TECH/POLICY/PHYSICIANS:American medical care, or Larry Weed on Speed

(This one is long on links and short on explanation….sorry, but it’s all old ground here on THCB).

Larry Weed was at IHI last week using the same line that he was using in 1998 and was probably using for years before that.

"What's the point of outcomes data?" Weed wonders. So what if there are four times the rate of prostate surgeries in Salt Lake City as in Denver? "I wouldn't know whether I should move to Salt Lake so they don't miss my cancer of the prostate or move to Denver so I wouldn't have unnecessary surgery."

That statement has been true for a while, but Eliott Fisher et al are basically now showing that care is better in Salt Lake City. As Fisher says in the roundtable in the Health Affairs blog

The increasing fragmentation — almost atomization — of medical care, and a payment system that rewards commercial behavior on the part of physicians that, from all of my work, looks as if it’s on average certainly wasteful and quite often harmful.

The situation is certainly worse in Miami (and the rest of Florida), and it costs a hell of a lot more there. I know that’s true because Brian Klepper says so too! (read down in the article for his quote). And even the pestilent sore-lickers at the NY Times have finally figured it out.

And much of the reason is the inconsistent incentives that, Jeff Goldmsith points out in a recent Health Affairs article, are making the physicians primarily in the Sunbelt leave their compact with the hospitals and open up their own shops/heart hospitals—all of which are turbocharging the natural incentives that FFS gives them to do more anyway. Not that this is exactly hurting all hospitals; some of the biggest of which are having banner years. But while everyone in the business makes hay, there are those who suffer as a consequence.

And we’ve known about this for thirty years and nothing has been done to stop it.

PS. “Larry Weed on Speed” is an Ian Morrison line about the future of the EMR. 25 years later no one is using the Problem Knowledge Coupler. Which is a pity and a problem.