The Health News Review blog posted a story yesterday asking why there was such extensive news coverage of the American College of Cardiology / American Heart Association hypertension guideline but so far, so little of the American Academy of Family Physicians' announcement that it was not endorsing the guideline (the only other news outlets to have reported this decision are the AAFP's own news publication and Medscape). It's a good question, since "de-intensification" (stepping back on intensity or frequency) of recommendations in clinical practice guidelines is relatively uncommon. In this case, the AAFP decided to continue to adhere to blood pressure targets established by the JNC-8 hypertension guideline and its joint guideline with the American College of Physicians for adults aged 60 years or older.
I don't usually read the journal Hypertension, so I only recently came across an editorial (published on June 26) that criticized the ACP-AAFP guideline for the lack of "experts" on its panel. The 30 named authors of this 3-page piece, most of whom I suspect did not meet the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' authorship criteria, collectively have a list of disclosures of commercial conflicts of interest that takes up nearly a column of text. Those concerns aside, Dr. Franz Messerli and colleagues stated correctly that "guidelines are traditionally scripted by a panel of experts who are intimately familiar with the topic in question." They went on to compare the glittering resumes of the JNC-8 panel ("most of them were indeed true experts") with the more pedestrian ones of the ACP/AAFP panel and asserted that the latter's dearth of expertise did not qualify them for guideline development:
As per PubMed, 3 of the 7 guideline authors have never authored an article on hypertension and 1 has coauthored a single study only. Moreover, not one of the authors of the ACP/AAFP guideline is known to be a hypertension specialist certified by the American Society of Hypertension or of the American Heart Association Council for High Blood Pressure. ... No ACP/AAFP guideline author is currently serving on the editorial board of a journal dealing with hypertension. ... The mere fact that you know how and when to prescribe hydrochlorothiazide does not make you an expert in hypertensive cardiovascular disease.
This argument echoes past complaints by subspecialty groups that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), made up entirely of primary care clinicians, could not possibly know what it was doing when it recommended fewer screening mammograms (without any radiologists!) or less prostate-specific antigen testing for prostate cancer (without any urologists!)
The question is not whether subspecialists should be involved in developing guidelines for diagnosis and management of common conditions such as hypertension: of course they should be. The question is, on what level? At the guideline review and revision phase (ACP/AAFP) or in developing the key recommendations? The ACC/AHA selected as one of its guideline co-chairs Dr. Paul Whelton, a renowned expert in hypertension who was the principal investigator for the SPRINT study, the only major trial to show that a blood pressure target of 120/80 yielded more benefits than harms compared to a blood pressure target of 140/90 in a selected group of high-risk patients (as it turns out, even more high-risk than previously reported). In recognition of this intellectual bias, Dr. Whelton was relieved from chairing duties when SPRINT came up, but apparently was able to fully participate in the discussion and vote.
Incidentally, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Whelton at a conference 2 years ago and came away enormously impressed by his intelligence and equanimity. But it's very hard for anyone to see something - in this case, harms of lower blood pressure thresholds - if your scientific reputation depends on your overlooking it. Also, in my experience as a staffer for the USPSTF, panel members who did not treat the condition being screened for were able to follow the evidence without being biased by clinical experience. Pediatricians who weren't conditioned to order yearly mammograms or obstetrician-gynecologists who never ordered PSA tests were more often assets than liabilities on these topics.
Finally, primary care clinicians, particularly family physicians, have unrivaled expertise in treating the whole person, not only one body part or organ system. As I wrote in my Medscape commentary on the ACC/AHA hypertension guidelines, "Cardiologists have the luxury of only needing to be concerned with cardiovascular disease, but the vast majority of my patients with hypertension have comorbid chronic conditions and take several medications. Adding one more anti-hypertensive drug means more potential side effects, medication interactions, and costs to the patient and the health system." Kudos to the AAFP for having the courage to stick with the evidence and buck this one-low-blood-pressure-target-fits-all trend.
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Monday, December 18, 2017
Twelve months of Common Sense Family Doctor: 2017's greatest hits
Although I don't rule out writing another post or two before the year is out, below is a recap of my favorites from each month, starting in January. I hope that you enjoy reading (or re-reading) each of them. Looking ahead to 2018, I am planning to launch a podcast version of Common Sense Family Doctor, featuring audio versions of selected blog posts and new content, such as interviews with health professionals and others who are revolutionizing family medicine and population health. Stay tuned!
January - Ethical foundations of health reform
As the patchwork U.S. health system seems primed to undergo another political upheaval, I think it's more important than ever to seek consensus on the destination for health reform before embarking on the journey.
February - Tom Price is a physician who doesn't understand cancer screening
Judging by a letter to then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that he signed in 2011 objecting to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's draft recommendations on prostate cancer screening, Dr. Price either failed to learn anything in evidence-based medicine class or forgot everything he learned.
March - Does family medicine training led to high-value care?
One value-based health care intervention has borne fruit for the past 8 years in a row: attracting more medical students to the specialty of family medicine.
April - Safety net doesn't protect patients against low-value care
Safety net physicians were just as likely as other physicians to provide low-value services, underlining the importance of involving clinicians and patients in underserved practices in the Choosing Wisely campaign against medical overuse.
May - Fear-mongering in thyroid and breast cancer screening
The 40not50 campaign is insulting to women. It says that they can't be trusted to consider the medical evidence, have conversations with their primary care physicians, and make decisions about their healthcare that are right for them.
June - We shouldn't expect anyone to die in childbirth
Maternal mortality in the U.S. is largely a problem of social, economic, and geographic inequality rather than differences in health care, and we must look beyond hospitals for solutions.
July - Unequal treatment: disparities in how physicians are paid
The cause of these salary disparities - and the reason that more and more primary care physicians are choosing to cast off the health insurance model entirely - is a task-based payment system that inherently values cutting and suturing more than thinking.
August - How about ranking how well hospitals serve their communities?
Physicians and health executives have long believed that the responsibility of medicine is solely to provide health care, not social services or economic benefits outside of employment. But it's 2017, not 1967.
September - Ambition, rejection and leadership
Although I have fallen slightly short of my high ambitions, I will find other avenues to demonstrate leadership in medical publishing, evidence-based medicine, and population health.
October - What we choose to name a disease matters
The use of a more medicalized or precise term led patients to prefer invasive management options that were no better than more conservative choices.
November - Artificial intelligence will not make family physicians obsolete
Although Watson and its AI predecessors have made short work of the previously invincible Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! and vanquished world chess champions with ease, it is having a much harder time cracking medicine.
December - As hospitals downsize, what will replace them?
In my view, the role of policymakers should be to encourage a health care environment that makes it easy for hospitals and health systems to do the right thing.
January - Ethical foundations of health reform
As the patchwork U.S. health system seems primed to undergo another political upheaval, I think it's more important than ever to seek consensus on the destination for health reform before embarking on the journey.
February - Tom Price is a physician who doesn't understand cancer screening
Judging by a letter to then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that he signed in 2011 objecting to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's draft recommendations on prostate cancer screening, Dr. Price either failed to learn anything in evidence-based medicine class or forgot everything he learned.
March - Does family medicine training led to high-value care?
One value-based health care intervention has borne fruit for the past 8 years in a row: attracting more medical students to the specialty of family medicine.
April - Safety net doesn't protect patients against low-value care
Safety net physicians were just as likely as other physicians to provide low-value services, underlining the importance of involving clinicians and patients in underserved practices in the Choosing Wisely campaign against medical overuse.
May - Fear-mongering in thyroid and breast cancer screening
The 40not50 campaign is insulting to women. It says that they can't be trusted to consider the medical evidence, have conversations with their primary care physicians, and make decisions about their healthcare that are right for them.
June - We shouldn't expect anyone to die in childbirth
Maternal mortality in the U.S. is largely a problem of social, economic, and geographic inequality rather than differences in health care, and we must look beyond hospitals for solutions.
July - Unequal treatment: disparities in how physicians are paid
The cause of these salary disparities - and the reason that more and more primary care physicians are choosing to cast off the health insurance model entirely - is a task-based payment system that inherently values cutting and suturing more than thinking.
August - How about ranking how well hospitals serve their communities?
Physicians and health executives have long believed that the responsibility of medicine is solely to provide health care, not social services or economic benefits outside of employment. But it's 2017, not 1967.
September - Ambition, rejection and leadership
Although I have fallen slightly short of my high ambitions, I will find other avenues to demonstrate leadership in medical publishing, evidence-based medicine, and population health.
October - What we choose to name a disease matters
The use of a more medicalized or precise term led patients to prefer invasive management options that were no better than more conservative choices.
November - Artificial intelligence will not make family physicians obsolete
Although Watson and its AI predecessors have made short work of the previously invincible Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! and vanquished world chess champions with ease, it is having a much harder time cracking medicine.
December - As hospitals downsize, what will replace them?
In my view, the role of policymakers should be to encourage a health care environment that makes it easy for hospitals and health systems to do the right thing.
Monday, December 11, 2017
As hospitals downsize, what will replace them?
Last week, I rounded on patients at Providence Hospital as the attending physician on the Family Medicine residency program's inpatient service. Providence recently closed its maternity ward as the first step in a planned redevelopment of the hospital grounds into a "health village." In the short term, the hospital's decision to stop delivering babies may worsen maternal health disparities, as the entire eastern side of Washington, DC is now a "maternity care desert" with no labor and delivery services. In Providence's defense, it lost $23 million in fiscal year 2016, and its long-term plan to replace hospital beds with ambulatory services and spaces that support community health and wellness is part of a broader national trend. As Dr. Neel Shah wrote recently in Politico's "The Case Against Hospital Beds":
Some corners of the health care world are already starting to embrace new, less bed-focused models of care. ... [At a] venture-capital based birthing center franchise, birthing families are often admitted and discharged on the same day, and beds are in the corner of the room (for resting and breastfeeding after the baby is born), rather than in the center; the idea is to encourage the mom to use movement as much as possible to support her labor by literally sidelining the bed. Health systems are increasingly investing in other types of spaces where bedrest is not the default, including skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities, as well as home visiting nurses and health coaches to help high-need patients with acute and chronic conditions stay out of the hospital.
For now, the future looks like this: Hospitals will keep doing things like deliveries, appendectomies and sewing up the victims of shootings and car wrecks. They’ll also have to care for people with diseases like diabetes, heart failure and cancer when they take bad turns. But in the future, the mission of the hospital will be to keep patients from coming through their doors in the first place.
Some corners of the health care world are already starting to embrace new, less bed-focused models of care. ... [At a] venture-capital based birthing center franchise, birthing families are often admitted and discharged on the same day, and beds are in the corner of the room (for resting and breastfeeding after the baby is born), rather than in the center; the idea is to encourage the mom to use movement as much as possible to support her labor by literally sidelining the bed. Health systems are increasingly investing in other types of spaces where bedrest is not the default, including skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities, as well as home visiting nurses and health coaches to help high-need patients with acute and chronic conditions stay out of the hospital.
Before the hospital building boom that began after World War II, most acutely ill persons were cared for at home by family members with the help of visiting physicians. Emerging technology may enable this historical arrangement to become the future of health care. A recent JAMA Viewpoint argued that the expansion of telehealth and virtual care capabilities means that it's time to start training and credentialing a new physician specialty called the "medical virtualist," who would possess specific expertise in providing remote care the way a hospitalist possesses expertise in hospital care. (I'm not sold on this idea, as studies continue to show that primary care physicians who care for their own patients in the hospital have as good or better outcomes than do hospitalists.) In "A Hospital Without Patients," Arthur Allen described the Mercy Virtual Care Center, where teams of doctors and nurses use wireless devices to remotely monitor homebound patients around the clock and act as consultants in intensive care units in faraway hospitals:
For now, the future looks like this: Hospitals will keep doing things like deliveries, appendectomies and sewing up the victims of shootings and car wrecks. They’ll also have to care for people with diseases like diabetes, heart failure and cancer when they take bad turns. But in the future, the mission of the hospital will be to keep patients from coming through their doors in the first place.
For a family physician with a natural orientation toward prevention and public health, this is certainly an appealing vision. As the years have passed, I find myself enjoying my time at the hospital less and less, mostly because most of the patients on my service wouldn't need to be there if outpatient health and social services simply worked better. So many admissions could have been avoided if primary care clinicians were able to easily check on patients in their homes and intervene early on in flares of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or congestive heart failure. If my homeless patient didn't have to wait months for housing; if my uninsured patient with diabetes didn't have to choose between buying insulin and glucose monitoring supplies; if my debilitated patient with Medicare could be transferred directly to a rehabilitation center rather than needing a hospital stay first.
There should be plenty of dollars available to redirect into prevention as hospitals downsize. Since 2014, Maryland has piloted a successful statewide experiment in giving hospitals financial incentives to keep patients well (and beds empty), overriding the traditional goal of keeping beds full to maximize revenue. The ever-present danger is that savings from hospital downsizing will go to pad executive salaries rather than flowing back into the community, as seems to be occurring at the fabulously wealthy "nonprofit" Mayo Clinic system.
Perhaps the future will see Providence Hospital's shuttered maternity ward replaced by a modern birthing center and comprehensive prenatal and postpartum care enhanced by telehealth services. Or today's maternity care desert could remain just that: a desert, where minority mothers continue to suffer pregnancy complications and deaths at appalling rates. In my view, the role of policymakers should be to encourage a health care environment that makes it easy for hospitals and health systems to do the right thing.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Why don't doctors discuss cancer screening harms?
A few years ago, I attended a conference that included an exercise where attendees were asked how many patients they thought it was acceptable to diagnose and treat needlessly ("overtreat") in order to prevent one death from cancer. We stood at various points along a wall that represented different thresholds: at one end, 100 persons overtreated for every 1 life saved; at the other, 1 person overtreated for every 1 life saved. Not surprisingly, attendees held a wide range of opinions (I stood somewhere in the middle), but the exercise illustrated the tradeoff inherent in effective screening tests for breast, colorectal, and cervical cancer: for every person who benefits from screening, others will be harmed. This fact has led many physicians to advocate that shared decision-making be used more widely to integrate patients' preferences and values with the decision to accept or decline a screening test.
How often do physicians take the time to explain the harms of cancer screening to their patients? A 2013 research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine explored this question in an online survey of 317 U.S. adults between 50 and 69 years of age. 83 percent of participants had attended at least 1 routine cancer screening; 27 percent had undergone 3 or more. However, less than 10 percent of participants had ever been informed by their physicians of the risk that the screening test(s) could lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. The few physicians who did attempt to quantify this risk generally provided information that was inconsistent with the medical literature.
If the results of this survey are representative of the practices of U.S. primary care clinicians, then more than 90 percent aren't telling patients that there are downsides to undergoing routine mammograms, colonoscopies, and Pap smears. Why not? Is it because they aren't familiar enough with the data to accurately describe these harms? Or is it because they fear that patients who receive information about cancer screening harms will choose to decline these tests?
**
This post originally appeared on Common Sense Family Doctor on November 3, 2013.
How often do physicians take the time to explain the harms of cancer screening to their patients? A 2013 research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine explored this question in an online survey of 317 U.S. adults between 50 and 69 years of age. 83 percent of participants had attended at least 1 routine cancer screening; 27 percent had undergone 3 or more. However, less than 10 percent of participants had ever been informed by their physicians of the risk that the screening test(s) could lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. The few physicians who did attempt to quantify this risk generally provided information that was inconsistent with the medical literature.
If the results of this survey are representative of the practices of U.S. primary care clinicians, then more than 90 percent aren't telling patients that there are downsides to undergoing routine mammograms, colonoscopies, and Pap smears. Why not? Is it because they aren't familiar enough with the data to accurately describe these harms? Or is it because they fear that patients who receive information about cancer screening harms will choose to decline these tests?
**
This post originally appeared on Common Sense Family Doctor on November 3, 2013.
Sunday, November 26, 2017
My favorite public health and health care books of 2017
With some extra free time this Thanksgiving weekend, I'm getting to my top 10 books list a bit earlier than in past years. I suppose that it's possible I will read a great book in December that would have made the cut - if so, I'll post its own review or include it in next year's list. As I did in 2016, I made eligible any health-related book that I read this year, regardless of the year it was published. Interestingly, all but three of these books were authored by physicians, although most of them are no longer actively seeing patients.
Books are listed in alphabetical order rather than order of preference/enjoyment.
**
1. An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back, by Elisabeth Rosenthal
2. Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus
4. Dreamland: the True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quinones
5. The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World, by Michael Marmot
6. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance
7. Inferno: A Doctor's Ebola Story, by Steven Hatch
8. Look It Up! What Patients, Doctors, Nurses, and Pharmacists Need to Know about the Internet and Primary Health Care, by Pierre Pluye and Roland Grad
9. Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life, by Allen Frances
10. Unanticipated Outcomes: A Medical Memoir, by Jerome Kassirer
Books are listed in alphabetical order rather than order of preference/enjoyment.
**
5. The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World, by Michael Marmot
Saturday, November 18, 2017
When does it make sense to lower cholesterol with statins?
There has been no shortage of recent guidance on statin use for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD). The American College of Cardiology / American Heart Association and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) disagree about the appropriate 10-year CVD event risk threshold at which clinicians should recommend statins - 7.5% and 10%, respectively - but both agree that the benefits significantly outweigh the harms. So what should clinicians make of the Medicine By the Numbers in the Nov. 1 issue of American Family Physician, which gave a Red (no benefits) rating to statins in persons at low (less than 20% 10-year) risk of cardiovascular disease?
Dr. John Abramson calculated the numbers needed to treat (NNT) to benefit and harm based on data from the 2012 Cholesterol Treatment Trialists (CTT) meta-analysis and the USPSTF's 2016 systematic review. Excluding patients with existing cardiovascular disease or a greater than 20% 10-year CVD event risk, the results showed no mortality benefit, but 1 in 217 persons avoided a nonfatal myocardial infarction and 1 in 313 avoided a nonfatal stroke. On the harms side of the scale, 1 in 21 persons experienced pain from muscle damage, and 1 in 204 developed diabetes mellitus as a result of taking statins. Dr. Abramson acknowledged that his conclusion of "no benefit" relied on value judgments about the importance of these harms compared with cardiovascular events prevented:
In summary, studies have found no significant overall mortality benefit with statin therapy in low-risk patients, as well as no reduction in the risk of serious illness overall and very small benefits for nonfatal heart attack and stroke. Statins also appear to cause diabetes. Although this is uncommon, diabetes may occur more often than the prevention of a heart attack or stroke in patients taking statins. ... With no mortality benefit, no reduction in serious illness, an approximately 1% chance of avoiding a nonfatal heart attack or stroke, a similar or greater chance of developing diabetes, and a one in 21 chance of muscle damage, it seems wiser to focus on lifestyle changes (such as adopting a Mediterranean diet, exercising, and not smoking) instead of cholesterol drugs in low-risk patients.
These findings are broadly consistent with a 2011 Cochrane for Clinicians that noted that because "most trials included large numbers of persons with known CVD, ... clear evidence of the effectiveness of statins to prevent a first cardiovascular event is lacking." Other Cochrane reviews have found that statins reduce all-cause mortality in patients with non-dialysis chronic kidney disease, but do not prevent dementia or cognitive decline. A previous AFP article summarized considerations for safe use of statins, which should be part of shared decision making discussions with patients when the benefits and harms are so closely balanced.
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog. And yes, I plan to discuss the new ACC/AHA blood pressure guideline in future posts ...
Dr. John Abramson calculated the numbers needed to treat (NNT) to benefit and harm based on data from the 2012 Cholesterol Treatment Trialists (CTT) meta-analysis and the USPSTF's 2016 systematic review. Excluding patients with existing cardiovascular disease or a greater than 20% 10-year CVD event risk, the results showed no mortality benefit, but 1 in 217 persons avoided a nonfatal myocardial infarction and 1 in 313 avoided a nonfatal stroke. On the harms side of the scale, 1 in 21 persons experienced pain from muscle damage, and 1 in 204 developed diabetes mellitus as a result of taking statins. Dr. Abramson acknowledged that his conclusion of "no benefit" relied on value judgments about the importance of these harms compared with cardiovascular events prevented:
In summary, studies have found no significant overall mortality benefit with statin therapy in low-risk patients, as well as no reduction in the risk of serious illness overall and very small benefits for nonfatal heart attack and stroke. Statins also appear to cause diabetes. Although this is uncommon, diabetes may occur more often than the prevention of a heart attack or stroke in patients taking statins. ... With no mortality benefit, no reduction in serious illness, an approximately 1% chance of avoiding a nonfatal heart attack or stroke, a similar or greater chance of developing diabetes, and a one in 21 chance of muscle damage, it seems wiser to focus on lifestyle changes (such as adopting a Mediterranean diet, exercising, and not smoking) instead of cholesterol drugs in low-risk patients.
These findings are broadly consistent with a 2011 Cochrane for Clinicians that noted that because "most trials included large numbers of persons with known CVD, ... clear evidence of the effectiveness of statins to prevent a first cardiovascular event is lacking." Other Cochrane reviews have found that statins reduce all-cause mortality in patients with non-dialysis chronic kidney disease, but do not prevent dementia or cognitive decline. A previous AFP article summarized considerations for safe use of statins, which should be part of shared decision making discussions with patients when the benefits and harms are so closely balanced.
**
This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog. And yes, I plan to discuss the new ACC/AHA blood pressure guideline in future posts ...
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
We will not be intimidated
Recent weeks have seen a virtual avalanche of allegations of past harassment or inappropriate sexual behavior by (mostly) male politicians, talk-show hosts, and business executives. Since many of these revelations have come out years or decades later, partisans have been quick to suggest that their stories are politically motivated fabrications. If what happened was so despicable or immoral, they ask, why not come forward earlier? Why wait, for example, until the repeat offender is a in a position to be elected to the U.S. Senate? I'll tell you why in one word: intimidation. For the most part, sexual violence isn't driven by an excess of passion; it's driven by an excess of power. Violators count on a combination of embarrassment, guilt, and intimidation to keep their victims from talking, and more often than not, it works.
Intimidation is often used to injure on a societal level, too. As illustrated in the critically acclaimed film The Insider, the tobacco industry was ruthless in attempting to prevent whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand from revealing that its executives intentionally added substances known to be addictive and carcinogenic to cigarettes. More recently, a group that publicly supported a tax on sugary drinks in Colombia was threatened and censored in the weeks leading up to the vote in the legislature. And Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Massachusetts general internist who writes the Updates in Slow Medicine e-newsletter, was hit with a $200 million libel lawsuit by a supplement company after publishing a scientific paper that demonstrated the presence of a designer stimulant in its product. Dr. Cohen (whose lawsuit was eventually dismissed by a jury after a week-long federal trial) and colleagues wrote recently in JAMA Internal Medicine:
When lawsuits target scientists, it does not matter that plaintiffs almost never win. It does not even matter if the case goes to trial. The goal is to intimidate. In the lawsuit over dietary supplements, for example, the head of the company who brought the suit openly admitted that he was “hoping that we were able to silence this guy,” as well as other researchers who might raise questions about the supplement industry. The most frivolous lawsuit can generate substantial legal costs, distract scientists from research, force the indiscriminate disclosure of laboratory notebooks and emails, and create unnecessary stress for colleagues and families.
On August 13, 2013, after reading a blog post where I called his company "unscrupulous" based on its aggressive efforts to sell packages of non-recommended and potentially harmful tests to vulnerable elders at health fairs and churches, the chief medical officer of Life Line Screening mailed me a letter that called my characterization "potentially libelous and actionable" and copied their in-house legal counsel. After a lengthy defense of the technical accuracy of their testing process (which I have never questioned - my problem is that these tests are unnecessary and do not improve patients' health!), he went on to write: "You and I can disagree, but you do not have the right to attack our reputation, our passion for helping people, or the integrity of our team." I subsequently forwarded this letter to my department Chair, who forwarded it to my employer's legal counsel, who concluded that the probability of a libel lawsuit was low, and that of a successful lawsuit virtually nil. Nonetheless, it was enough to scare me into remaining silent for the next 4 years.
Intimidation is often used to injure on a societal level, too. As illustrated in the critically acclaimed film The Insider, the tobacco industry was ruthless in attempting to prevent whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand from revealing that its executives intentionally added substances known to be addictive and carcinogenic to cigarettes. More recently, a group that publicly supported a tax on sugary drinks in Colombia was threatened and censored in the weeks leading up to the vote in the legislature. And Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Massachusetts general internist who writes the Updates in Slow Medicine e-newsletter, was hit with a $200 million libel lawsuit by a supplement company after publishing a scientific paper that demonstrated the presence of a designer stimulant in its product. Dr. Cohen (whose lawsuit was eventually dismissed by a jury after a week-long federal trial) and colleagues wrote recently in JAMA Internal Medicine:
When lawsuits target scientists, it does not matter that plaintiffs almost never win. It does not even matter if the case goes to trial. The goal is to intimidate. In the lawsuit over dietary supplements, for example, the head of the company who brought the suit openly admitted that he was “hoping that we were able to silence this guy,” as well as other researchers who might raise questions about the supplement industry. The most frivolous lawsuit can generate substantial legal costs, distract scientists from research, force the indiscriminate disclosure of laboratory notebooks and emails, and create unnecessary stress for colleagues and families.
On August 13, 2013, after reading a blog post where I called his company "unscrupulous" based on its aggressive efforts to sell packages of non-recommended and potentially harmful tests to vulnerable elders at health fairs and churches, the chief medical officer of Life Line Screening mailed me a letter that called my characterization "potentially libelous and actionable" and copied their in-house legal counsel. After a lengthy defense of the technical accuracy of their testing process (which I have never questioned - my problem is that these tests are unnecessary and do not improve patients' health!), he went on to write: "You and I can disagree, but you do not have the right to attack our reputation, our passion for helping people, or the integrity of our team." I subsequently forwarded this letter to my department Chair, who forwarded it to my employer's legal counsel, who concluded that the probability of a libel lawsuit was low, and that of a successful lawsuit virtually nil. Nonetheless, it was enough to scare me into remaining silent for the next 4 years.
Dear Life Line Screening, I am not attacking your company's integrity. I am sure that the vast majority of your employees are passionate about helping people (why else work for a company named "Life Line"?) But the tests you portray to potential customers - like the retired ladies in the next pew at my church who live off fixed incomes - as bargains, however CLIA-certifiably accurate, are ineffective or, like screening for carotid artery stenosis, actually do more harm than good. And I will no longer be intimidated by you or anyone else from saying so.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Artificial intelligence will not make family physicians obsolete
Last week, I was speaking on the phone with Dr. Roland Grad, a family physician at McGill University and co-author of the new book "Look It Up! What Patients, Doctors, Nurses, and Pharmacists Need to Know about the Internet and Primary Health Care." We were discussing the (to us, preposterous) notion that there would be no future for primary care physicians because we will all be replaced by cognitive computing / artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as IBM's Watson. Roland told me that whenever someone asks him about this, he points out that Star Trek clearly shows that there will be human doctors well into the 24th century. Even the holographic Doctor on the U.S.S. Voyager is only pressed into service after the entire human medical staff is killed in an accident.
Many of the prospective medical students I interview have asked me about how AI will influence how I practice family medicine in the future. A recent Perspective on machine learning in the New England Journal of Medicine asserted that "the complexity of medicine now exceeds the capacity of the human mind." The authors argued that since doctors can no longer keep all relevant medical knowledge in their heads, and "every patient is now a 'big data' challenge," we will soon need to rely on massive computer-generated algorithms to avoid diagnostic and treatment paralysis.
It's no surprise that neither author of this piece is a family physician. Since I began my residency 16 years ago, and well before that, I knew that no matter how much I learned, it wouldn't be possible to keep everything I needed in my head. I never had to. In medical school I carried around a variety of pocket-sized print references, and in residency and clinical practice I had several generations of Palm Pilots and, eventually, smartphones that allowed me to look up what I didn't know or couldn't recall. The same goes for keeping up with the medical literature. Although I regularly read more journals than the average generalist (nine*), I know that there's no way that I can possibly read, much less critically appraise, every new primary care-relevant study. Drs. David Slawson and Allen Shaughnessy have argued that rather than pursue that hopeless (even for a super-subspecialist) task, clinicians should be taught information management skills, which consist of foraging (selecting tools that filter information for relevance and validity); hunting ("just in time" information tools for use at the point of care), and "combining the best patient-oriented evidence with patient-centered care."
And although Watson and its AI predecessors have made short work of the previously invincible Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! and vanquished world chess champions with ease, it is having a much harder time cracking medicine. Although IBM started selling Watson for Oncology as a "revolution in cancer care" to hospital systems worldwide in 2014 and has spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to exempt its software from FDA regulation, a STAT investigation found that the system has fallen far short of its hype:
At its heart, Watson for Oncology uses the cloud-based supercomputer to digest massive amounts of data - from doctor's notes to medical studies to clinical guidelines. But its treatment recommendations are not based on its own insights from these data. Instead, they are based exclusively on training by human overseers, who laboriously feed Watson information about how patients with specific characteristics should be treated.
AI will no doubt play a supporting role in the future of health care, alongside smartphone physicals and precision medicine and many other promising innovations borrowed from other industries. But based on past experience, I'm not convinced that any of these innovations will be as revolutionary as advertised. In my own career, doctors have gone from using paper charts that were time-consuming to maintain and couldn't communicate with each other to electronic health records that are even more time-consuming to maintain and still can't communicate with each other. You get my point. Even if IBM or some other tech company eventually harnesses AI to improve primary care practice, here's what Roland and his colleagues have to say in Look It Up!:
Some might wonder whether this new automated world of information will create a medical world that is dominated by artificial intelligence, where doctors - if we even need them anymore - will just repeat what the machines say. On the contrary, as more information becomes readily available, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and allied health professionals will become more important as the interpreters of that information in accordance with the specific clinical and social history, values, and preferences of the patient and her or his family.
Right. I couldn't have said it better myself.
* - American Family Physician, Annals of Family Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Health Affairs, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, Journal of Family Practice, New England Journal of Medicine
Many of the prospective medical students I interview have asked me about how AI will influence how I practice family medicine in the future. A recent Perspective on machine learning in the New England Journal of Medicine asserted that "the complexity of medicine now exceeds the capacity of the human mind." The authors argued that since doctors can no longer keep all relevant medical knowledge in their heads, and "every patient is now a 'big data' challenge," we will soon need to rely on massive computer-generated algorithms to avoid diagnostic and treatment paralysis.
It's no surprise that neither author of this piece is a family physician. Since I began my residency 16 years ago, and well before that, I knew that no matter how much I learned, it wouldn't be possible to keep everything I needed in my head. I never had to. In medical school I carried around a variety of pocket-sized print references, and in residency and clinical practice I had several generations of Palm Pilots and, eventually, smartphones that allowed me to look up what I didn't know or couldn't recall. The same goes for keeping up with the medical literature. Although I regularly read more journals than the average generalist (nine*), I know that there's no way that I can possibly read, much less critically appraise, every new primary care-relevant study. Drs. David Slawson and Allen Shaughnessy have argued that rather than pursue that hopeless (even for a super-subspecialist) task, clinicians should be taught information management skills, which consist of foraging (selecting tools that filter information for relevance and validity); hunting ("just in time" information tools for use at the point of care), and "combining the best patient-oriented evidence with patient-centered care."
And although Watson and its AI predecessors have made short work of the previously invincible Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! and vanquished world chess champions with ease, it is having a much harder time cracking medicine. Although IBM started selling Watson for Oncology as a "revolution in cancer care" to hospital systems worldwide in 2014 and has spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to exempt its software from FDA regulation, a STAT investigation found that the system has fallen far short of its hype:
At its heart, Watson for Oncology uses the cloud-based supercomputer to digest massive amounts of data - from doctor's notes to medical studies to clinical guidelines. But its treatment recommendations are not based on its own insights from these data. Instead, they are based exclusively on training by human overseers, who laboriously feed Watson information about how patients with specific characteristics should be treated.
AI will no doubt play a supporting role in the future of health care, alongside smartphone physicals and precision medicine and many other promising innovations borrowed from other industries. But based on past experience, I'm not convinced that any of these innovations will be as revolutionary as advertised. In my own career, doctors have gone from using paper charts that were time-consuming to maintain and couldn't communicate with each other to electronic health records that are even more time-consuming to maintain and still can't communicate with each other. You get my point. Even if IBM or some other tech company eventually harnesses AI to improve primary care practice, here's what Roland and his colleagues have to say in Look It Up!:
Some might wonder whether this new automated world of information will create a medical world that is dominated by artificial intelligence, where doctors - if we even need them anymore - will just repeat what the machines say. On the contrary, as more information becomes readily available, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and allied health professionals will become more important as the interpreters of that information in accordance with the specific clinical and social history, values, and preferences of the patient and her or his family.
Right. I couldn't have said it better myself.
* - American Family Physician, Annals of Family Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Health Affairs, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, Journal of Family Practice, New England Journal of Medicine
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Can social media misuse be a downer?
Social media use provides several professional benefits for family physicians and other health care professionals: it can promote one's practice and engage patients, increase the dissemination of insightful or practice changing conference findings, and amplify the voice of our specialty to advocate on public health concerns. Similarly, patients can also benefit from social media's networking and community-enhancing functions. However, social media's potential downsides include cyberbullying, which targets persons of all ages but may be particularly damaging to children, and problematic internet use / Internet gaming disorder. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement last year on office counseling for families and children five to 18 years of age on media use.
A Curbside Consultation in the October 15 issue of American Family Physician explored the relationship between social media and mood disorders. For some persons, particularly in the millenial age group, social media misuse can cause or contribute to the anxiety-related condition "fear of missing out" (FOMO), wrote Drs. Kaitlyn Watson and David Slawson:
Viewing social media intensifies feelings of irritability, anxiety, and inadequacy. Additionally, the drive to stay in the loop can contribute to a cycle of unhealthy social media use. The more time individuals spend on social media, the more likely they are to feel that they are missing out on something, which many will then try to alleviate through more social media activity. Higher FOMO scores, as measured by a validated 10-question scale, are significantly associated with lower feelings of competence, autonomy, and connectedness with others compared with persons who do not worry about being left out.
For patients whose social media misuse is causing adverse emotional or physical symptoms, clinicians can recommend any of several free or low-cost apps that help users "unplug" by limiting total social media time per day or restricting use of certain sites (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat) to specific time windows. Other suggested interventions include "changing notification settings to daily or weekly instead of instantly, developing offline relationships, committing to daily personal improvement practices (e.g., yoga, meditation, exercise), and cutting back on the number of social media formats on which the same person is followed." Finally, cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness exercises may also be helpful.
A Curbside Consultation in the October 15 issue of American Family Physician explored the relationship between social media and mood disorders. For some persons, particularly in the millenial age group, social media misuse can cause or contribute to the anxiety-related condition "fear of missing out" (FOMO), wrote Drs. Kaitlyn Watson and David Slawson:
Viewing social media intensifies feelings of irritability, anxiety, and inadequacy. Additionally, the drive to stay in the loop can contribute to a cycle of unhealthy social media use. The more time individuals spend on social media, the more likely they are to feel that they are missing out on something, which many will then try to alleviate through more social media activity. Higher FOMO scores, as measured by a validated 10-question scale, are significantly associated with lower feelings of competence, autonomy, and connectedness with others compared with persons who do not worry about being left out.
What has been your experience with symptoms of depression or anxiety linked to social media use?
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Once a Cesarean ... now, a vaginal delivery
A 2015 essay in the "Narrative Matters" section of Health Affairs by physician and health policy researcher Carla Keirns highlighted the challenges that even a highly educated, well-informed patient faces in achieving the desired outcome of a vaginal childbirth, especially if her pregnancy is classified as high risk. Dr. Keirns, whose pregnancy was complicated by "advanced maternal age" (there's that term again) and gestational diabetes, narrowly avoided a Cesarean delivery by obstetricians who often seemed to be "watching the clock" more than assessing her individual circumstances. She observed how the "Cesarean culture" of medical practice overshadows the ideal of shared decision-making about delivery preference:
I was naked and uncomfortable, had invasive lines in place, and hadn’t slept or eaten in three days. If a doctor I trusted, instead of one I didn’t know, had suggested a cesarean forty-eight hours into my labor induction, I might have agreed. If they had told me that my baby’s life or health was in jeopardy, I would have consented to anything. The vision of the empowered consumer, or even the autonomous patient, is laughable under these circumstances.
Once a woman has had one Cesarean delivery, she faces considerable pressure from the medical system to choose repeat Cesarean deliveries in subsequent pregnancies. A 2014 article in The Atlantic explained why the dictum "once a Cesarean, always a Cesarean" increasingly holds true despite good evidence that planned VBAC is safe for, and desired by, most women. After the American College of Obsetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) published guidelines in 1996 (later challenged by the AAFP) recommending that in-house surgical teams be "immediately available" during planned VBAC, many hospitals stopped allowing women to attempt labor after a Cesarean. Even though ACOG now acknowledges that there is no evidence that hospitals with fewer resources have worse maternal or neonatal outcomes from planned VBAC, these restrictive institutional policies have remained in place.
After our first child was born by Cesarean section, my wife, who is also a family physician, proceeded to have three consecutive uncomplicated vaginal deliveries after the age of 35. To change the culture of medicine to support this kind of outcome, and to reduce the overall frequency of Cesarean deliveries, patients, physicians, and hospitals must advocate for aligning medical protocols with the best evidence and putting mothers and babies back at the center of care.
**
A slightly different version of this post appeared in Common Sense Family Doctor on February 5, 2015.
I was naked and uncomfortable, had invasive lines in place, and hadn’t slept or eaten in three days. If a doctor I trusted, instead of one I didn’t know, had suggested a cesarean forty-eight hours into my labor induction, I might have agreed. If they had told me that my baby’s life or health was in jeopardy, I would have consented to anything. The vision of the empowered consumer, or even the autonomous patient, is laughable under these circumstances.
Once a woman has had one Cesarean delivery, she faces considerable pressure from the medical system to choose repeat Cesarean deliveries in subsequent pregnancies. A 2014 article in The Atlantic explained why the dictum "once a Cesarean, always a Cesarean" increasingly holds true despite good evidence that planned VBAC is safe for, and desired by, most women. After the American College of Obsetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) published guidelines in 1996 (later challenged by the AAFP) recommending that in-house surgical teams be "immediately available" during planned VBAC, many hospitals stopped allowing women to attempt labor after a Cesarean. Even though ACOG now acknowledges that there is no evidence that hospitals with fewer resources have worse maternal or neonatal outcomes from planned VBAC, these restrictive institutional policies have remained in place.
After our first child was born by Cesarean section, my wife, who is also a family physician, proceeded to have three consecutive uncomplicated vaginal deliveries after the age of 35. To change the culture of medicine to support this kind of outcome, and to reduce the overall frequency of Cesarean deliveries, patients, physicians, and hospitals must advocate for aligning medical protocols with the best evidence and putting mothers and babies back at the center of care.
**
A slightly different version of this post appeared in Common Sense Family Doctor on February 5, 2015.
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Three reasons for optimism in health policy
For clinicians like me who worry about how health policy changes may harm our patients, there have been plenty of reasons for pessimism this fall. Congressional re-authorization of the highly effective, popular, bipartisan Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), whose funding expired on September 30, was derailed by yet another "repeal Obamacare" attempt that failed to muster 50 of 52 Republican votes (or any Democratic votes) in the Senate. Dr. Tom Price, the now-former Secretary of Health and Human Services, was dismissed after billing taxpayers nearly $1 million for travel on private and military jets between obscure destinations with few commercial options such as ... Washington, DC to Philadelphia. (I was happy to see him go.) And building on his Administration's record of partisan actions on science policy, President Trump has confused just about everybody on whether he will ultimately support a bipartisan agreement to pass legislation stabilizing the Affordable Care Act's health insurance marketplaces in exchange for making it easier for states to obtain waivers to develop their own programs.
So why am I feeling optimistic, instead? Two weeks ago, I attended the 25th anniversary celebration of the Alliance for Health Policy, "a nonpartisan forum for learning and dialogue among policymakers and other leaders working to address the country’s most pressing health and health care issues." (Thanks to my friends at Health Is Primary for the invite.) This is one of the few health-related groups in Washington that could bestow honors on prominent conservative (Gail Wilensky) and liberal (Uwe Reinhardt) health care economists, as well as longtime Republican and Democratic congressional staffers, on the same night. And it was reassuring to see that family medicine had not one but many seats at the table, with the American Academy of Family Physicians' CEO, immediate past President, President, and President-Elect all in attendance.
Another nonpartisan health policy group that I've been following for the past few years is the Milbank Memorial Fund, which focuses on developing evidence to support state-level population health strategies, including but not limited to insurance reforms. In three recent reports, the Fund examined how some states achieved "significant, sustained improvements ... in one or more key population health outcome measures" and what lessons could be generalized from those experiences. For example, Georgia and Florida both made significant strides in reducing infant mortality relative to the rest of the nation between 2004 and 2014. In Georgia, a campaign led by then-public health commissioner Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald (now director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the Fund concluded that stakeholder engagement, champions, strategic use of data, and partnerships focused on postnatal care were crucial elements.
My third reason for optimism is my students. It strikes me as ironic that the medical school course that I co-direct at Georgetown was not even part of the curriculum of my own alma mater (NYU) or any other school of medicine in the 1990s. This year, for the first time, the course is concentrated into two intensive one-week blocks - one last week on Health Disparities and Health Equity, and another next spring on Health Policy and Advocacy - rather than being parceled out through five months of the academic year in direct competition with basic science courses. The result has been the most engaged, enthusiastic group of first-year medical students whom I've had the pleasure to teach. These students not only understand social determinants of health, they are ready to take action to address the root causes of health disparities where people live, work and play. They are prepared to advocate for patients in their neighborhoods and communities, far outside the walls of the hospital and clinic. They are motivated to change the culture of medical education to provide more than lip service to the social mission of caring for historically disadvantaged populations. They are part of the future of medicine and population health in this country, and they give me reason to believe that the future is bright.
So why am I feeling optimistic, instead? Two weeks ago, I attended the 25th anniversary celebration of the Alliance for Health Policy, "a nonpartisan forum for learning and dialogue among policymakers and other leaders working to address the country’s most pressing health and health care issues." (Thanks to my friends at Health Is Primary for the invite.) This is one of the few health-related groups in Washington that could bestow honors on prominent conservative (Gail Wilensky) and liberal (Uwe Reinhardt) health care economists, as well as longtime Republican and Democratic congressional staffers, on the same night. And it was reassuring to see that family medicine had not one but many seats at the table, with the American Academy of Family Physicians' CEO, immediate past President, President, and President-Elect all in attendance.
Another nonpartisan health policy group that I've been following for the past few years is the Milbank Memorial Fund, which focuses on developing evidence to support state-level population health strategies, including but not limited to insurance reforms. In three recent reports, the Fund examined how some states achieved "significant, sustained improvements ... in one or more key population health outcome measures" and what lessons could be generalized from those experiences. For example, Georgia and Florida both made significant strides in reducing infant mortality relative to the rest of the nation between 2004 and 2014. In Georgia, a campaign led by then-public health commissioner Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald (now director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the Fund concluded that stakeholder engagement, champions, strategic use of data, and partnerships focused on postnatal care were crucial elements.
My third reason for optimism is my students. It strikes me as ironic that the medical school course that I co-direct at Georgetown was not even part of the curriculum of my own alma mater (NYU) or any other school of medicine in the 1990s. This year, for the first time, the course is concentrated into two intensive one-week blocks - one last week on Health Disparities and Health Equity, and another next spring on Health Policy and Advocacy - rather than being parceled out through five months of the academic year in direct competition with basic science courses. The result has been the most engaged, enthusiastic group of first-year medical students whom I've had the pleasure to teach. These students not only understand social determinants of health, they are ready to take action to address the root causes of health disparities where people live, work and play. They are prepared to advocate for patients in their neighborhoods and communities, far outside the walls of the hospital and clinic. They are motivated to change the culture of medical education to provide more than lip service to the social mission of caring for historically disadvantaged populations. They are part of the future of medicine and population health in this country, and they give me reason to believe that the future is bright.
Thursday, October 5, 2017
What we choose to name a disease matters
A couple of years ago around this time, I was dealing with a series of minor health problems. I developed a sinus infection that took several weeks to resolve. I twisted one of my knees ice skating, and for a while I feared that I had torn a meniscus. Occasionally after eating a heavy meal, I had the sensation that food was getting stuck on the way to my stomach - so along with an x-ray and MRI for my knee, my doctor also sent me for an upper GI series. Finally, my blood tests for a new life insurance policy came back with a slightly high hemoglobin A1c level. The A1c test was once used only to monitor glucose control in patients with established diabetes, but in 2010 the American Diabetes Association changed their diagnostic criteria to classify an A1c level of 6.5% or greater as consistent with diabetes, 5.7% to 6.4% as prediabetes, and 5.6% or lower as normal. So on top of knee tendinitis and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), I also found out that I had prediabetes.
Intellectually, I knew that there was no evidence that screening for prediabetes is beneficial (the life insurance company, not my doctor, had ordered the test), and that a screen-and-treat approach to diabetes prevention leads to lots of overdiagnosis. Emotionally, it was a different story. I had recently turned 40 and was feeling old. It had been years since I had gotten the recommended amount of physical activity for adults, and now I was doing even less because my knee hurt. It didn't help that the afternoon I found out about my A1c level, my wife called and asked me to pick up some Burger King sandwiches and fries to bring home for dinner. Not exactly what a pre-diabetic adult with GERD should be eating.
Would I have felt less sick if I had instead been told that I had "slightly high blood sugar"? In recent years, oncologists have recommended re-naming slow-growing lesions that we currently call cancer, such as "ductal carcinoma in situ" of the breast, indolent lesions of epithelial origin (IDLE), hoping that a less scary term will discourage patients from pursuing unnecessarily aggressive (and potentially harmful) treatment. Similarly, some doctors believe that telling patients that they have a "chest cold" rather than "acute bronchitis" will make them less likely to ask for antibiotics.
A systematic review published this year in BMJ Open supported the notion that what clinicians choose to name a disease influences patients' management preferences. Some study examples: women who were told they had "polycystic ovary syndrome" were more likely to want a pelvic ultrasound than those who were told they had a "hormone imbalance." Women were more likely to want surgery if they had "pre-invasive breast cancer cells" versus "abnormal cells" or a "breast lesion." Patients were more likely to expect surgery or casting of a "broken bone" or "greenstick fracture" than a "hairline fracture" or "crack in the bone." In each of these cases, the use of a more medicalized or precise term led patients to prefer invasive management options that were no better than more conservative choices.
How will I apply this knowledge to my daily practice? Although I already use the term "prediabetes" sparingly (preferring "increased risk for diabetes"), I'm going to start telling more patients with A1c levels similar to mine that they have high blood sugar instead. That they have heartburn rather than GERD. That they have overuse knee strains instead of tendinitis. And certain medical terms, such as "advanced maternal age" (i.e., pregnancy after the age of 35, or my wife's age when she gave birth to 3 of our 4 children), I will strive to eliminate from my vocabulary entirely.
Intellectually, I knew that there was no evidence that screening for prediabetes is beneficial (the life insurance company, not my doctor, had ordered the test), and that a screen-and-treat approach to diabetes prevention leads to lots of overdiagnosis. Emotionally, it was a different story. I had recently turned 40 and was feeling old. It had been years since I had gotten the recommended amount of physical activity for adults, and now I was doing even less because my knee hurt. It didn't help that the afternoon I found out about my A1c level, my wife called and asked me to pick up some Burger King sandwiches and fries to bring home for dinner. Not exactly what a pre-diabetic adult with GERD should be eating.
Would I have felt less sick if I had instead been told that I had "slightly high blood sugar"? In recent years, oncologists have recommended re-naming slow-growing lesions that we currently call cancer, such as "ductal carcinoma in situ" of the breast, indolent lesions of epithelial origin (IDLE), hoping that a less scary term will discourage patients from pursuing unnecessarily aggressive (and potentially harmful) treatment. Similarly, some doctors believe that telling patients that they have a "chest cold" rather than "acute bronchitis" will make them less likely to ask for antibiotics.
A systematic review published this year in BMJ Open supported the notion that what clinicians choose to name a disease influences patients' management preferences. Some study examples: women who were told they had "polycystic ovary syndrome" were more likely to want a pelvic ultrasound than those who were told they had a "hormone imbalance." Women were more likely to want surgery if they had "pre-invasive breast cancer cells" versus "abnormal cells" or a "breast lesion." Patients were more likely to expect surgery or casting of a "broken bone" or "greenstick fracture" than a "hairline fracture" or "crack in the bone." In each of these cases, the use of a more medicalized or precise term led patients to prefer invasive management options that were no better than more conservative choices.
How will I apply this knowledge to my daily practice? Although I already use the term "prediabetes" sparingly (preferring "increased risk for diabetes"), I'm going to start telling more patients with A1c levels similar to mine that they have high blood sugar instead. That they have heartburn rather than GERD. That they have overuse knee strains instead of tendinitis. And certain medical terms, such as "advanced maternal age" (i.e., pregnancy after the age of 35, or my wife's age when she gave birth to 3 of our 4 children), I will strive to eliminate from my vocabulary entirely.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction: the family physician's role
Millions of Americans suffer from a potentially fatal disease that has become so common over the past decade that it has lowered the average life expectancy and has particularly devastated vulnerable populations, such as adults with mental health disorders. Although effective medications exist to treat this national health emergency, only a small fraction of family physicians can prescribe them, and even certified physicians face numerous obstacles to providing treatment where their services were most needed. Instead, efforts have focused on disseminating guidelines to prevent this condition, mostly by reducing known risk factors. Unfortunately, most of what we know about prevention is only supported by low-quality evidence on patient outcomes.
I am writing, of course, about the epidemic of opioid use disorder and overdoses. In an editorial in the Sept. 15 issue of American Family Physician, my fellow editor Dr. Jennifer Middleton argued that while reducing the risk of addiction through the selective and responsible prescribing of opioid medications for pain is important, it is not sufficient to turn the tide. Observing that there is a critical shortage of substance abuse subspecialists, she encouraged family physicians to obtain a Drug Abuse Treatment Act of 2000 (DATA 2000) waiver to prescribe buprenorphine:
Family physicians ... are already adept at combining behavioral interventions with medication management for chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; addiction treatment requires a similar combination of lifestyle coaching and prescription oversight. ...
I am writing, of course, about the epidemic of opioid use disorder and overdoses. In an editorial in the Sept. 15 issue of American Family Physician, my fellow editor Dr. Jennifer Middleton argued that while reducing the risk of addiction through the selective and responsible prescribing of opioid medications for pain is important, it is not sufficient to turn the tide. Observing that there is a critical shortage of substance abuse subspecialists, she encouraged family physicians to obtain a Drug Abuse Treatment Act of 2000 (DATA 2000) waiver to prescribe buprenorphine:
Family physicians ... are already adept at combining behavioral interventions with medication management for chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; addiction treatment requires a similar combination of lifestyle coaching and prescription oversight. ...
Buprenorphine is no more complex or difficult to manage than many other treatments routinely used in primary care. Additionally, our specialty has historically embraced the needs of populations labeled as difficult or challenging, such as homeless persons, refugees, and those with developmental disabilities or mental illness. Patients who are struggling with addiction are no less deserving of our attention.
Whether or not medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder should become part of every family physician's scope of practice is a subject of intense debate, most recently in a pair of Point/Counterpoint editorials in the Annals of Family Medicine. Echoing Dr. Middleton, Dr. David Loxtercamp wrote about his "conversion experience" - the 19 year-old patient with whom he realized that he needed to be able to prescribe MAT to provide adequate care to her and so many others like her. "I am still involved [in MAT]," he wrote, "because I am a doctor and this is the epidemic of our time, a social tsunami that can be traced to my prescription - and yours. ... Addiction is a chronic disease that is decimating our communities. We need no other reason to embrace its treatment within every primary care practice."
Taking the opposite view that not every family physician can "be at the front lines" of the fight against the opioid epidemic, Dr. Richard Hill outlined several other factors that weigh against most family physicians prescribing MAT: specialized treatment required, comorbid psychiatric illness, methods shortcomings of emerging models of care, and the risk that taking on this additional responsibility would create more job dissatisfaction and burnout. "Even if further research establishes an 'optimal' model of care for use in primary care," he asserted, "the nature of the disease [opioid use disorder] itself will place undue clinical burden on an already overextended clinical workforce. Perhaps future efforts and funding should be directed toward the development of readily accessible referral networks of mental health/addiction centers, both public and private."
Both sides of the debate make compelling points. Personally, I am torn. What do you think the family physician's role should be in prescribing MAT for opioid addiction?
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Blood pressure goals in patients with kidney disease: how low should we go?
In 2013, the Eighth Joint National Committee (JNC 8) recommended that adults with hypertension and chronic kidney disease (CKD) be treated to a blood pressure (BP) goal of lower than 140/90, after finding no evidence that treating to lower BP goals showed the progression of CKD. At the same time, the American College of Physicians published a guideline on screening, monitoring, and treatment of Stage 1 to 3 CKD that suggested pharmacologic therapy with an ACE inhibitor or angiotensin II receptor blocker, but noted "no difference in end-stage renal disease or mortality between strict blood pressure control (128 to 133/75 to 81 mm Hg) and standard control (134 to 141/81 to 87 mm Hg)."
Less than two years later, however, findings from the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT) suggested that some older adults at high risk of heart disease and stroke, including those with CKD, may experience additional benefits if treated to a systolic BP goal of 120. After reviewing SPRINT and other recent studies, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Physicians decided in a new guideline for adults aged 60 years or older to stick with a systolic BP goal of 140 for adults at high cardiovascular risk.
Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine ensure that debate about BP goals for adults with CKD will continue. The first study, by Dr. Wan-Chuan Tsai and colleagues, identified 9 randomized trials (n=8127) that compared intensive BP control (less than 130/80 mm Hg) with standard BP control (less than 140/90 mm Hg) in nondiabetic patients with chronic kidney disease. They found no significant differences between the groups in annual rate of change in glomerular filtration rate (GFR), doubling of serum creatinine level, a composite renal outcome, or all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 3.3 years.
The second study, by Dr. Rakesh Malhotra and colleagues, reviewed data from 18 randomized trials that included 15,924 participants with CKD to determine if more intensive (mean systolic BP 132 mm Hg) compared with less intensive (mean systolic BP 140 mm Hg) control reduced mortality risk in persons with CKD stages 3 to 5. The authors found that more intensive BP control was associated with a statistically significant 14% lower relative risk of all-cause mortality.
An accompanying editorial by Dr. Csaba Kovesdy did a good job of putting these findings into perspective. Dr. Kovesdy pointed out that the benefits of a systolic BP goal of 120 for persons with CKD remain uncertain, and that the meta-analysis could have low external validity because trials had much lower death rates than those in observational cohorts of adults with CKD. Finally, he observed that any incremental mortality benefit from intensive BP control is small in comparison to that already achieved by standard BP control:
We must remember that the highest risks of hypertension occur in those with extremely elevated BP levels, and the benefits accrued with treating systolic BP to levels below about 140 mm Hg are much smaller. ... More intensive vs less intensive BP lowering resulted in a [number needed to treat] to prevent 1 death of 167 based on the absolute risk reduction estimated in the meta-analysis by Malhotra et al and an NNT to prevent 1 composite renal failure event of 250 based on the results of another meta-analysis. These diminishing absolute benefits have to be weighed against the increased likelihood of adverse effects and the higher costs associated with more intensive BP lowering.
Bottom line: if family physicians choose to devote more resources to patients with CKD or other cardiovascular risk factors who might benefit from lower-than-usual BP goals, they should not lose focus on improving care for the 46% of U.S. adults with hypertension whose BP numbers are not adequately controlled by any standard.
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Less than two years later, however, findings from the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT) suggested that some older adults at high risk of heart disease and stroke, including those with CKD, may experience additional benefits if treated to a systolic BP goal of 120. After reviewing SPRINT and other recent studies, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Physicians decided in a new guideline for adults aged 60 years or older to stick with a systolic BP goal of 140 for adults at high cardiovascular risk.
Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine ensure that debate about BP goals for adults with CKD will continue. The first study, by Dr. Wan-Chuan Tsai and colleagues, identified 9 randomized trials (n=8127) that compared intensive BP control (less than 130/80 mm Hg) with standard BP control (less than 140/90 mm Hg) in nondiabetic patients with chronic kidney disease. They found no significant differences between the groups in annual rate of change in glomerular filtration rate (GFR), doubling of serum creatinine level, a composite renal outcome, or all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 3.3 years.
The second study, by Dr. Rakesh Malhotra and colleagues, reviewed data from 18 randomized trials that included 15,924 participants with CKD to determine if more intensive (mean systolic BP 132 mm Hg) compared with less intensive (mean systolic BP 140 mm Hg) control reduced mortality risk in persons with CKD stages 3 to 5. The authors found that more intensive BP control was associated with a statistically significant 14% lower relative risk of all-cause mortality.
An accompanying editorial by Dr. Csaba Kovesdy did a good job of putting these findings into perspective. Dr. Kovesdy pointed out that the benefits of a systolic BP goal of 120 for persons with CKD remain uncertain, and that the meta-analysis could have low external validity because trials had much lower death rates than those in observational cohorts of adults with CKD. Finally, he observed that any incremental mortality benefit from intensive BP control is small in comparison to that already achieved by standard BP control:
We must remember that the highest risks of hypertension occur in those with extremely elevated BP levels, and the benefits accrued with treating systolic BP to levels below about 140 mm Hg are much smaller. ... More intensive vs less intensive BP lowering resulted in a [number needed to treat] to prevent 1 death of 167 based on the absolute risk reduction estimated in the meta-analysis by Malhotra et al and an NNT to prevent 1 composite renal failure event of 250 based on the results of another meta-analysis. These diminishing absolute benefits have to be weighed against the increased likelihood of adverse effects and the higher costs associated with more intensive BP lowering.
Bottom line: if family physicians choose to devote more resources to patients with CKD or other cardiovascular risk factors who might benefit from lower-than-usual BP goals, they should not lose focus on improving care for the 46% of U.S. adults with hypertension whose BP numbers are not adequately controlled by any standard.
**
This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Monday, September 18, 2017
Ambition, rejection and leadership
Most readers are aware that it was my work as a medical officer in the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force program at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that catapulted me from a little-known junior faculty member to a recognized authority on preventive medicine and guidelines. What you probably didn't know is that AHRQ turned me down the first time I applied for the job, fresh out of my medical editing fellowship at Georgetown. In retrospect, they absolutely made the right decision. Not only was the physician they selected considerably more qualified, she is still working there, while I left four years after being hired (2006-2010). But that initial rejection, painful as it was, put me in excellent position to seize the next opportunity to join the program one year later.
I've been reflecting on this and other early-career disappointments to put my more recent leadership setbacks into perspective. Even though I won't take the helm at American Family Physician (the medical journal with the third highest print circulation in the world, behind the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA), I will continue to contribute behind the scenes and support the new Editor in a variety of ways. And although I won't have the opportunity to Chair the AAFP's Commission on the Health of the Public and Science (and my 4-year term as a member ends in December), I will continue to work on evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and other projects in family medicine, such as this position paper on incarceration and health and last week's presentation at FMX on the challenges of providing preventive services to adolescents and young adults. Finally, I remain a go-to source for reporters looking for a skeptical perspective on overused screening tests, especially the prostate-specific antigen test; I was recently quoted in the New York Times and STAT about a modeling study that in my estimation didn't live up to the hype surrounding its conclusion that PSA screening "saves lives."
In short, I'm down but certainly not out. Although I have again fallen slightly short of my high ambitions, I will find other avenues to demonstrate leadership in medical publishing, evidence-based medicine, and population health. At least one silver lining is that I should have more time to devote to blogging about subjects that need the context that a Common Sense Family Doctor can bring.
I've been reflecting on this and other early-career disappointments to put my more recent leadership setbacks into perspective. Even though I won't take the helm at American Family Physician (the medical journal with the third highest print circulation in the world, behind the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA), I will continue to contribute behind the scenes and support the new Editor in a variety of ways. And although I won't have the opportunity to Chair the AAFP's Commission on the Health of the Public and Science (and my 4-year term as a member ends in December), I will continue to work on evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and other projects in family medicine, such as this position paper on incarceration and health and last week's presentation at FMX on the challenges of providing preventive services to adolescents and young adults. Finally, I remain a go-to source for reporters looking for a skeptical perspective on overused screening tests, especially the prostate-specific antigen test; I was recently quoted in the New York Times and STAT about a modeling study that in my estimation didn't live up to the hype surrounding its conclusion that PSA screening "saves lives."
In short, I'm down but certainly not out. Although I have again fallen slightly short of my high ambitions, I will find other avenues to demonstrate leadership in medical publishing, evidence-based medicine, and population health. At least one silver lining is that I should have more time to devote to blogging about subjects that need the context that a Common Sense Family Doctor can bring.
Monday, September 11, 2017
Too much medicine disrupts end-of-life care
During one of the plenary sessions at the Lown Institute's Road to Right Care conference in 2015, a speaker recounted how overdiagnosis and overtreatment ruined her father's last year of life. Diagnosed with symptomatic multi-vessel coronary artery disease but otherwise in good health and independent at age 85, her father underwent successful coronary artery bypass surgery. His postoperative course was happily uneventful, except for a single stool sample that was positive for blood.
Why her father's stool was tested at all was unclear, since his blood counts were normal during his hospitalization. But his heart surgeon nonetheless strongly recommended that he see a gastroenterologist and undergo a colonoscopy. She tried to dissuade her father from doing this, since at his age even an advanced colorectal cancer would be unlikely to progress enough to cause symptoms before he died a natural death, most likely of heart disease. But her father was accustomed to following doctors' orders, so he dutifully underwent the colonoscopy, which showed a single precancerous lesion.
That should have been the end of the story, but since the gastroenterologist was unable to completely remove the lesion, he recommended consulting a surgeon to operate and take out the entire affected section of large intestine. Her father was barely four weeks out from heart surgery, and she again advised him to disregard this spectacularly ill-advised plan. But he wanted to get everything taken care of, to get this all behind him, so he consented to going under the knife again. This time, the postoperative course did not go well. He developed profuse and unremitting diarrhea, most likely from an antibiotic given prior to the surgery. His doctor pronounced the surgery a success - the cancer was cut out, after all - and expressed little interest in dealing with diarrhea. Her father was then transferred to a nursing home, where his diarrhea continued to resist all treatment, and where he died, miserable beyond all imagining, 6 months later.
Lown Institute senior vice president Shannon Brownlee told another sad end-of-life story about her own father in the Washington Monthly. The article's subtitle said it all: "How Medicare and other federal subsidies rope the elderly into painful, futile, and costly end-of-life care." Despite her father's expressed wish to never go to "the big hospital in Portland" again, he not only ended up there anyway, but underwent a totally unnecessary nuclear stress test and was hooked up to intravenous nutrition before his hospitalist could be persuaded to call in the palliative care team. Brownlee minced no words in describing the deficiences of what passes for end-of-life care in America:
When a frail, elderly person gets sick, takes a fall, or has trouble breathing, it’s as if they have stepped onto a slippery chute leading straight into the hospital, no matter how fervently they and their families might wish to avoid invasive treatment as they age and approach death. That’s because hospital services are what our medical industrial complex has been built to offer, and delivering invasive end-of-life care is the job for which we have trained our doctors and nurses. ... What we don’t do is train clinicians to talk to patients, and what we don’t have is the community-based infrastructure for delivering “high touch” care to people where they live.
I've written before about my belief that the future of medicine is low-tech and high-touch, and I agree with Brownlee that changing Medicare regulations that value ineffective "technology-rich, hospital-centric" interventions rather than house calls and social services to help elderly persons age in place are a necessary first step in fixing the way we provide care near the end of life. It's equally critical that we change the mindsets of physicians who see their roles as sustaining life at all costs ("doing everything," in classic medical parlance) even when they are only prolonging death. Hospitalist Aaron Stupple made a highly sensible proposal in an editorial in BMJ: pair advanced cardiovascular life support (ACLS) training with communication training about palliative care:
Coupling ACLS with communication training has several advantages. Firstly, it legitimizes the skill set as an important and valid component of today’s medical practice. ... Secondly, affixing communication training to mandatory ACLS training binds this material to an established curriculum with a good track record of reliability and measurability. ... Thirdly, all clinical disciplines receive ACLS training, so it could be used to teach a common message and an essential skill set.
Why her father's stool was tested at all was unclear, since his blood counts were normal during his hospitalization. But his heart surgeon nonetheless strongly recommended that he see a gastroenterologist and undergo a colonoscopy. She tried to dissuade her father from doing this, since at his age even an advanced colorectal cancer would be unlikely to progress enough to cause symptoms before he died a natural death, most likely of heart disease. But her father was accustomed to following doctors' orders, so he dutifully underwent the colonoscopy, which showed a single precancerous lesion.
That should have been the end of the story, but since the gastroenterologist was unable to completely remove the lesion, he recommended consulting a surgeon to operate and take out the entire affected section of large intestine. Her father was barely four weeks out from heart surgery, and she again advised him to disregard this spectacularly ill-advised plan. But he wanted to get everything taken care of, to get this all behind him, so he consented to going under the knife again. This time, the postoperative course did not go well. He developed profuse and unremitting diarrhea, most likely from an antibiotic given prior to the surgery. His doctor pronounced the surgery a success - the cancer was cut out, after all - and expressed little interest in dealing with diarrhea. Her father was then transferred to a nursing home, where his diarrhea continued to resist all treatment, and where he died, miserable beyond all imagining, 6 months later.
Lown Institute senior vice president Shannon Brownlee told another sad end-of-life story about her own father in the Washington Monthly. The article's subtitle said it all: "How Medicare and other federal subsidies rope the elderly into painful, futile, and costly end-of-life care." Despite her father's expressed wish to never go to "the big hospital in Portland" again, he not only ended up there anyway, but underwent a totally unnecessary nuclear stress test and was hooked up to intravenous nutrition before his hospitalist could be persuaded to call in the palliative care team. Brownlee minced no words in describing the deficiences of what passes for end-of-life care in America:
When a frail, elderly person gets sick, takes a fall, or has trouble breathing, it’s as if they have stepped onto a slippery chute leading straight into the hospital, no matter how fervently they and their families might wish to avoid invasive treatment as they age and approach death. That’s because hospital services are what our medical industrial complex has been built to offer, and delivering invasive end-of-life care is the job for which we have trained our doctors and nurses. ... What we don’t do is train clinicians to talk to patients, and what we don’t have is the community-based infrastructure for delivering “high touch” care to people where they live.
I've written before about my belief that the future of medicine is low-tech and high-touch, and I agree with Brownlee that changing Medicare regulations that value ineffective "technology-rich, hospital-centric" interventions rather than house calls and social services to help elderly persons age in place are a necessary first step in fixing the way we provide care near the end of life. It's equally critical that we change the mindsets of physicians who see their roles as sustaining life at all costs ("doing everything," in classic medical parlance) even when they are only prolonging death. Hospitalist Aaron Stupple made a highly sensible proposal in an editorial in BMJ: pair advanced cardiovascular life support (ACLS) training with communication training about palliative care:
Coupling ACLS with communication training has several advantages. Firstly, it legitimizes the skill set as an important and valid component of today’s medical practice. ... Secondly, affixing communication training to mandatory ACLS training binds this material to an established curriculum with a good track record of reliability and measurability. ... Thirdly, all clinical disciplines receive ACLS training, so it could be used to teach a common message and an essential skill set.
Alas, Dr. Stupple's proposal makes so much sense that I fear it may be ignored. How long have we been trying to change the health care system to protect older patients from harmful interventions near the end of life? I remember reading the late surgeon Sherwin Nuland's How We Die in college and being shocked that most of us will die in hospitals, receiving "heroic" interventions that we don't want and won't do us a bit of good anyway. That was more than twenty years ago, and very little has changed. Let's spread the word about the Right Care Movement and dedicate ourselves to making sure I won't be able to write that again twenty years from now.
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This post first appeared on Common Sense Family Doctor on April 2, 2015.
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This post first appeared on Common Sense Family Doctor on April 2, 2015.
Monday, September 4, 2017
Taking stock of a new guideline for high blood pressure in children
Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a new practice guideline on screening, evaluation and management of high blood pressure in children and adolescents, updating a 2004 guideline from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The new guideline includes 30 evidence-informed "key action statements" and 27 other recommendations based on consensus opinion. The AAP recommends that blood pressure be measured annually in every child starting at 3 years of age, and at every health care encounter in children with obesity, renal disease, diabetes, aortic arch obstruction or coarctation, or who are taking medications known to increase blood pressure. Notably, the guideline's blood pressure tables lower previous thresholds for abnormal blood pressure in children by several mmHg because they are based on normal weight children only.
The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) currently supports the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's (USPSTF) 2013 statement that "current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for primary hypertension in asymptomatic children and adolescents to prevent subsequent cardiovascular disease in childhood or adulthood." According to the USPSTF, the accuracy and reliability of blood pressure screening protocols in children has not been well studied; a sizable percentage of persons with high blood pressure in childhood will have normal blood pressure as adults; and there is inadequate evidence that lifestyle modification or pharmacotherapy results in sustained blood pressure decreases in children or prevents cardiovascular events. Also, abnormal blood pressure thresholds in the AAP guideline are based on a normal population distribution (with 3 different readings greater than the 95th percentile defined as hypertensive) rather than on patient-oriented evidence of improved outcomes, as in the JNC-8 guidelines for hypertension management in adults.
How can family physicians know if a new guideline is trustworthy and applicable to their patients? In a 2009 article, Dr. David Slawson and I proposed several attributes of good practice guidelines:
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) currently supports the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's (USPSTF) 2013 statement that "current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for primary hypertension in asymptomatic children and adolescents to prevent subsequent cardiovascular disease in childhood or adulthood." According to the USPSTF, the accuracy and reliability of blood pressure screening protocols in children has not been well studied; a sizable percentage of persons with high blood pressure in childhood will have normal blood pressure as adults; and there is inadequate evidence that lifestyle modification or pharmacotherapy results in sustained blood pressure decreases in children or prevents cardiovascular events. Also, abnormal blood pressure thresholds in the AAP guideline are based on a normal population distribution (with 3 different readings greater than the 95th percentile defined as hypertensive) rather than on patient-oriented evidence of improved outcomes, as in the JNC-8 guidelines for hypertension management in adults.
How can family physicians know if a new guideline is trustworthy and applicable to their patients? In a 2009 article, Dr. David Slawson and I proposed several attributes of good practice guidelines:
- Comprehensive, systematic evidence search with end date noted
- Evidence linked directly to recommendations via strength of recommendation grading system
- Recommendations based on patient-oriented rather than disease-oriented outcomes
- Transparent guideline development process
- Potential conflicts of interest identified and addressed
- Prospectively validated (i.e., guideline use has been shown to improve patient-oriented outcomes)
- Recommendations offer flexibility in various clinical situations
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Monday, August 28, 2017
In health care and disasters, details make all the difference
In October 2012, when I heard that Superstorm Sandy was projected to make landfall somewhere in the vicinity of DC and Maryland, I prepared for the worst. I stocked up on non-perishable goods and evacuated to higher ground. (The rest of my family was already coincidentally out of town and harm's way.) I put fresh batteries into two flashlights and installed a flashlight app on my smartphone for good measure. Although I didn't give it much thought at the time, I assumed that hospitals in Sandy's path were taking similar precautions - stocking medical supplies, testing backup generators and so forth. So when a power failure at NYU Langone Medical Center (one of the teaching hospitals for NYU School of Medicine, where I received my medical degree) forced an evacuation of the entire hospital, with heart-stopping scenes of neonatal ICU nurses cradling respirator-dependent newborns down several flights of stairs to safety, I couldn't understand what had happened. How had they not been better prepared? Had NYU administrators been the equivalent of residents of low-lying coastal areas who ignored repeated warnings and defied evacuation orders?
As it turned out, NYU did a lot of things right before the storm. According to an article in ProPublica, after the scare of last year's Hurricane Irene, the hospital moved its emergency generators from street level to the rooftop and thoroughly waterproofed the generators' fuel pumps. Unfortunately, they neglected to relocate or protect the electricity distribution circuits, which remained in the basement and were quickly disabled by the flooding. As in many areas of health care, doing everything "almost right" wasn't good enough.
All people are fallible, and health professionals no less so than others. But medicine is usually less forgiving of simple mistakes. A technically perfect surgery is a disaster because it was performed on the wrong body part. A patient develops a life-threatening infection because a doctor forgot to wash his hands. A child dies three days after being discharged from an emergency room because his parents were not notified of critical lab values that came back hours after they left.
People are fallible, but health systems need not be. Despite the staggering complexity involved in flying passenger jets and constructing skyscrapers, commercial airline accidents are rare and building collapses even rarer. Atul Gawande argued in The Checklist Manifesto that checklists are the best way to make sure that small but critical details of health care are addressed systematically, so that every member of a care team feels empowered to preempt potential disasters. I believe that checklists and decision support tools are applicable not only to surgery or intensive care settings, but to primary care as well.
Fortunately, the emergency evacuation of NYU Langone Medical Center went off smoothly. But today, as the news of Hurricane Harvey's devastating impact on Houston's hospitals and nursing homes is just coming into focus, I hope that the good outcome of NYU's near-miss did not make any hospital or public health system complacent about addressing the little details and vulnerabilities that can make all the difference.
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An earlier version of this post was publised on Common Sense Family Doctor on December 4, 2012.
As it turned out, NYU did a lot of things right before the storm. According to an article in ProPublica, after the scare of last year's Hurricane Irene, the hospital moved its emergency generators from street level to the rooftop and thoroughly waterproofed the generators' fuel pumps. Unfortunately, they neglected to relocate or protect the electricity distribution circuits, which remained in the basement and were quickly disabled by the flooding. As in many areas of health care, doing everything "almost right" wasn't good enough.
All people are fallible, and health professionals no less so than others. But medicine is usually less forgiving of simple mistakes. A technically perfect surgery is a disaster because it was performed on the wrong body part. A patient develops a life-threatening infection because a doctor forgot to wash his hands. A child dies three days after being discharged from an emergency room because his parents were not notified of critical lab values that came back hours after they left.
People are fallible, but health systems need not be. Despite the staggering complexity involved in flying passenger jets and constructing skyscrapers, commercial airline accidents are rare and building collapses even rarer. Atul Gawande argued in The Checklist Manifesto that checklists are the best way to make sure that small but critical details of health care are addressed systematically, so that every member of a care team feels empowered to preempt potential disasters. I believe that checklists and decision support tools are applicable not only to surgery or intensive care settings, but to primary care as well.
Fortunately, the emergency evacuation of NYU Langone Medical Center went off smoothly. But today, as the news of Hurricane Harvey's devastating impact on Houston's hospitals and nursing homes is just coming into focus, I hope that the good outcome of NYU's near-miss did not make any hospital or public health system complacent about addressing the little details and vulnerabilities that can make all the difference.
**
An earlier version of this post was publised on Common Sense Family Doctor on December 4, 2012.
Monday, August 21, 2017
Procedures and prevention: the challenges of Choosing Wisely
A 55 year-old woman with chronic low back pain and symptomatic knee osteoarthritis asks her family physician's opinion about lumbar fusion surgery and some arthritis walking shoes she saw advertised on television. She is prescribed long-acting oxycodone and physical therapy for back pain, and her orthopedist recently began a series of hyaluronic acid injections for her knees. She is up-to-date on cervical and breast cancer screening, but also desires screening for ovarian cancer.
The next patient is her husband, a 60 year-old man with stable coronary artery disease. He was recently hospitalized for an episode of chest pain, and although tests did not show a myocardial infarction, a cardiac catheterization found an 80% stenosis in the left anterior descending artery. He already takes a baby aspirin daily, but his cardiologist has advised adding clopidogrel and having a coronary stent placed. Last year, he quit smoking after going through a pack of cigarettes a day for 40 years, and he is interested in screening for lung cancer. Also, since his brother was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at age 50, he has undergone screening colonoscopies at ages 40, 45, 50, and 55. These have all been normal, and he wonders if it is necessary for him to continue having them every 5 years.
Although both of these patients are fictitious, they represent common clinical scenarios in family medicine that contain enormous potential for overdiagnosis and overtreatment. In the August 15 issue of American Family Physician, Drs. Roland Grad and Mark Ebell presented this year's edition of the "Top POEMs Consistent with the Principles of the Choosing Wisely Campaign," which included the following suggested clinical actions:
Every aspect of patient care—every word we say, every test or exam we perform, every treatment or procedure we employ—carries with it the possibility of harm as well as the opportunity for benefit. Although eliminating overuse is often perceived as a way of cutting medical costs, it is really about decreasing wasteful, unnecessary testing and treatment that offer only the potential of harm without the corresponding possibility of benefit. Sometimes, we need to leave our old friends behind.
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
The next patient is her husband, a 60 year-old man with stable coronary artery disease. He was recently hospitalized for an episode of chest pain, and although tests did not show a myocardial infarction, a cardiac catheterization found an 80% stenosis in the left anterior descending artery. He already takes a baby aspirin daily, but his cardiologist has advised adding clopidogrel and having a coronary stent placed. Last year, he quit smoking after going through a pack of cigarettes a day for 40 years, and he is interested in screening for lung cancer. Also, since his brother was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at age 50, he has undergone screening colonoscopies at ages 40, 45, 50, and 55. These have all been normal, and he wonders if it is necessary for him to continue having them every 5 years.
Although both of these patients are fictitious, they represent common clinical scenarios in family medicine that contain enormous potential for overdiagnosis and overtreatment. In the August 15 issue of American Family Physician, Drs. Roland Grad and Mark Ebell presented this year's edition of the "Top POEMs Consistent with the Principles of the Choosing Wisely Campaign," which included the following suggested clinical actions:
- In patients with chronic low back pain, do not recommend lumbar fusion over physical therapy for pain or disability.
- In patients with chronic noncancer pain, try to avoid the use of long-acting opioids because they are associated with a significantly increased risk of premature mortality.
- In patients with knee degenerative joint disease, do not recommend hyaluronic acid injections because they are only minimally better than sham injections in improving pain and function.
- In patients with documented knee OA, do not recommend specifically designed walking shoes because they are no more effective than typical walking shoes at relieving pain and improving function.
- In patients with chronic stable angina and at least 70% stenosis of one coronary artery, do not recommend PCI with optimal medical therapy over optimal medical therapy alone.
- In patients with, or at risk of, coronary artery disease, do not add clopidogrel (Plavix) to aspirin because it does not change the overall risk of death.
- In women at average risk, do not recommend screening for ovarian cancer because they are unlikely to experience any mortality benefit.
- In all patients deciding to screen for lung cancer with low-dose CT, discuss the significant risks of harm (3% mortality from invasive procedures after screening) compared with the large number needed to screen to prevent one death from lung cancer (308; 95% confidence interval, 201 to 787).
- In patients who have one first-degree relative with colorectal cancer, but have not developed the cancer by 55 years of age, advise them that their risk is similar to the risk of colorectal cancer in the general population.
Every aspect of patient care—every word we say, every test or exam we perform, every treatment or procedure we employ—carries with it the possibility of harm as well as the opportunity for benefit. Although eliminating overuse is often perceived as a way of cutting medical costs, it is really about decreasing wasteful, unnecessary testing and treatment that offer only the potential of harm without the corresponding possibility of benefit. Sometimes, we need to leave our old friends behind.
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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
How about ranking how well hospitals serve their communities?
I'm sure that many fabulously talented, skillful, compassionate physicians work at the Cleveland Clinic. If I lived in Cleveland or a nearby town and suffered from a rare or life-threatening disease, I would strongly consider going to the Clinic for specialty care. Maybe I would even work there. But ranking the Cleveland Clinic the #2 hospital in America, as U.S. News and World Report did last week, is outrageous. (Full disclosure: I once blogged for U.S. News.)
My use of the term "outrageous" has little to do with deficiencies in U.S. News's ranking methodology, whose past versions have been criticized for relying more on subjective reputation rather than objective data on safety and quality, and having no correlation with other ratings such as those on Medicare.gov's Hospital Compare website. As Elisabeth Rosenthal has previously reported, hospital rankings are mostly about hype, and it's questionable how much impact they really have on patient choices when every academic or community hospital can probably find at least one high-ranked specialty or service line to brag about.
No, I think this top-notch ranking is outrageous because it only accounts for the patient care that the hospital and its affiliated practices provide, rather than including the health status of the surrounding community - which is awful. Although the Clinic may provide excellent care to patients who walk or are wheeled through its doors, Dan Diamond's recent article in Politico sharply contrasted the overflowing wealth of the medical institution with the barren, crumbling neighborhoods that surround it:
Yes, the hospital is the pride of Cleveland, and its leaders readily tout reports that the Clinic delivers billions of dollars in value to the state. ... But it’s also a tax-exempt organization that, like many hospitals, fought to preserve its not-for-profit status in the years leading up to the Affordable Care Act. As a result, it doesn’t have to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes, but it is supposed to fulfill a loosely defined commitment to reinvest in its community. That community is poor, unhealthy and — in the words of one national neighborhood-ranking website — “barely livable.”
Hospitals and health systems can't be expected to shoulder the entire burden of improving a community's economic prospects, and many hospitals were originally located in poor neighborhoods because that's where more sick people live. But according to Diamond, its financial figures indicate that the Cleveland Clinic hasn't been doing nearly enough for the community to offset the tax benefits it receives:
[The Clinic's] hospital system cleared $514 million in profit last year and $2.7 billion the past four years, when accounting for investments and other sources of revenue. And since the ACA coverage expansion took full effect, the Clinic’s been able to spend a lot less to cover uninsured patients; its annual charity care costs fell by $106 million from 2013 to 2015. But its annual community benefit spending only went up $41 million across the same two-year period, raising a $65 million question: Did the Clinic just pocket the difference in savings?
“I think we have more than fulfilled our duties,” [Clinic CEO Toby] Cosgrove said in response, pointing to the system’s total community benefit spending, which was $693 million in 2015. The majority of that spending, however, wasn’t free care or direct investments in community health; about $500 million, or more than 70 percent, represented either Medicaid underpayments — the gap between the Clinic’s official rate, which is usually higher than the rate insurers pay, and what Medicaid pays — or Clinic staffers’ own medical education.
It's not that the Cleveland Clinic is blind to the health crisis occurring outside of its doors. Like all nonprofit hospitals, it is required to perform a community health needs assessment (CHNA) every three years. The 189-page document it issued in 2016 provides a dismal accounting of all of the ways in which its local neighborhoods have worse indicators of health than other counties in Ohio and the vast majority of the nation. When Diamond suggested that the Clinic consider increasing its investments in population health, "where fixing community problems like lead exposure and food deserts are viewed as equally important as treating heart attacks," CEO Cosgrove sounded doubtful about what his hospital could or should do about these problems:
"That’s a good direction to go," he allowed. “But how much can we do in population health? We don’t get paid for this, we’re not trained to do this, and people are increasingly looking to us to deal with these sorts of situations,” Cosgrove added. “I say that society as a whole has to look at these circumstances and they can’t depend on just us.”
Judging from readers' comments posted at the end of the article, Cosgrove is far from alone in thinking that it isn't the place of medical institutions to solve the problems of distressed neighborhoods. Physicians and health executives have long believed that the responsibility of medicine is solely to provide health care, not social services or economic benefits outside of employment. But it's 2017, not 1967. As Susan Heavey reported for the Association of Health Care Journalists, in many parts of the U.S. health professionals have successfully partnered with advocates, local officials, and housing developers to "reinvent neighborhoods with [an] eye on health." If the leaders of the Cleveland Clinic wanted a road map for how to help rebuild the surrounding community, they could review one of 10 recent case studies posted by the Build Healthy Places Network, an organization whose mission "is to catalyze and support collaboration across the health and community development sectors, together working to improve low-income communities and the lives of people living in them."
On a national level, rather than allowing CHNAs to gather dust on a shelf (or the online equivalent), health policymakers could use them to allocate public funding for graduate medical education where it is needed most, rather than where it is currently going. As Dr. Melanie Raffoul, one of my past Policy Fellows, wrote recently in an analysis of Texas CHNAs and regional health partnership plans in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine:
Many [CHNAs] mentioned problems such as “low literacy,” “food deserts,” or “high levels of teen pregnancy.” Many of these concerns cannot be meaningfully addressed by hospitals, but they can be tackled through increased access to primary care and mental health services, and residency training sites are one way to provide this to the community. This should increase institutions' thinking about their role in larger community strategies to tackle community issues that affect health. Workforce gaps similarly need to be seen in this context—a community resource meant to resolve community needs. ... Community assessments could help refocus the use of publicly funded physician training as part of a broader hospital-community partnership for resolving health needs.
My use of the term "outrageous" has little to do with deficiencies in U.S. News's ranking methodology, whose past versions have been criticized for relying more on subjective reputation rather than objective data on safety and quality, and having no correlation with other ratings such as those on Medicare.gov's Hospital Compare website. As Elisabeth Rosenthal has previously reported, hospital rankings are mostly about hype, and it's questionable how much impact they really have on patient choices when every academic or community hospital can probably find at least one high-ranked specialty or service line to brag about.
No, I think this top-notch ranking is outrageous because it only accounts for the patient care that the hospital and its affiliated practices provide, rather than including the health status of the surrounding community - which is awful. Although the Clinic may provide excellent care to patients who walk or are wheeled through its doors, Dan Diamond's recent article in Politico sharply contrasted the overflowing wealth of the medical institution with the barren, crumbling neighborhoods that surround it:
Yes, the hospital is the pride of Cleveland, and its leaders readily tout reports that the Clinic delivers billions of dollars in value to the state. ... But it’s also a tax-exempt organization that, like many hospitals, fought to preserve its not-for-profit status in the years leading up to the Affordable Care Act. As a result, it doesn’t have to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes, but it is supposed to fulfill a loosely defined commitment to reinvest in its community. That community is poor, unhealthy and — in the words of one national neighborhood-ranking website — “barely livable.”
Hospitals and health systems can't be expected to shoulder the entire burden of improving a community's economic prospects, and many hospitals were originally located in poor neighborhoods because that's where more sick people live. But according to Diamond, its financial figures indicate that the Cleveland Clinic hasn't been doing nearly enough for the community to offset the tax benefits it receives:
[The Clinic's] hospital system cleared $514 million in profit last year and $2.7 billion the past four years, when accounting for investments and other sources of revenue. And since the ACA coverage expansion took full effect, the Clinic’s been able to spend a lot less to cover uninsured patients; its annual charity care costs fell by $106 million from 2013 to 2015. But its annual community benefit spending only went up $41 million across the same two-year period, raising a $65 million question: Did the Clinic just pocket the difference in savings?
“I think we have more than fulfilled our duties,” [Clinic CEO Toby] Cosgrove said in response, pointing to the system’s total community benefit spending, which was $693 million in 2015. The majority of that spending, however, wasn’t free care or direct investments in community health; about $500 million, or more than 70 percent, represented either Medicaid underpayments — the gap between the Clinic’s official rate, which is usually higher than the rate insurers pay, and what Medicaid pays — or Clinic staffers’ own medical education.
It's not that the Cleveland Clinic is blind to the health crisis occurring outside of its doors. Like all nonprofit hospitals, it is required to perform a community health needs assessment (CHNA) every three years. The 189-page document it issued in 2016 provides a dismal accounting of all of the ways in which its local neighborhoods have worse indicators of health than other counties in Ohio and the vast majority of the nation. When Diamond suggested that the Clinic consider increasing its investments in population health, "where fixing community problems like lead exposure and food deserts are viewed as equally important as treating heart attacks," CEO Cosgrove sounded doubtful about what his hospital could or should do about these problems:
"That’s a good direction to go," he allowed. “But how much can we do in population health? We don’t get paid for this, we’re not trained to do this, and people are increasingly looking to us to deal with these sorts of situations,” Cosgrove added. “I say that society as a whole has to look at these circumstances and they can’t depend on just us.”
Judging from readers' comments posted at the end of the article, Cosgrove is far from alone in thinking that it isn't the place of medical institutions to solve the problems of distressed neighborhoods. Physicians and health executives have long believed that the responsibility of medicine is solely to provide health care, not social services or economic benefits outside of employment. But it's 2017, not 1967. As Susan Heavey reported for the Association of Health Care Journalists, in many parts of the U.S. health professionals have successfully partnered with advocates, local officials, and housing developers to "reinvent neighborhoods with [an] eye on health." If the leaders of the Cleveland Clinic wanted a road map for how to help rebuild the surrounding community, they could review one of 10 recent case studies posted by the Build Healthy Places Network, an organization whose mission "is to catalyze and support collaboration across the health and community development sectors, together working to improve low-income communities and the lives of people living in them."
On a national level, rather than allowing CHNAs to gather dust on a shelf (or the online equivalent), health policymakers could use them to allocate public funding for graduate medical education where it is needed most, rather than where it is currently going. As Dr. Melanie Raffoul, one of my past Policy Fellows, wrote recently in an analysis of Texas CHNAs and regional health partnership plans in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine:
Many [CHNAs] mentioned problems such as “low literacy,” “food deserts,” or “high levels of teen pregnancy.” Many of these concerns cannot be meaningfully addressed by hospitals, but they can be tackled through increased access to primary care and mental health services, and residency training sites are one way to provide this to the community. This should increase institutions' thinking about their role in larger community strategies to tackle community issues that affect health. Workforce gaps similarly need to be seen in this context—a community resource meant to resolve community needs. ... Community assessments could help refocus the use of publicly funded physician training as part of a broader hospital-community partnership for resolving health needs.
I began by stating that I didn't think that the Cleveland Clinic deserved to be ranked the #2 hospital in the nation, but since U.S. News and World Report already put it on that pedestal, the Clinic should live up to it by not only providing the best health care for their patients, but getting serious about improving the health of their community.