A Country Doctor Writes:

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Upselling in Medicine: Would You Like a Pap Smear with that Ankle Brace, Ma’am?

Published April 28, 2018 Reflections 3 Comments

For many years, I’ve held a brief huddle with my team every morning to make sure we are ready for the day: Anybody with complex problems coming in today? Anybody who’s been in the ER? How is Mrs. Jones’ husband over at the nursing home, is she worried about his condition? Where can we squeeze in more add-on’s?

Now other people have tried to hijack the word “huddle” for a completely different purpose. They want to use it to slow us down instead of helping get us get through the avalanche of issues we’re already expecting. In my other office they call it pre-visit planning. It’s not about having the MRI result available or the recent ER note, but more about who is behind on some aspect of their health maintenance and (unsuspectingly) expecting just a sore throat visit, but consistently avoiding their diabetes followup visits?

My veterinarian colleagues handle this differently. They just send a post card at random times, or hand me a paper, usually part of my exit statement, as I recall, that says which critter is due for what. But in that case I’m already safely close to the door and nobody is expecting me to act on it in that instant.

In human medicine, our quality ratings, and soon our paycheck, will depend on how effectively we convince patients to get caught up on their proscribed health maintenance.

In the retail world, they call that upselling. When I stop at a 24 hour gas station and buy some coffee for my long trip between my two offices, they always ask if I want some donuts or chips with that, maybe a banana or whatever. Same thing at the hardware store, if I buy a flashlight, they ask if I need spare batteries, and so on.

How fair is that to our patients?

I remember seeing a video about the hijacked kind of huddle, where the doctor and medical assistant almost gleefully talk about how to convince a noncompliant female patient to have her overdue Pap smear when she is only expecting something much less involved.

And all the while we are supposed to be patient centered and respect each patient’s own agenda. Too bad not everyone else has to…

Progress in Weekly Increments

Published April 20, 2018 Progress Notes 1 Comment

I’m prescribing Suboxone again, not in a half empty strip mall in town, where I filled in for a number of years, but in my own office.

My clinic received a grant that helped us hire an additional social worker, a part time medical assistant with recovery experience and a part time substance abuse counselor.

For a couple of months now I have met once a week with each one of a dozen patients with widely different stories and circumstances. Unlike the last time I worked with opioid addicted patients, I am not just one of several prescribers rotating through the clinic. I am the only doctor for this, our first group.

I have followed this group of a dozen fellow human beings every single week through the cold of winter and the snowstorms outside and through the outer and inner tumult of their own lives. Our encounters are brief, pulling each member out from a group session to review how the Suboxone is changing their bodies and their lives, check the rapid drug screen results and send the electronic prescriptions to the pharmacy.

In those brief encounters, I get deep glimpses into the many lives that are starting to move away from the brink: A young woman has moved out of an abusive relationship. A young man has made a plea bargain with the District Attorney. A heroin addict is enjoying her children without the Department of Health and Human Services watching her every move. A depressed young man smiled at me for the first time two weeks ago, and someone else has stopped drinking.

Other participants have transferred in from other clinics. One was already my patient, but I couldn’t prescribe Suboxone for him without the full structure of a substance abuse program. He has a visible career in our community, and he is like a mentor or older brother to those that have just started on their own road to recovery.

My last tour of duty in substance abuse care was all individual appointments; this time, I hear everyone saying that the group is more effective in bringing out honesty and accountability in its members than one or two clinicians have been able to do before.

In my previous setting, I had to be careful not to assume the role of primary care provider and give detailed advice or prescriptions for general medical matters. Here, in my own office, I can adjust antidepressants, prescribe for insomnia and restless legs as I would any time filling in for one of my colleagues. In the same way, the staff counselor who attends the group can give advice and refer seamlessly to clients’ individual therapists here.

This time for me, the care for opioid addiction is integrated with both the provision of primary care and behavioral health. This is as it should be. It requires a certain structure and a certain level of expertise, but it is by now a basic kind of care for a very common chronic condition with, if untreated, potentially devastating consequences.

Last time I wrote about treating opioid addiction, “I don’t hate coming here”. This time, I feel good about having helped bring this service home, under our own roof, in our own community.

On a Personal Note

Published April 13, 2018 Progress Notes 5 Comments

In the ten years since I first clicked “Publish” and posted my first piece on “A Country Doctor Writes”, I have published roughly the quantitative equivalent of Moby Dick and War and Peace combined. Not that I claim to be quite in their league, but have written quite a lot.

During this decade I have recertified twice as a Family Physician. I have buried both of my parents and several cats, dogs and horses. I have grayed significantly at the temples and I have gained and lost two pants sizes.

This week I received news that I passed my Board examination, 34 years after my first one, and I got an email that “A Country Doctor Writes” is one of the top 25 doctor blogs in the country.

On the day of my ten year anniversary I will be in Boston at a Harvard course for medical writers. Such a coincidental symbol of my milestone as a writer.

Listening to Audio Digest’s Family Medicine Review course on my way to and from work gave me a sense of renewal, and the other events this month make me feel that I am preparing for a professional growth spurt at an age when some of my contemporaries are retiring.

One of my purposes when I started this blog was to inspire the next generation of doctors and counterbalance some of the negativity I see among my colleagues today. I have seen that my writing has been republished and commented on in student doctor circles, and I have had some of them comment here, first as students and later as new doctors.

I have also tried to paint a picture of how rural medicine today is a soulful endeavor, allowing you intimate access into the lives of people in a way that is not very different from how doctoring was a generation ago.

I have created a fictional version of my community, its citizens, my colleagues, the nearby hospitals and the specialists in the city. But the essence of all of what I have written is pure truth. “Only the names have been changed”, as they say.

Thanks very much for reading.

(P.S. Because my senior colleague did retire, and because one of my contemporaries is planning to do so, I’m looking for one or two new partners. My email is in the sidebar on the right.)

Brilinta or Clopidogrel, Maximum Benefit or Social Responsibility?

Published April 7, 2018 Reflections 3 Comments

Brilinta, at $6.50 per pill, twice a day, reduces cardiovascular events more than generic Plavix, which costs 50 cents per pill, once a day. But only a little – 20% relative or 2% absolute risk reduction. The event risk was 10% with the more expensive drug and 12% with the one that costs 82% less.

Put differently, if 100 patients were treated with Brilinta for a year, at a cost of $4,680 for each patient, 10 patients would still have an event. With clopidogrel, 100 patients, each one at a cost of $180, 12 events would occur. That means two fewer events would happen per 100 patients on Brilinta at an extra cost of $450,000, or $225,000 per avoided cardiovascular emergency (Number Needed to Treat, NNT=50).

This is described in a New York Times article as a profound ethical dilemma in medicine today:

“Some of us believed that a doctor’s job is to deliver the best possible care, period. Others argued that doctors should aim to find some balance between medical benefit, financial cost and social responsibility. It’s the kind of question that we aren’t really trained to solve. Are costs something that an individual doctor should do something about? What is a doctor supposed to do?”

As a Swedish born and trained physician, even though I now work in the United States, I guess I would claim that I was trained to solve this kind of question. Therein lies the fundamental dilemma of American medicine.

The American ethic of wanting to do absolutely everything possible for each patient has its roots in a different era from the one we live in now. It is a relic of a time when diagnostic tests, surgical interventions or medicines for everyday diseases didn’t cost multiples of average people’s annual incomes. It also came about in he era before the Government (Medicare and Medicaid) or risk pools of ordinary people (insurance companies, in stewardship of employers’ and wage earners’ premiums) became the payers of health care expenses. Back then, patients paid for their own health care, or it was offered as more or less charity care.

Americans don’t like to use the term Socialized Medicine, but that is what it works like when someone else pays for our care. We may use different words, like Socially Responsible Medicine. But “social” is part of it.

If I had just survived a heart attack and had a choice between clopidogrel and Brilinta, would my choice be different if I had to pay an extra $4,500 per year myself than if I could have someone else pay for it?

Would the latter choice possibly deprive other people of medicines, surgeries or vaccines they needed because of the vast number of people making the same choice at their fellow citizens’ expense?

Would my choice indirectly be someone else’s death sentence? All for a jump from an 88% chance of me being okay to a 90% chance? I could get the more expensive drug and make bad dietary choices, or forget a dose here and there and the nuance in efficacy between the two drugs might be moot – but certainly not the cost differential.

The operative word here, in English, is stewardship. I can’t even remember what it is in Swedish: Spending resources wisely, especially when those resources belong to all of us.

From EMR to Paper to EMR

Published April 1, 2018 Progress Notes 1 Comment

I can’t help myself from telling patients how things really work in health care. But I feel they have a right to know.

When I see new patients their jaw usually drops when I sit down with them next to the computer with a stack of papers held together with a rubber band or a gigantic clamp and with yellow sticky notes protruding here and there with words like LAB, ER and X-RAY.

Patients always assume that medical records transfer seamlessly between practices. They don’t, even between clinics that use the same EMR vendor. The stack of papers gets scanned in, as images or PDFs, but they don’t appear in searchable, tabular or report-compatible form. Often, they don’t each get labeled, but are clumped together under headings like “Radiology 2010-2017”.

In one of the clinics I work in, a Registered Nurse enters patients’ medical history in the EMR before each new patient’s first appointment. In the other, it is my job.

In both cases, only a fraction of he information is usually carried over from one EMR to the other, and the patient’s life story risks getting diluted, even distorted.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why things work this way:

Once upon a time, the Rulers of a great country handed out money to all the medicine men so they could start using computers to document what they did (and what they charged for, which was the real reason the Rulers handed out money the way they did).

This was a gift, not only to the medicine men but also to a lot of computer companies, who quickly geared up and made EMRs that the medicine men needed to buy before the deadline the Rulers had imposed.

Soon the medicine men gave all their newfound money to the computer makers. One of the things they thought they remembered hearing about was “interoperability”, but the computer makers were no fools. By making it just about impossible to transfer data between EMRs, the computer companies figured they could keep their respective customers hostage, because no matter how much they hated the slapped-together systems, it would be too costly to start over with another system.

Eventually, each vendor secretly hoped they would end up with the most users and thereby becoming the industry standard when the medicine men and the Rulers caught on to the lack of interoperability.

That, I explain to those of my patients who were around for it, is like the early days of VCRs – Betamax or VHS – more than 100 times over or, think about it, 100 times worse.

(I wrote this on April 1, but I’m not fooling…)

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