A Country Doctor Writes:

Hourly Wage, Piecework or Quality?

A long time ago, when I worked in Sweden’s Socialized health care system, there were no incentives to see more patients. In the hospital and in the outpatient offices there were scheduled coffee breaks at 10 and at 3 o’clock, lunch was an hour, and everyone left on the dot at five. On-call work was reimbursed as time off. Any extra income would have been taxed at the prevailing marginal income tax rate of somewhere around 80%.

There was, in my view, a culture of giving less than you were able to, a lack of urgency, and a patient-unfriendly set of barriers. One example: most clinics took phone calls only for an hour or two in the morning. After that, there was no patient access; no additions were made to providers’ schedules, even if some patients didn’t keep their appointments, not that there was a way to call and make a same-day cancellation.

As my father always said: “There must be a reward for working”. But, high productivity can sometimes mean churning out patient visits without accomplishing much, or it can mean providing unnecessary care just to increase revenue. For example, some of my patients who spend winters in warmer climates come back with tall tales of excessive testing while away.

A recent Wall Street Journal article offers an interactive display of doctors who collect the highest Medicare payments. The difference between providers in the same specialties across the country makes interesting reading. It is hard to imagine that many individual doctors are billing Medicare more than $10,000,000 per year.

So it might make sense to insure against paying for excessive care by also demanding a certain level of quality.

But defining quality is fraught with scientific and ethical problems, since quality targets really aren’t, or shouldn’t be, the same for all of our patients.

The scientific community, for example, knows that elderly diabetics with “ideal” blood sugars are more likely to suffer harm or die than those with sugars that are a little higher. Even though the American Diabetes Association has embraced higher blood sugar targets for older diabetics, many healthcare organizations’ quality assurance programs treat all diabetics the same and penalize doctors who individualize treatment goals in accordance with the scientific evidence or common sense.

In almost every area of medicine there are individual nuances that must be considered if we are to best serve each of our patients. It is ironic and very sad that, right now, those who pay us are looking for simple (or simplistic), universally applicable quality targets just as the explosion in our understanding of genetics is promising to usher in the era of “personalized medicine”.

Up until now, the gold standard of scientific research has been to prove which standardized interventions work best for large groups of patients, even if there are subgroups that aren’t helped at all by them.

Who should define the “quality” measures of our work?

The central question for how doctors might be paid for quality in the future hinges on the priorities of whoever holds the purse strings. Insurance companies, if we overlook profit motives that also exist, prioritize population management. They pay for what works for most people, knowing full well that some patients will not get the best care for their individual situations, for example when certain medications are not covered. Politicians also favor the population view of health care.

If patients pay us directly, they expect us to deliver the care that works for them. If the Government or an insurance company pays us, they expect us to deliver care that meets their standards, because they don’t trust the patients – their constituents and customers – to know what is best for them. And their focus is to have us do what helps most of our patients, even if some are not helped and some, or many, aren’t happy with what they are getting.

With all the political talk about “Patient Centeredness” during the current health care reform, may I suggest that patients need to be given more choice about how their health care dollars are spent. With limited choice and no responsibility, patients tend to feel entitled and deprived at the same time. This creates a toxic environment for delivering health care. I have never met a patient who felt in partnership with his or her insurance company – ever. And I don’t expect to.

In order to maintain what partnership is left today between doctors and patients, we need a cost-quality paradigm that is shared by patients and providers. We also need to foster and maintain a sense of stewardship that is elusive if all that is at stake is someone else’s money.

I think there are ways to achieve this.

(More to come…)

It’s a strange business we are in.

I can freeze a couple of warts in less than a minute and send a bill to a patient’s commercial insurance for much more money than for a fifteen minute visit to change their blood pressure medication.

I can see a Medicaid or Medicare patient for five minutes or forty-five, and up until now, because I work for a Federally Qualified Health Center, the payment we actually receive is the same.

I can chat briefly with a patient who comes in for a dressing change done by my nurse, quickly make sure the wound and the dressing look okay and charge for an office visit. But I cannot bill anything for spending a half hour on the phone with a distraught patient who just developed terrible side effects from his new medication and whose X-ray results suggest he needs more testing.

As a primary care physician I get dozens of reports every day, from specialists, emergency rooms, the local Veterans’ clinic and so on, and everybody expects me to go over all these reports with a fine-toothed comb.

A specialist will write “I recommend an angiogram”, and we have to call his office to make sure if that means he ordered it, or that he wants us to order it.

An emergency room doctor orders a CT scan to rule out a blood clot in someone’s lung and gets a verbal reading by the radiologist that there is no clot. But the final CT report, dictated after the emergency room doctor’s shift has ended, suggests a possible small lung cancer. Did anyone at the ER deal with this, or is it up to me to contact the patient and arrange for followup testing? All of this takes time, but we cannot bill for it.

Most people are aware these days that procedures are reimbursed at a higher rate than “cognitive work”, but many patients are shocked to hear that doctors essentially cannot bill for any work that isn’t done face to face with a patient. This fact, not technophobia, is probably the biggest reason why doctors and patients aren’t emailing, for example.

Just lately, there is a new trickle of money flowing into medical offices for the type of between-visit oversight that goes with the new Patient-Centered Medical Home model of care, but it is not enough money to substantially change how doctors’ time is scheduled.

Taking a primary care physician away from direct patient care for just an hour can cost the employer somewhere around $400 in lost revenue. In today’s economic climate, few health care organizations can afford to fully embrace the notion of all the different indirect care activities others think physicians should engage in besides seeing patients one by one for a fee.

Of the three professions, physicians probably have the most confusing payment arrangement: Members of the clergy tend to make a straight salary regardless of how busy they are, lawyers bill for their time whether spent with the client or without, but we only get paid if someone is watching us.

If a tree falls in the forest, does it still make a noise?

If a doctor isn’t face to face with a patient, is he still a doctor? Is he still doctoring?

I say yes, but, then, how should we get paid?

(To be continued…)