and found…it didn’t make much difference.  They had two groups of parents, those with “low health literacy” and those with “adequate health literacy”.  The low literacy group improved a ton regardless of which educational modality was used.  The adequate literacy group barely budged with written and had a little bit more of bump with video – but the relative change in their level of literacy really wasn’t anything to write home about and they don’t try to offer an explanation for why intelligent people derive no benefit from written education.

But it doesn’t stop them from stating it “appears promising” – which, I suppose, means it’s probably better than not educating people at all, or potentially educating the illiterate.

“Parental Health Literacy and Asthma Education Delivery During a Visit to a Community-Based Pediatric Emergency Department.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21629152

5% of Patients Spend 50% of Our Healthcare Dollars

Per-capita spending doubled from 1997 through 2009 from $4100 to $8100 – with 5% of patients spending $35,800 on average annually to account for 47.5% of healthcare spending.  Overall, the five most expensive conditions are heart disease, cancer, trauma, mental disorders, and pulmonary conditions.

Unsurprisingly, people over 55 made up the majority of the high spending groups.  Unhappily enough, the authors note a “flattening” of the distribution of spending, where younger individuals are responsible for a greater proportion of the spending.  This is not due to more cost-effective care in the elderly, it’s a result of increasing disease prevalence in the young, primarily attribute to obesity-related diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

“Understanding U.S. Health Care Spending – NIHCM Foundation Data Brief July 2011”
http://www.nihcm.org/images/stories/NIHCM-CostBrief-Email.pdf

If You Don’t Reperfuse STEMI, That’s Bad

I’m not sure why this is earthshaking news – other than some good statisticians had access to some good data.  Of course, that’s pretty much what research is about – have data, will travel.

This JAMA article looks at door-in-door-out time for STEMI at transferring hospitals – and they suggest an association between between quicker transfer times and unadjusted mortality.  There is still some debate regarding how much time to primary PCI matters, but, if you say this in-and-out time is a surrogate marker for time to primary PCI, you could presumably support the hypothesis of rapid PCI mattering.

There are a few interesting nuggets of information in the article – particularly looking at patients for whom the transfer time was exceptionally prolonged.  Essentially, left bundle and patients with ambiguous or non-obvious STEMI were delayed.  I.e., when the diagnosis is hard, it’s hard to make the diagnosis.

As usual, time matters to the individual, but system factors affect many patients.  Mortality for STEMI is improved by faster transport, but you still need to consider the consequences of faster transport.  Reckless abandon towards shoving a semi-stable patient out the door won’t always lead to better outcomes, but, then again, I have worked in some of those hospitals….

“Association of Door-In to Door-Out Time With Reperfusion Delays and Outcomes Among Patients Transferred for Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21693742

Liability Protections For Emergency Services

Smart folks at ACEP – tying liability reform to cost savings, which makes liability protection for Emergency Physicians an easier sell.  I have to say, the training environment these days is so skewed, I don’t think anyone graduating now knows how to practice without scanning everyone, as it’s become generally the standard of care.  The “quality of care” argument is a little new to me – but I certainly could move patients through more quickly, have less sign-out liability, etc., if I weren’t tying up beds waiting for scans.

But, the threat of a lawsuit is a big one.  And it’s not just us – so many PMDs refer their patients to the ED for a CT scan – whether the test is indicated, how miserable a malpractice hearing would it be to have testimony from the PMD who thought a CT was indicated after you declined to order it.

Next step beyond liability protection – Press-Ganey protection – for all these patients who expect answers, and CTs at the minimum, and aren’t going to fill out very favorable patient satisfaction surveys without getting what they want….

http://www.acep.org/Content.aspx?id=79958

72-Hour Returns – Fun, But Not Useful

Our EMR lets us generate reports of our 72-hour returns – and it’s a fun toy, but, reading through it is rarely illuminating.  On a rare occasion you see a “true miss”, where one of your colleagues finds something through another line of thinking.  But, mostly, it’s wound checks, admissions for failed outpatient antibiotic therapy for cellulitis, or the town drunk coming back in again.  It is a valuable tool, at least, in the sense that our ED is the only one for 40 miles and is the only tertiary center for 90 miles, so we should get most of our own bouncebacks.

And, this study essentially confirms my anecdotal observations – most people who come back return for non-emergent conditions, do not require significant additional testing, and are no more likely to be admitted.  Their conclusion, then, is that 72-hour returns are of limited utility as a quality measure – something of which I tend to agree…although, if it were, the unintended consequence of discouraging that 2-day wound check/abscess repacking might finally put abscess packing to rest….

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21496142