A Country Doctor Writes:

In 2009 I wrote a post titled “Quality or Conformity“, where I pointed out that many of the quality measures in primary care have more to do with whether doctors follow guidelines than if they deliver care that helps patients live long and well. There is a tendency to focus quality efforts on measuring what is easy to measure, rather than what matters the most.

That phenomenon is called the Streetlamp Effect, named after the man who was found searching for his car keys not in the dark alley where he lost them, but under the corner streetlight where he could see better.

Last night and tonight I read four articles in The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA that made me think again about how elusive an ideal quality is in primary care.

The Case Record of the Massachusetts General Hospital for the week of May 23 was a 12-year-old girl with celiac disease, behavioral symptoms and fatigue. Her final diagnosis was Addison’s disease, a deficiency of the body’s natural steroids. The piece mentioned that most sufferers of this condition live with its often-debilitating symptoms for 2-5 years before diagnosis. The girl in this article had been hospitalized several times before the correct diagnosis was made (at MGH, of course!).

The other piece in The New England Journal was about how Fee-For-Service payment was going to go away and be replaced by payment schemes based on relative value units and adherence to clinical guidelines for chronic disease. This piece specifically mentioned that treatment of (acute) illness would have far less value than managing chronic diseases.

I thought of the man who had been to the emergency room twice before I diagnosed him with scabies a few months ago. Doesn’t accurate diagnosis with new presenting symptoms count for anything anymore?

The first article in JAMA was a very broadly written piece about the future of quality measurements under Obamacare. The second article, written by a group of primary care doctors, was titled “A View From the Safety Net”. These doctors described the difficult choices they had to make between doing what mattered most to their underserved minority population or scoring better on quality measures dictated by outside authorities when they didn’t have enough staff or money to do both. The Obamacare article mentioned striving for patient-centered measures, but it remains to be seen how patient-centered we are going to be allowed to practice in the future.

Quality is still in the eye of the beholder. People in Government, insurance and academia prefer easily quantifiable data and still hold on to arbitrary or outdated numeric targets, even when the evidence to support them is controversial or refuted by science. They are often like the man under the streetlight.

Doctors on the frontlines, who live and breathe the complexity of health, disease and patients’ everyday socioeconomic challenges, know that for every clever metric someone can think up to measure quality, there are countless other factors that can render the quality parameters meaningless. What good does it do to prescribe the right medications for someone with chronic illness when the patient can’t afford them or keeps forgetting to take them?

In the same month my original post was published in 2009, for example, the American Diabetes Association revised its blood sugar targets for older diabetics. The evidence has shown that our usual targets were low enough to cause harm to many frail patients, yet doctors in this country are still given poor report cards if they practice with their patients’ safety and the new evidence in mind.

So, what is quality?

Quality is easing suffering and giving hope, not crunching numbers.

Quality is treating each patient in a sensitive, caring and competent manner.

Quality is serving the patient’s best interest with societal good in mind, not serving society with only an eye toward the individual patient.

Quality is having not only systems to promote safety and good practice, but people who care and invest their talents and abilities for the good of the patient.

Quality is diagnosing a rare disease like Addison’s early enough to give an adolescent girl her teenage years before they are gone.

Quality is making the diagnosis of a common disease like scabies in five minutes in a patient who has already cost himself weeks of discomfort and his insurance the dollar value of two emergency room visits and three prescriptions.

Quality is doing what matters to the patient. If we accept, even endorse, patients’ right to decide whether or not to be resuscitated if their hearts should stop, aren’t we then also allowed to listen to our patients and together with them formulate a care plan that they feel comfortable with for their chronic illness without fear of retribution by some Government or insurance reviewer for not following some more or less arbitrary guideline?

Quality is a word that lacks universal meaning. Every dictionary I have looked in has scores of definitions. It is a word people use for their own purposes.

We must be careful about letting others define the standards for our profession. If people with a more financial and less scientific and humanistic viewpoint set all the standards, technicians and computers will replace doctors.

The quality of a church service is, in my opinion, not adequately measured by how freshly painted the murals are, how well matched the choir uniforms are, how well-shaven the minister is or how clear his voice is when he puts his notes aside and speaks from the heart. If the Government were to set quality standards for churches, those things might be major quality indicators.

Fortunately, Church and State are separate in this country; health care and Government are no longer.

Health care, like religion, has a lot of intangibles, and even its substance is the source of many disagreements. I think that just like people go to church for different reasons, they seek health care for enough different reasons that our quality measures need to be very patient-centered, without losing sight of our “substance”, our foundation of science and humanity.

Quality is about addressing both the intangibles and the substance. Most of us know it when we experience it ourselves; the problem is building systems that guarantee it.

I used to be a stickler for time. One of my first blog posts was about how it felt to go to work without my wristwatch.

I also used to be very particular about knowing the purpose of each visit, partly to help me manage my time, and partly to help me feel prepared and in control of the visit.

I often questioned why my colleagues’ patients would sometimes end up in my schedule for issues that seemed to me safe to wait until the patient’s own provider was available.

Over the last five years I have relaxed about these peeves of mine. I have become more accepting of the fact that patients don’t think in terms of how many minutes they have assigned to them as well as the fact that many patients can’t or choose not to tell the front desk staff why they want to see me on a given day.

Thinking about the way I used to be, I was more efficient than my employer expected me to be, but I don’t believe I quite lived up to my full potential as a healer. There were already then systems in place that made sure the housekeeping aspects of health care weren’t missed for very long if I were to digress in the visit – we had our chronic disease registries and recall systems for pap smears, mammograms and immunizations.

Lately, I have come to think more and more about the physician’s duty to ease suffering. So much of modern medicine is about population and disease management, and there are so many pressures on our time and attention that physicians seem to have little left to offer patients who are suffering, physically or emotionally.

But the systems to manage the measurable aspects of medicine are there, backed up by even more computer power, and we physicians may just need to step back from the numbers long enough in every encounter with each fellow human being to allow us to be open and see our patients as individuals. We need to listen actively to hear their unique agendas. We have teams behind us now to help manage the housekeeping details; we have health coaches and case managers and more nurses than we used to. But since only we have the title “Doctor”, we need to have our senses open to those things only we get to hear.

My wife, reflecting on her years delivering primary health care, always says: “I never had just a Diabetes visit. There was always something else.”

The sad truth is that the health of a nation is more dependent on public health, socioeconomics and the prevailing attitude among the majority of the population. The quality of medical care matters very little. For example, a healthy diet together with an active lifestyle is at least as good a weapon against heart disease as all the cholesterol pills and interventional cardiology that money can buy. It doesn’t take a medical degree to change the attitude of a nation, and trying to do it on a case-by-case basis with each patient at $7 a minute is not effective population management – not that I don’t try every single day.

So, what is the role of the physician in today’s health care system? I believe we are the ones who can best help patients make sense of their symptoms and also understand what the health care system can and cannot do for them.

With common human experiences given names that make them seem like diseases, and with our nation’s increasing confusion about even common ailments and preventive measures in spite of the glut of information out there, physicians can bring wisdom and empathy to a system that provides neither. Since we are closer to the mysteries of birth, disease and death than most people, we need to be there for our patients to turn to when the angst of life afflicts them.

I believe the new systems we have all been required to put in place to meet all the public mandates are actually blessings in disguise. If we are wise, we can meet our quality and productivity metrics through the use of the technology at our disposal and at the same time rediscover and cultivate the ancient art of doctoring. Because the phones at my clinic as well as every other doctor’s office keep ringing, not with patients asking to have diabetes follow-ups, but with patients who have a new concern, a new fear, or the courage – just today, or they will lose their momentum – to finally tell someone their deepest fear.

Pausing, as I do every time before knocking on the exam room door, I clear my mind and I am ready:

“Hi, I am D—. What can I do for you today?”