Power to the Patient!
Last month I was interviewed by Joan Justice of HealthWorks Collective. She’d picked up on my “visible pricing” rant, and couldn’t agree more, so we did this nine minute Skype interview. Her full post about it is here.
Her entire series of interviews on high quality, low cost healthcare is here. Thanks for including me, Joan – it was stimulating!
For my last post of the year, as word filters out that Washington still can’t fix “the cliff,” I’ll do something rare: repeat something from just a few days ago. This needs to sink in for everyone who wants to fix America’s medical costs:
The “fiscal cliff” is big, but America’s excess medical costs are 30% bigger.
(Not total costs – just the waste that needs to be trimmed.)
As we start 2013, think about that.
Think how much commitment and guidance
it will take to fix it.
Some providers are working really hard to improve effectiveness,
and some insurance companies are too.
Some aren’t.
A lot of people’s income depends
on keeping things the way they are.
During the change, how will we ensure
that families and the best workers in the system are protected
while inefficiencies are pruned?
Here’s this week’s post again, tweaked just a little:
This is cross-posted from e-patients.net.
The PDF at right is a summary of sample data from this new dataset.
The Leapfrog Group is a highly respected patient safety organization. They’ve earned a reputation for carefully and thoughtfully assessing providers’ actual performance in quality and safety. Their mission statement:
To trigger giant leaps forward in the safety, quality and affordability of health care by:
Today, Leapfrog’s affiliated organization Hospital Safety Scores announced a major update of its A-through-F grades of thousands of US hospitals, and new smartphone apps to access the data on the fly.
Predictably, the hospitals who got an F – based on their own data! – are saying it’s “not a fair scoring system.” Happily, Leapfrog follows the best practices of open science: they fully disclose all their data, the methodology they used, and who designed the system. This means all buyers of care – e-patients, families, employers – can examine the data and assess claims of fairness for ourselves.
The full press release is here. I won’t take time to go into it; many others are doing so – here’s a current Google News search and blog search. Here, I want to focus on two aspects that are core to participatory medicine: understanding the data, and why this matters.
I’m always getting surprised by the vast resources out there that not only have I never seen, but nobody else has told me about, even when I write about something closely related. Latest example: this 7 minute video from last year on the need to publish prices of medical services.
(That’s my buddy and four-time cancer patient Jessie Gruman in the preview picture. The clarity of everything she says hides how deep her insights are: she’s a world-changer.)
I’ve blogged a lot about the problems patients face when they try to be responsible for health costs, so in a sense this video doesn’t contain anything new to my readers. BUT, this video existed a year ago, and I wish I’d known about it …. and there’s something about a well produced video that conveys the point effectively.
I could see this being used at the start of many sorts of health meetings.
This bit of awesomeness comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, of course. I feel like they’re the Smithsonian of research on improving health – so vast that nobody knows everything that’s in there. So I love it when I find something like this.
(Later I’ll post about the significance of how I found it.) <= Here’s that post.
This post brings together several threads from the past year’s work. At the core is one of the Great Challenges for TEDMED 2013: The Role of the Patient. Roles exist in a context, and a new perspective on this context came to light today.
_______________
Those who’ve seen me speak know I spend a lot of time thinking about the underlying structural issues that keep healthcare from evolving. In particular, leaders like Warner Slack MD have been saying since the 1970s that patients are the most under-used resource in healthcare.
But many in the profession can’t imagine that participatory medicine could be valid.
Why? Why do so many physicians, administrators and health policy people roll their eyes at the idea of patient as partner? (Many don’t, but many do.)
I don’t ask this as a whine, I ask it as an inquiry.
Paul Levy is the former CEO of my hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He’s also the one who introduced me to Dr. Danny Sands, my famous primary physician, who practices at BIDMC, saying “You’ll probably like this guy.” Well, GOOOAAALLL!, as they say in soccer. Which Paul plays, coaches, and referees. (He’s skinny.)
Today on his blog Paul writes How a Team Degrades. It’s a tale of a Lean exercise his hospital used, which he connects to a recent soccer episode. And I see a parallel with the role of the patient.
The Lean exercise:
A group of colleagues sat around a table and were given a problem to solve. Each person wore a hat with a label that could be seen by everyone at the table, except the person wearing the hat. The label might say “whines,” “creative,” “combative,” “unintelligent,” or some other characteristic.
Strikingly, within just a few minutes, people at the table began to treat each person as though the assigned characteristic were true.
Well, that’s not exactly what he said. And I’m not even sure he’s a dermatologist, though it sure sounds like it.
For newcomers, this is the latest in a four month saga, including these posts:
Today (Saturday 6/16) on the “decision” post, commenter “Joe” (apparently a dermatologist) said the most interesting, thought-provoking stuff I’ve ever seen anywhere about basal cell carcinoma treatment options:
[Read more…]