Dan Keller's Nursing, Health Policy and Healthcare Technology Blog

Contents NoPINOs July, 2024 Single payer! June, 2024 DocGPT Apr., 2024 Gut bugs Mar., 2024 Fix ER waits Feb., 2024 Winning strategy Jan., 2024 Nursing ed v.2 Jan., 2024 The Benjamins Oct., 2023 Sex in the SNF Sep., 2023 Perel wisdom Aug., 2023 Politics and death July, 2023 Colonoscopy sense June, 2023 Prolon fast May, 2023 Nursing Education 2.0 Feb., 2023 Kleptocapitalism Jan., 2023 Covid ICU Jan., 2023 Under attack Dec., 2022 Guns! Regulate! Dec., 2022 Time management Nov., 2022 Medical disinformation Oct., 2022 Nurses? Models? Sep., 2022 CPR: Wrong Default Aug., 2022 Rethinking nursing informatics Aug., 2022 Advance care July, 2022 RaDonda redux May, 2022 Overhaul SNFs May, 2022 Wilderness May, 2022 Criminal error? Apr., 2022 Data in the rigs Apr., 2022 Gov't wants SNF quality Apr., 2022 I got rhythm Feb., 2022 Hospital at home? Dec., 2021 We SAFER? Dec., 2021 Falls Dec., 2021 A giant has passed Nov., 2021 Ageism is a thing Oct., 2021 Covid future Oct., 2021 We have Covid Sep., 2021 NY Tristate Sep., 2021 Dottoressa Sep., 2021 ANIA 2021 Aug., 2021 Hesitancy schmesitancy July, 2021 Go Nursing Informatics! June, 2021 LACEd Up! Apr., 2021 Covid Staffing? Mar., 2021 New blog Mar., 2021 Vaxes 'r us! Jan., 2021 Biden? Nurses! Nov., 2020 Fix pandemic Nov., 2020 Wear that mask! Nov., 2020 Herd immunity? Nov., 2020 Incompetents in charge Nov., 2020 Medicare and Youpays Oct., 2020 Burdensome EHRs Sept., 2020 Innovate! Perform! Sept., 2020 Droplet? Airborne? July, 2020 Madison Covid Screening July, 2020 Goodbye Zakheim June, 2020 Clinicians and computers June, 2020 RN = IT June, 2020 What SNFs must do May, 2020 Eating my own dogfood May, 2020 In defense of SNFs May, 2020 Big babies May, 2020 Covid Times Apr., 2020 NEJM on SNFs Apr., 2020 SNF musings Apr., 2020 Sitting ducks Apr., 2020 Nursing plans dead Apr., 2020 Informatics for pandemics Mar., 2020 Coronawisdom Mar., 2020 Wrongheaded graph Mar., 2020 Corona no conference Mar., 2020 Cruel bills Feb., 2020 Year of the nurse Jan., 2020 Shopping around Jan., 2020 Ber-nie! Jan., 2020 Checklist is ten Jan., 2020 Portals suck Dec., 2019 Nurses assess Dec., 2019 Another behemoth fails? Dec., 2019 Rethinking nutrition Dec., 2019 RN, heal thineself Dec., 2019 Still volunteering Oct., 2019 Vegan works Sep., 2019 Patient engagement Sep., 2019 Linked In Sep., 2019 Afib July, 2019 Goodbye Kaiser June, 2019 HIMSS hype June 2019 Not interested June 2019 Numbers June 2019 Break fast May 2019 It works! May 2019 Get well May 2019 Allopaths 'r us May 2019 Going fast May 2019 Free radical May 2019 Nurse informaticians 'r us! Apr. 2019 EHR report card Mar. 2019 Paying for m4a Mar. 2019 Bad behavior points Feb 2019 No vax? Die! Feb. 2019 Still turkeys Dec. 2018 Nursing orders June 2018 Sugar = poison Aug. 2018 Another nurse hero June 2018 EHR market shares June 2018 Reboot education June 2018 Gun research Apr. 2018 Epic Mecca Dec. 2017 Not documented not done Jan. 2018 Econ 101 Jan. 2018 Nursing the system Nov. 2017 Choke it down June 2017 Kaiser Ed May 2017 Never events Apr. 2017 Reconciling Apr. 2017 High reliability Apr. 2017 Comms metaphor Apr. 2017 Pleading the fifth Feb. 2017 Synapse firing Oct. 2014 Gold standard Jan. 2017 Data for sale Jan. 2017 Quandary solved Jan. 2017 Nurse, Advocate Jan. 2017 Escaping the spotlight Dec. 2016 TrumpCare? Dec. 2016 Nursonomics Nov. 2016 Trumbers Oct. 2016 Learn informatics! Aug. 2016 Balancing act Aug. 2016 It's the workflow, stupid Aug. 2016 RN + Rx? July 2016 More war stories June 2016 Nurses are underserved June 2016 War story June 2016 Bundling & engagement Apr. 2016 PHC 62 Mar. 2016 Little guys Mar. 2016 Financial incentives Mar. 2016 Big data Mar. 2016 Vaccinations, revisited Mar. 2016 Healthcare Econ 101 Feb. 2016 Obstacle? Opportunity! Feb. 2016 Get real Feb. 2016 Cool gig Jan. 2016 Work to do Nov. 2015 General Zuckerberg Nov. 2015 Coding Nursing Nov. 2015 AMIA 2015 Nov. 2015 Innovate! Nov. 2015 Boot camp Sep. 2015 Yes vault Sep. 2015 No vault Sep. 2015 Good vault? Aug. 2015 How sick? Aug. 2015 Nurses more than ever Aug. 2015 Numbers Aug. 2015 Yes, patients Aug. 2015 Go Bernie! Go nurses! Aug. 2015 ACA for whom? Aug. 2015 Cool clear Brooke July 2015 Interopera-wha? June 2015 Defending their turf June 2015 Dentist regent May 2015 Woulda shoulda May 2015 Nursing volunteer May 2015 Military RNs May 2015 Overkill May 2015 BANIA Apr. 2015 World domination Apr. 2015 HIMSS and HERSS Apr. 2015 HIMSS15 Apr. 2015 Patient-centric? Apr. 2015 We've come a long way... Apr. 2015 Pepsi apples Apr. 2015 Counting Jan. 2015 New Guy Jan. 2015 PHC 57 Dec. 2014 Supes vs soda Dec. 2014 23 and Anne Dec. 2014 Pride and precision Dec. 2014 Play with FHIR Nov. 2014 AMIA! Nov. 2014 Et tu, RNs? Nov. 2014 Wise Cutting Oct. 2014 Talking Sense Oct. 2014 Lava Mae Oct. 2014 Hey Obama Oct. 2014 Schmebola Oct. 2014 New Vectors Sep. 2014 Teachers Sep. 2014 Ebola Gates Sep. 2014 Ebola death Sep. 2014 Corporate genetics Aug. 2014 A nurse hero Aug. 2014 Talking soda tax Aug. 2014 Ebola hysteria Aug. 2014 A garden to tend Aug. 2014 Medicare for all July 2014 Back in the saddle July 2014 Astro Truth July 2014 Health July 2014 MU phase 2 July 2014 Save VistA July 2014 Apple Health July 2014 Vocabulary 101 June 2014 End employer-provided May 2014 ACA in real life Apr. 2014 Go SF Apr. 2014 New Model Mar. 2014 Too HIPAA Mar. 2014 Big soda spending Mar. 2014 Who was first? Mar. 2014 How we die Mar. 2014 Big soda Feb. 2014 Politics or health? Jan. 2014 Disaster not Jan. 2014 Wing nuts Dec. 2013 Heroic senator Dec. 2013 More homeless Dec. 2013 Nurses next Dec. 2013 Empire emerging Dec. 2013 Obamacare and me Oct. 2013 Future now Sep. 2013 Get Social Sep. 2013 Bedside blogger Aug. 2013 Homeless connect Aug. 2013 Mere apps Aug. 2013 Roadmap to Single-Payer July 2013 Nursing Iceberg July 2013 Gimme Data June 2013 Simple Dollar May 2013 Data ownership, redux Apr. 2013 Doc-by-mail? Mar. 2013 Biggest carriers Jan. 2013 Not a moment too soon Dec. 2012 Partisans Dec. 2012 Against the tide Dec. 2012 Scan this! Dec. 2012 Being Present Sept. 2012 UCSF's APeX Go-Live June 2012 Silent organs Jan. 2012 Lateral violence Dec. 2011 Healthcare & advertising Nov. 2011 UC is in trouble Sep. 2011 Greedy nurses? Sep. 2011 Hear us roar! Sept. 2011 Strikes, yikes! Sept. 2011 Trimming the fat Sept. 2011 New fraud Sept. 2011 National Health IT Week Sept. 2011 MDs & RNs are not enough July 2011 A good guy at the top July 2011 You'll be safe here July 2011 Google Health dead June 2011 Cancer cures? May 2011 Woo Hoo! We're Winning! May 2011 Profits for Insurers May 2011 Foreshadow things to come? May 2011 Profit? May 1, 2011 Calif. Healthcare Act Apr. 2011 Beware the 3 Ds Apr. 2011 Quantity or Quality? Apr. 2011 Words! Mar. 2011 Start Something Feb. 2011 Government = Inefficient? Feb. 2011 Mind = Brain? Feb. 2011 Capped! Feb. 2011 Planning for prevention Feb. 2011 Penny-wise... Jan. 2011 Pinned! Dec. 2010 Men at work Dec. 2010 Dear diary Dec. 2010 Brainy nurses Dec. 2010 Emergency! Dec. 2010 Public option, public sector Nov. 2010 Change the world Oct. 2010 Want a hero? Or a checklist? Oct. 2010 Environursing Oct. 2010 Don't call it compliance Sep. 2010 Shoppin' spree? Aug. 2010 Double mandate? Aug. 2010 Control your medical data? May 2010 Conform & stethoscopes May 2010 Do nurses compute? Apr. 2010 Addiction phobia Apr. 2010 Krugman nails it again Mar. 2010 Recognizing diabetes Mar. 2010 A new stethoscope... Mar. 2010 Blame the Lawyers Feb. 2010 Turkeys vote for Xmas Jan. 2010 The Incentive that Works Dec. 2009 Doctors? Businessmen? Nov. 2009 Gullibles Sep. 2009 Speier Gets It! Sep. 2009 Snowe Job June 2009 Chronic Disease Systems May 2009 Vaccinate! Jan. 2009 Health Sites Jan. 2009 Obama Gets It! Jan. 2009 Unfair Advantages? Jan. 2009 USHealthCrisis: Francine? Jan. 2009 Google knows you... Nov. 2008 Heart Attack Grill Nov. 2008 How Do Italians Pay for It? Oct. 2008 Yes on Calif Bill 840! Sep. 2008 Pat Rants Aug. 2008 Medical-Industrial July 2008 Nosocomial Infections June 2008 Gore Gets It! May 2008 Kucinich Gets It! Apr. 2008 Neurosurgery in Vietnam Mar. 2008 Americans Pay for It? Mar. 2008 Google Gets It Mar. 2008 Surprised! ...Again Feb. 2008 EMR: Still Waiting Jan. 2008 Medical System Ashamed! Dec. 2007 Gavin Gets It! Sep. 2007 Cato Schmato Sep. 2007 Do You Read Me? Aug. 2007 Clear about Single Payer May 2007 "Socialized medicine" Feb. 2007 Post-Oil World Jan. 2007 Getting It Explained? July 2006 Pritikin's Still Got It! June 2006 No Butts May 2006 Nurses On the Job? Apr. 2006 Beat It Mar. 2006 Homework-O-Matic Feb. 2006 That Is Sick! Jan. 2006 Go Aussies! Dec. 2005 Shifting paradigms Nov. 2005 My Own Medical Data? Oct. 2005 Higher Ed: Revolution Sep. 2005 Doesn't Compute Aug. 2005 Emotion July 2005 Don't Just Protect Me June 2005 The Art of Volunteering May 2005 About Dan

NoPINOs again July 22, 2024 -- NoPINOs -- a term I coined here -- have become a common financial structure in US healthcare, and stray ever further from their original purpose. What's a NoPINO? It's a non-profit in name only. In Why many nonprofit (wink, wink) hospitals are rolling in money, Elizabeth Rosenthal writes in the Washington Post: When many U.S. hospitals were founded over the past two centuries, mostly by religious groups, they were accorded nonprofit status for doling out free care during an era in which fewer people had insurance and bills were modest. The institutions operated on razor-thin margins. But as more Americans gained insurance and medical treatments became more effective — and more expensive — there was money to be made. And make it they do. Without being taxed. The notion of "community benefit" is ill-defined by the IRS and the hospital executives' pay packages are bloated, running into the millions. ...they are not channeling Mother Teresa. Maybe it’s time to end the community benefit charade for those that exploit it, and have these big businesses pay at least some tax? Communities could then use those dollars in ways that directly benefit residents’ health. top   Single Payer Now! June 19, 2024 -- Dear SFC Editor, I write to commend the comments in Linda Baumann's letter in today's SFC. As she points out, single-payer health is long past due. This deserves a little elucidation: why single-payer? When there is more than one payer -- and often the payer winds up being the patient -- the incentive is to stick the other guy with the bill. Thus, unconscionable mountains of paperwork confront our hapless healthcare providers and vast insurance company and State and Federal bureaucracies are erected. Numerous studies demonstrate that 15% to 30% of our healthcare dollars are thus consumed. Compare this to any country (such as, say, Canada) that does actually have a single payer. There, the bureaucratic overhead is typically 4% to 8%. And no medical bankruptcies. Come on, California! We are compassionate people. We lead the nation in so many ways... Let's do this! Go California! -- Dan Keller RN MS top   DocGPT April 12, 2024 -- We knew it was coming. Now it's here. Computers diagnose better than humans. In Are You Ready for AI to Be a Better Doctor Than You? published today in Medscape Medical News, Joe Kita writes of artificial intelligence applied to medicine. ChatGPT made the correct diagnosis in 97% of patients compared to 87% for human doctors. Missed diagnoses are a big problem in healthcare today so this is good news for patients, right? Often, the doctors are not pleased. Sometimes with good reason. For example, clinical labs are an area of effective AI enhancement. One doc observed, "...he's had several instances where patients received their cancer diagnosis from the lab through an automated patient-portal system rather than from him." Surely patients would prefer to hear this from humans. My own opinion? On balance, AI in healthcare is a good thing. MDs will grow accustomed to using AI for its strengths (esp. diagnoses). But let's not fall for the hype cycle. AI is having a media frenzy right now. Eventually, AI-based tools in healthcare will settle into place -- they won't replace doctors (or nurses!) -- and quality of care will rise. Go tech-savvy clinicians! top   Gut bugs March, 2024 -- I have blogged about how the kidneys run the show. But I've changed my mind. Now I think it's the gut. And its all-important microbiome: Over the last 20 years, research has linked problems in the gut microbiome to a wide variety of conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, metabolic ones like diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, asthma, and even autism. [Medscape] What's a microbiome? Wikipedia calls it a "community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat." In this case, the habitat is your gut. There are, technically speaking, zillions of bacteria living in there, each demanding its own type of nutrients and thriving or starving depending on what you eat. They then poop out body-regulating chemicals. So you want to feed the good ones. Wikipedia goes on, "The mammalian gut microbiome has emerged as a key regulator of host physiology." In other words, eating bad stuff grows bad bugs that poop out chemicals that regulate your body toward disease states, especially chronic conditions: "...dysregulation of the gut flora has been correlated with a host of inflammatory and autoimmune conditions." So it's not quite accurate to say that the gut regulates our bodies; it's the bugs that live in it that do this. Eat right -- mainly plant-based foods and lots of fiber -- and you'll feed the beneficial bugs and stay healthy. Go nutrition-savvy clinicians! Go forces for change in the American diet! top   Fix ER waits February, 2024 -- Hurry up and wait! The benjamins, the benjamins... yet again. The incentives in American healthcare continue to be wrong. It's bad for us! When's the last time you went to an ER? No doubt you wondered why you were kept waiting for so many hours. Why is this system so badly broken? Dr. Morhaim explains it well: How to fix Maryland's ER wait times: Cut executive salaries. A lot. He also explains what happens when for-profits take over hospitals... It's not pretty. Viewed through a financial lens, the purpose of an ER in a hospital is to be the primary admissions portal. Typically, at least half of a hospital's patients arrive that way. When the admitting process gets backed up, patients are backlogged in the ER. Why the process slowdown? Cost cutting. Corporate bean counters. They are doing their job... but it's a job that shouldn't exist, or at least today's incentives shouldn't. Quality of care and outcomes should be the drivers, not corporate (including NOPINOs!) profits. Single-payer is a big part of the solution. But given the present incentive structure (and the political might that perpetuates it) don't expect change anytime soon... Instead, hurry up and wait! Dr. Morhaim's message? Don’t let anyone tell you that we don’t have the money to do better. We do. The money is there. It’s just not going to where it’s needed: to those who perform the front-line work of patient care and for preventive services and public health. Go Dr. Morhaim! Go front-line nurses! Go forces for change! -- cartoon by my Dad, Charles Keller top   A winning strategy at last January, 2024 -- How do you sell a nursing app? How do you sell two of them? Yes, I have developed two -- NurseAssess and NurseMind -- each more brilliant than the last. Workflow-centric... reality-based... developed by nurses for nurses... making nursing better... or should. Alas, the marketplace hasn't cooperated. In my first approach, I expected nurses far and wide to use and love my apps and subscribe for just four bucks a month. Alas, this approach was a flop; on the Internet, everything is free. Even just four bucks scared people off. My second approach I termed "come from below". I expected nurses everywhere to enthusiastically adopt my apps and use them on the job. This would get management's attention and lead to sales. Though many nurses did indeed use the apps, they needed to be surreptitious; they weren't officially sanctioned. Often, cellphone use at work (BYOD) is unauthorized. So successes were covert, the opposite of what I'd hoped. Approach #3: talk to hospital management. Demonstrate improved nursing workflow, increased efficiency, enhanced job satisfaction and data reporting accuracy. They'll surely license the product and direct IT to connect it to the EHR. This, too, flopped. Managers are largely fear-driven. Looking at a product to buy or a workplace strategy to employ, a manager seeks reduced cost or increased revenue. Something more subtle -- improved workflow, job satisfaction, or data quality -- is rarely worth sticking out your neck. Yet we know we have a valuable improvement for nurses. How do we get it into their hands? Approach number four is surely the answer: the EHR vendors will welcome this mobile solution as a value-add for their product. Sure, they already have mobile solutions. E.g. Epic has Rover and Haiku. Other EHR vendors, too, offer mobile extensions. But none is nursing workflow-centric. Nurses rarely use them. These vendors' products will benefit mightily from NurseAssess and NurseMind. Go tech-savvy nurses! Go enlightened management! Go brilliant EHR vendors! top   Nursing ed v.2 January, 2024 -- In some ways, classroom-based education is like airplane travel. Each seat has a price, and if it's empty at takeoff it goes unfilled. For the school, filling those seats is essential for financial survival. For the student, occupying those seats is essential for acquiring professional expertise and a degree. What's the best way to match them up? A new business model could make these matches better. Selling education according to an air travel model would solve some of the problems of the existing educational system. One such problem is the lack of incentives for quality. There is little motivation to make the educational experience a good one, since -- once they matriculate -- the buyer (the student) is locked in. Imagine instead that the student has a shopping list of courses that must be taken, determined by the certifying State Board, e.g. California's Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) that decides what topics must be mastered in order to receive the degree (Associate, BSN, MSN) and how many units (classroom hours) of each. Attendance at a given course is sold by a clearinghouse (like a travel agent selling tickets on many airlines). The student chooses by price, quality, reputation, schedule, and location. The schools become incentivized to deliver a quality product at a competitive price. Reviews and ratings become important. Teachers become driven to do a good job. The student has a new-found flexibility and consumer power in the marketplace. And nursing education at last must be good. Go radical educators! Go innovative students! Go fearless nurses! top   The Benjamins October 15, 2023 -- The things that primary care providers (PCPs) can do to get the best outcomes for patients with chronic conditions are disincentivized by our medical-industrial complex. Why? In the deathless words of Rep. Ilhan Omar, "It's all about the Benjamins, baby." What could PCPs do to improve outcomes? Promote lifestyle change, educate about healthful diet and fasting, and encourage and support regular exercise. Why don't they? These things don't make money so the system disincentivizes them. In How PCPs Are Penalized for Positive Outcomes From Lifestyle Change, Medscape reports that they are rewarded not when the patient gets better but when the patient adheres to their medication regimen. Yet often the medication is not the best therapy. "In fact, some quality measures unintentionally penalize physicians for successfully treating or reversing disease through lifestyle behavior interventions while rewarding clinicians for meeting process measures — usually adherence to medication — regardless of whether health outcomes improved." Is this yet another ugly conspiracy? If so, the docs are not in on it. Indeed, according to Medscape, they are among the victims, discouraged from doing what they know to be best. How do we fix it? Implied by the Medscape article, one obvious solution is to tie MD ratings to outcomes (did patients get better?) not just to process (did they do as they were told?) But the more effective solution -- surely harder to implement -- is better regulation of Big Pharma and the health insurance industry. It's still about the Benjamins. Go regulators! Go courageous PCPs! Go positive lifestyle-encouraging nurses! top   Sex in the SNF September 21, 2023 -- Old people have sex? Who knew? By a Medscape article, Love and Sex in the Nursing Home? Ethicist Says, 'Why Not?' published today, we are shocked. Or maybe not. My mother, Judith Keller -- also an RN -- made a movie -- Rose by Any Other Name on this very topic 35 years ago. It... "Challenges stereotypes most of us don't even know we have." --Indiana University Center on Aging My mother... Explores the reactions of other people to a loving relationship between an aging pair and the pressures that are brought to end its "unseemliness". Says the Ethicist... Stopping nonconsensual activities, yes. [But] when mom chooses to have a little romance in the nursing home, my attitude is to butt out. This has been obvious to us for 35 years... It's good to see the world catching up. Go Ethicist! Go Mom (his and mine)! Go compassionate nurses! top   The wisdom of Esther Perel August, 2023 -- Perel writes beautifully and her mastery of language and metaphor is delightful. But she attains her full stride in person in her podcast, counseling a struggling couple, conducting a therapeutic session, actively listening, reflecting, challenging with supreme skill. Her 2017 book The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity captures the lessons she teaches in that context which, by its rawness -- neither rehearsed nor edited (as a book can be but a live session cannot) -- show the depth of her insight. She perceives the subtlest cues and drives straight to the heart of her client's quandary. Her performances are nothing short of spectacular. My essay about this and her is here. Go Esther! Go wise nurses! top   Politics and death July 24, 2023 -- Politics is noisy but is it life and death? Evidently so. This recent study in JAMA, Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic found: "... In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters... the excess death rate for Republican voters was... 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters..." There are smart people in both parties. But are some willing to die for their ideologies? Go political nurses! top   Colonoscopy sense June, 2023 -- Being 68 years old, I have undergone several routine colonoscopies (even a virtual colonoscopy once), as have my peers. Everyone has an opinion about the procedure, and so do I. Trouble is, most are excessively medicalized. This procedure intersects with two of our culture's strongest fetishes, which I'll describe. But first, here is the right way to prep for and then undergo this procedure. How to prep: Driven by our culture's food fetish, you think you can't go without it for more than a few hours. Yet the doctor needs an empty bowel to examine so your task is to make it so. Standard prep recommendations call for laxatives and suppositories and diarrhea. There's an easier way: just stop eating for three days prior. "But I can't do that!" you say. Of course you can; we homo sapiens evolved to handle long periods without sustenance. Think cavemen in wintertime. It's easier than people believe. After three days of fasting (clear liquids are OK as long as they're not red), your bowel will be nicely empty and you won't have poisoned yourself with those noxious chemicals. How to undergo the procedure: Driven by our culture's phobia about things anal, many squeamish folk demand anesthesia. But that's not necessary; pain, if any, is mild; perhaps some brief stomach cramping, nothing you can't easily sustain. Not taking drugs is always better. You want to be awake and alert so you can watch the video screen. No one is more interested in your insides than you. It's a rare opportunity for a guided tour. Your doctor can explain what he/she sees and does -- perhaps snip a polyp (which you don't feel because polyps have no enervation.) Don't let the phobias drive you. Colonoscopy's just not a big deal. You can handle it! Go enlightened patients! Go supportive providers! top   Prolon fast May 5, 2023 -- I've done it again. Not at Truenorth this time but at home. Not for three weeks but for five days. Not water-only but with a scientific "fasting nutrition program designed to nourish your body & mind while providing fasting benefits" (quoted from the box the food comes in). The method? A package named Prolon, designed by nutrition guru Valter Longo (see www.dan-keller.com/nursing/vegan ), revered in the nutrition/fasting world. I've just finished day five of five and I feel great! Prolon: "5-day fasting with food." The Prolon box (5-day fasting kit: $190) is beautiful, elaborate packaging with some powdered soups, fancy crackers, vitamin pills, nut bars, a few olives, and a liquid they call L-drink (I presume the L is for Longo). You measure and consume the L-drink according to your body weight. Fasting means intake of zero calories. Prolon is not that. There is doubtless some real science behind these components but I'm convinced that the real value of the Prolon fast is simply calorie reduction, even if it's not quite to zero. Prolon is 1150 calories on Day 1 and 750 calories on Days 2-5. This is a third or a fourth of typical daily intake, enough to stave off hunger yet reach a mild ketosis and fasting metabolic state. The fast was facilitated by my friend Darcie Ellyne, nutritionist formerly at Mills Hospital (where I used to work). She ran pre-, mid-, and post-fast Zoom sessions for the five of us participants. We did check-ins and chair yoga. All helpful! The beauty of the plan is that when you get really hungry, you have some morsels to nibble, so it's easier than water-only fasts such as I have done previously. That matters, because those previous fasts were at a site where everyone was fasting, there was medical supervision, and opportunities to stray (i.e. eat) were absent. Prolon is done at home, in the course of ordinary daily life, where temptations abound. But is the science real? Sure, I don't doubt it. The company claims to have done decades and millions of dollars of research and this, too, I don't doubt. They do call it "fasting mimicking" [italics mine] described as "...micro- and macro-nutrients in precise quantities and combinations that nourish you, but are not recognized as food by your body." But the real value, I believe, is simply the calorie restriction. The rest is window dressing and fancy packaging. Why five days? They claim the duration is scientifically devised. I believe their marketing tells them that longer would be harder to sell. Cleverly, Prolon makes the five days relatively easy, with little disruption of our busy lives. Though -- I'm also certain -- the longer you fast, the more you benefit. No doubt their marketing is right. In the five days, I have lost five pounds... Hurray! Would I do it again? Indeed I shall, perhaps quarterly (unless I repeat those stricter, longer water fasts.) Go Prolon! And go nutrition-savvy nurses! top   Nursing Education 2.0 February 20, 2023 -- Today I sat down with Sharon Goldfarb, DNP, RN, FNP-BC. We talked about nursing education, its shortcomings, and visions for improvement. Until recently the Dean of Health Sciences at the College of Marin, Sharon is now an advisor at HealthImpact, the California Nursing and Policy center headed by Dr. Garrett Chan, which runs the Benner Institute for Teaching and Learning at my alma mater UCSF. It is a California State-funded nursing workforce development organization, billing itself as a "Revolutionary Solution to Remake Nursing Education and Support Professional Development for Nursing Educators". Sharon and I agreed that a revolutionary solution is sorely needed! ...read more. Go enlightened nursing educators! Go Sharon! top   Kleptocapitalism January 30, 2023 -- In today's JAMA, Salve Lucrum: The Existential Threat of Greed in US Health Care, the venerable, conservative AMA complains of the cruel economics (they actually call it a kleptocracy) of America's health care system. The author is Don Berwick, former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obama. He knows of what he writes. ...Let's start here: regulate what I term NoPINOs -- non-profits in name only (you saw it here first!) -- such as Kaiser and -- especially called-out in this article -- Oak Street Health -- which have special tax advantages in return for obligation to provide services to broader populations. Today, instead, they create "kleptocapitalist" grotesque wealth for those at the top of their hierarchies, paying CEOs and others millions and even tens of millions of dollars. Call those non-profits? As the humorist said, there ought to be a law! But it's not funny. ...read more. Go Dr. Berwick, go enlightened legislators, go principled clinicians! top   Covid ICU Watch the video. What an ICU is really like. Great footage from nurse-worn GoPros. I watched it when it came out and, two years later, it still moves me: New York Times: Death, Through a Nurse's Eyes by nursing hero Pat Benner (of my alma mater UCSF). Been there, done that, hated it. I have nursed on Covid-infected units. Here, the topic is Covid-infected ICUs. California is the only state in the nation that has legally mandated nurse staffing ratios. In med/surg (the kind of nursing I do like) it's 5:1 (one nurse has up to five patients). In ICU it's 2:1. California is enlightened. Be proud. Go sustainably-staffed nursing units! Go Pat Benner! Go California nurses! top   Under attack December 20, 2022 -- My colleague and friend Karen Hunter, an informatics nurse and director at CommonSpirit Health, America's second-largest non-profit healthcare chain, spoke with me about how her work was hugely impacted by a recent cyber attack. (Becker describes it here and here.) Their computers were immobilized. 620,000 patient records were stolen. For Karen on the front lines it was a nightmare. Even on a normal day, the job of the informatics nurse is challenging... Read more. Go cyber-savvy informatics nurses! top   Guns! Wise regulation! December, 2022 -- I have blogged previously about the endlessly ghastly problem of gun violence in America. I (and many others) have observed that it is a public health crisis. In recent years, much of this mayhem is done with assault weapons. Part of the solution is, of course, legislation. My brilliant friend Dr. Jeff Johnson, in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, proposed a most rational way to address this scourge: Assault rifles are a danger to the public (6/20/2021) ...Assault rifles are NOT good for self defense ("Gun debate propelled by assault rifle's allure", June 20). The rounds they fire are so high powered that they are a danger to people who are not the target because they usually pass through the intended target and even through walls, or they ricochet off hard surfaces creating showers of high-energy shrapnel. Laws to restrict assault rifles should be based strictly on: The power of the rounds they fire (proportional to bullet-mass x velocity-squared), How quickly successive rounds can be fired, How many rounds their magazines hold, and How quickly magazines can be swapped. Above a threshold on each of those measures, assault rifles should be deemed weapons of war and banned for civilian use. Other aspects, such as whether they are styled to look military, how many handles they have, or how they are named are irrelevant and should not be factors in determining their legality. Go Jeff! Go sensible regulation! Go life-saving public health legislation! top   Why Is Nursing Time Management Hard? October 2, 2022 -- You know what it feels like: the shift ends and everything's done... no staying late (on the clock? off the clock?) to finish charting, no "missed care," all patients making good progress. Effective time management is a great feeling: you're at your best, and your patients have received truly good care. But how do you get there? Time management is one of the hardest parts of the job of the nurse. There is always more to do, and never enough time. Setting priorities, not losing sight of the big picture, multi-tasking (especially while juggling interruptions), and delegating are essential skills, subtle and complex, acquired only with years of experience. Here are some of the issues I've confronted in my own practice. Go time-managing nurses! top   Medical disinformation September 23, 2022 -- Lots of people believe things that are simply wrong. Why? Social media are a powerful vector. In today's JAMA Network, Social Media and Medical Misinformation: Confronting New Variants of an Old Problem the reasons are summarized: "declining trust in institutions, splintering of the media ecosystem, deepening political polarization, and worsening economic inequality." Real harm is done: During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, misinformation contributed to the use of unproven treatments, nonadherence to mitigation measures, and high levels of vaccine hesitancy... higher immunization rates could have prevented nearly half of COVID-19–related deaths... The temptation is to say that the platforms are neutral and deliver only what users post. But in fact their algorithms are tuned to "...promote extreme and sensational content with the goal of sustaining user engagement." Their bottom lines are driven by eyeballs. "Free" media are bought by advertisers. Advertisers pay for eyeballs. Eyeballs are drawn by inflammatory material. It would be contrary to the incentives of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, and Snapchat to turn down the heat. They could, but they won't. They'd make less money. Concludes JAMA Network: Mitigating the effects of misinformation requires a multifaceted approach that includes partnerships among clinicians, public health officials, technologists, patient groups, and community leaders. My own solution is simpler: Use social media only for social things: keeping in touch with friends and family. Avoid the clickbait. Don't look at political or "scientific/medical" postings on these sites. If everybody did this, these problems would go away. Go misinformation-correcting nurses! top   Nurses? Models? September 2022 -- When I first put up my web site www.nursemind.com with numerous images of nurses (by a professional artist I'd hired) I got a surprising amount of blowback from folks who didn't like them. Here is why their opinions are ill-considered. My policy regarding images of nurses is to shun the typical marketing blather. Unlike most nursing-related web sites, our images are not of fashion models in tight scrubs. Instead, the idea is to portray people as they really are. Some are fat. Many are non-white; indeed, ours is a majority-minority profession. The world must learn to accept us however we look. We are proud of what we do and what counts is the quality of our work, not the svelteness of our physiques. That big Black lady is doing a hard job and she's doing it with intelligence and skill. (Of course, she's running our nursing app on her smartphone.) Maybe she's saving somebody's life. I hope that's the message that people get from the image. As a counter-example, consider Nurse Jackie (played by Edie Falco). In the TV series, she wears white scrubs (only students wear white though Jackie is supposed to be a grizzled veteran) and instead of scrubs pants she wears a tight white skirt. I have never, not once, seen a nurse dressed that way. TV audiences may like to see that, but they won't on the NurseMind web site. Go, real life nurses! top   CPR: wrong default September 10, 2022 -- In today's Medscape Should We Always Offer CPR? Dr. Mallidi of our very own San Francisco General Hospital (I loved working there) writes movingly of CPR given ineffectually to a dying patient. Since no DNR nor Advance Directive directed otherwise, medical staff was obliged to implement the default: all available measures. To no avail, or worse. But why beat him up on his inevitable way out? Dr. Mallidi suggests we change the default. She cites a proposal by physicians from Columbia University Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children's Hospital. They proposed changes to how we decide whether to attempt resuscitation. Instead of CPR by default: Consider CPR when the benefits vs. risks are uncertain, and the patient is not end-stage; Recommend against CPR when there is a low likelihood of benefit and high likelihood of harm (e.g. patients with anoxic brain injury, advanced incurable cancer, or end-stage multiorgan dysfunction); and Do not offer CPR to patients who will die imminently and have no chance of surviving CPR (e.g. patients with multiorgan dysfunction, increasing pressor requirements, and those who are actively dying without a single immediately reversible cause). And -- everybody! -- write that Advance Directive! Go Dr. Mallidi! Go enlightened caregivers! top   Rethinking nursing informatics August 31, 2022 -- I've been doing informatics for decades -- four decades, to be exact -- focusing on the sub-specialty of nursing informatics (NI) for the last of those decades. You'd think it would be a mature technology... And you'd be right. But much of the world hasn't figured this out yet. Each quarter, my BANIA group delivers an educational event to address the question, what is nursing informatics? You wouldn't need to do that for, say, car mechanics. Everyone knows what that is. It's a mature technology. So why, if my contention is correct, must we do so for nursing informatics? Read the story here. Go informatics nurses! top   Advance care July 14, 2022 -- Dr. Dan Morhaim urges caregivers not to shy away from sometimes-uncomfortable but essential conversations with patients about their values and wishes regarding treatments in their final days. Advance Care Planning documents and portable medical orders, he urges, are essential. Today, in the authoritative journal Medical Economics, he published Why your patients need advance care plans. He writes, We should be encouraging and assisting our patients to complete an advance directive and to make sure these forms are electronically securely stored and readily available across the healthcare continuum 24/7. Dr. Morhaim is expert on POLSTs, MOLSTs, DNRs, Living Wills, Advance Directives, Durable Powers of Attorney, organ/tissue donation wishes, and the informatics mechanisms that make these documents accessible. His book Preparing for a Better End was published in 2020 by Johns Hopkins Press. Essential reading for anyone who expects someday to die. In other words, all of us! Interested? Here are some recommended readings. On Saturday, October 29th at 11:00 am PST, he will speak on this topic to our Bay Area chapter of the American Nursing Informatics Association. As informaticians, we are especially interested in learning about tools and methods to support the electronic availability of these documents. What good are documents if you can't find them when you need them? We informatics nurses can fix that. Go Dr. Morhaim! Go informatics nurses! top   RaDonda redux May 13, 2022 -- We wrote earlier of our dismay at the criminal charges for the nursing errors of RaDonda Vaught. Today we have the sentence: three years supervised probation. Her mistakes were severe and she paid a high price -- career, license, and a lifetime of regret. But no prison time. The nursing community has breathed a sigh of relief. We are vindicated in our belief that errors are not crimes. Go justice for nurses! top   Overhaul SNFs May 11, 2022 -- Having worked in a few SNFs (skilled nursing facilities, i.e. nursing homes), I implore my children not to let me end up in one. Even the ones that don't reek of urine are depressing places. Even the ones that cost $8000/month. Let alone the ones that are largely federally-funded. But change is coming. In an article today in JAMA, National Academies: US Nursing Home System Needs Fundamental Overhaul, the problems are identified and solutions proposed. Problems Understaffing -- a critical problem. Funding and reimbursements -- "Medicaid, the dominant payer of long-term care services, doesn’t fully cover nursing homes’ costs — especially the cost of providing quality care." "Predatory owners and operators who seek to maximize their profits at the expense of vulnerable residents’ health and safety." Solutions Improve low-paid nursing home workers’ wages and benefits. Shore up minimum staffing standards and education requirements. Provide smaller and more home-like environments with single- rather than multiple-occupancy bedrooms and bathrooms. Incorporate residents' families experiences into enhanced quality measures in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Care Compare website, where consumers can research facilities, for the first time. All health care professionals to receive geriatrics training, ideally with nursing home experience. Give state agencies that conduct nursing home surveys the resources they need to monitor facilities, investigate complaints, and enforce rules. Create incentives to increase adoption of electronic health records in nursing home facilities. (Yes! Go informatics!) Collect, audit, and make publically available data on nursing homes' often opaque finances, operations, and ownership. Develop a federal long-term care benefit. (I have long-term care (LTC) insurance; I don't count on the gummint to take care of me in my dotage.) Go government reforms! Go SNF nurses! top   Wilderness May 9, 2022 -- I just completed Advanced Wilderness Life Support, a weekend of hiking and training in the woods by Lake Tahoe. It was great. We practiced treating the ills that befall hikers, river rafters, skiers, and other outdoorsy types as they revel in nature, far from urban health care systems. Lightning strikes, snake bites, contaminated water, broken limbs, wounds, diving accidents, sunburn, frostbite, and a zillion more. How far do you go before you summon the helicopter? The course materials were developed at the U. of Utah School of Medicine. Hey, if you love being a nurse -- and I do! -- you couldn't ask for a nicer place to be it. And great teachers sharing their experience. Go wilderness nurses! top   Criminal error? April, 2022 -- We nurses joke that a mistake by us could kill a patient so we must never cease to be at the top of our game. But it's not a joke -- it happened. So now the question is, is a medical mistake a crime? Should the nurse be punished? The story is gripping nurses across the country. Here is NPR on March 25th: RaDonda Vaught, a former nurse criminally prosecuted for a fatal drug error in 2017, was convicted of gross neglect of an impaired adult and negligent homicide on Friday after a three-day trial in Nashville, Tenn. She has not yet been sentenced but likely faces years behind bars. Is that fair? Appropriate? This nurse says no. We make mistakes but we never intend harm. We are passionate about our work and care deeply about and for our patients. The job is extraordinarily difficult, opportunities for error abound, and Nurse Vaught had unusually many obstacles on that fateful day. Her life is already ruined and her career is destroyed. If punishment is warranted (and I believe it is not) this is already more than enough. I urge the authorities to suspend whatever sentence their vindictive little hearts mete out. Go overworked, imperfect but well-intended nurses! top   Data in the rigs April, 2022 -- My nursing informatics group BANIA (Bay Area Chapter of the American Nursing Informatics Association) gives quarterly presentations on topics related to our work. This quarter's talk is on the Emergency Medical Services Authority (EMSA) project. Our speakers will be: Ian Brown (Medical Informatics Director at Stanford Emergency Services) Carlye Hatwood (Health IT - Assistant Chief Information Officer at San Mateo County Health, President-elect of BANIA) Tamara Muccia (Business Intelligence Health IT Director at San Mateo County Health) Dave Anderson - Project/Technical Analyst team member at San Mateo County Health) The event will be Apr 25, 2022 from 18:00 to 19:15 (PT) online (Zoom). It awards 1 CEU of nursing training credit. Register to attend here. The system that will be described -- EMSA -- has a component named SAFR (search, alert, file, reconcile) that provides patient data in realtime to the EMS personnel in ambulances ("rigs") as they transport patients. It also alerts the emergency room what to expect. In 2021 when I was employed by San Mateo County's health department I worked on this project. My role included documentation for clinical staff and live testing as a ride-along. It was fascinating, and is making a big difference in the coordination of caregiver teams and in the quality of care being delivered. Click the pic to see me in action! There's a lot of tech in those rigs! Go EMS! Go tech-inspired nurses! top   Gov't wants SNF quality April, 2022 -- This week, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule on a couple of topics dear to nurses: safety and quality in nursing homes (SNFs), and nurse staffing there. Some statistics were provided: Medicare pays "over 15,000 nursing homes, serving more than 1.5 million people. Medicare spending to nursing homes is projected to be approximately $35 billion in FY 2022." As we cannot manage what we do not measure, CMS proposes to add three important metrics to its value-based purchasing (VBP). VBP rewards facilities with incentive payments based on the quality of care they provide to people with Medicare. These are: Skilled Nursing Facility Healthcare Associated Infections Requiring Hospitalization (SNF HAI -- hospital-acquired infections) especially Covid; Total Nursing Hours per Resident Day -- more nursing care correlates with improved outcomes; and Discharge to Community (DTC) -– Post Acute Care Measure for SNFs counts successful discharges to community from SNF settings. Our government is listening, and we are moving in the right direction. Indeed, Biden mentioned these things in his recent State of the Union Address. Here is his FACT SHEET: Protecting Seniors by Improving Safety and Quality of Care in the Nation's Nursing Homes. Having worked in SNFs, I have seen the good and the bad and care deeply about these issues. So should you. Go CMS! Go SNF nurses! top   I got rhythm February, 2022 -- An insight about nursing from when I was a student and thinking deeply about it: What makes an expert nurse? I remember distinctly a comment made by one of my clinical instructors. She observed that I was having difficulty finding my "rhythm". Rhythm was a well-chosen word. When you're an expert, you know without hesitation what is your top priority, what to do now, what can wait, when something is a crisis and you must hurry, and even more importantly when it's not yet a crisis but it could become one. All these things are about time management. Music, too, is all about time. Skilled musicians (for a few years in a former career this was how I made my living, though having worked with a few geniuses I wouldn't have rated myself above "competent") always know where "one" (the first beat of every measure) is. Their job, too, is about time. Finding that rhythm -- more a head thing than a hand thing -- is about mastery, flow. Exhortations from our professor to find out when meds are due but not look them up until time permits -- get our head-to-toe done first! -- help us develop time management instincts. Perhaps a better word than instinct is reflex. A reflex is an action taken as a result of a decision made at a sub-cortical level. When you know something thoroughly, you do it without having to think about it. You just know. That's where I strive to get to. I feel like it's a long way away yet, but at least I have a sense of where I want to go. It will take years of practice to arrive at that sense of confidence, of mastery. Someday I will have that rhythm. Go nurses who've got rhythm! top   Hospital at home? December, 2021 -- Kaiser is in the news again. As a cost-saving measure, it now promotes "hospital-at-home" -- care-at-home programs that use iPads and other digital technology for remote patient monitoring 24/7. They conflate this with "aging in place" -- who doesn't prefer home to hospital? But nurses slam the program. My nurse friend Ann Farrel points out, Hospitals (bean counters) see RNs on balance sheet as largest expense labor [cost], easy to cut to optimize profits though it's long proven RN hrs. per patient day is a key driver of inpatient mortality and morbidity... [I blogged about this here.] Acute and critical nursing care cannot be replicated by family and technology (often unreliable) connected to call center and visits by roving "care teams". But what a money saver! We've forced lower RN staff, now let's transfer nursing care to home and family unable to assume this role, even with patients wired to multiple monitors. Another RN friend, Saskia, offers this nuanced view: I'd rather see it as a choice. Some patients may be cut out for it. However, after 'getting discharged home too early' now we have 'too early and without proper resources', double whammy. No, we don't want nosocomial infections. But people need to be over the hump, symptoms well-controlled, before going home. Want top-notch nursing care, reliable and competent? Don't expect it from family, often overtaxed and stressed-out. Go to the hospital! Go Ann! Go Saskia! Go inpatient nurses! top   We SAFER? December, 2021 -- The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, funded by the HITECH Act under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has released the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) Guides by Sittig et al, 2014. That's a mouthful. What's the point? Health information technology (HIT) -- most notably electronic health records (EHRs) -- is as vulnerable to cyberattack as any other industry, several of which have recently sustained horrific and highly damaging assaults from miscreants both domestic and foreign. Government systems as well as private enterprise (for example, earlier this year, hackers shut down the Colonial Pipeline) have been attacked. Health care institutions, too, are not immune. Why fret about this here? Because nurse informaticists need education, skills, and action to confront these threats. The SAFER Guides outline approaches to informatics responsibilties including: High Priority Practices Organizational Responsibilities Infrastructure Design and Management Contingency Planning System Configuration System Interfaces Clinical Processes Patient Identification Computerized Provider Order Entry Decision Support Test Results Reporting and Follow-Up Clinician Communication A video introduction to these issues is available. Watch it! "The SAFER Guides are self-assessment tools to help you and your team identify these risks and mitigate them." And get smart about health data security. Go nursing informatics security experts! top   Falls December, 2021 -- Falling is, of course, a serious health risk and one often assessed by nurses. A popular tool for this purpose is the Morse Fall Scale. It is one of many such tools offered by NurseAssess. To use the tool, click the radio buttons and then Calculate. The degree of risk is then displayed.    A helpful web site that describes fall risk factors and hazards, and prevention strategies, is Sixty and Me. Recommended reading. top   A giant has passed November 24, 2021 -- With great sadness we acknowledge the passing of a giant of nursing informatics. Dr. Virginia Saba was a true visionary. "...Researcher, developer, and matriarch of the Clinical Care Classification system" (In Memoriam: Dr. Virginia Saba). She invented CCC, the best of the coding schemes for nursing data. I have met her, discussed this, and blogged about it and about her and again here. Here is her autograph. Go informatics nurses! Go Virginia and your disciples! top   Ageism is a thing October 21, 2021 -- Ageism in health care? Is that a thing? You better believe it! And none of us is getting younger. Here is the story: a panel of experts moderated by my friend Judy Graham of Kaiser Health News, Confronting Ageism in Health Care: A Conversation for Patients, Caregivers and Clinicians. It presents statistics and issues as well as several personal stories that make the facts and figures real. It's an hour and a half and well worth it especially if, like me, you are old, or caring for someone who is. Or planning to be old some day. How does health care fail us oldsters? We are often not involved in decisions. It is assumed that we are incompetent or cognitively compromised. We are often not heard and often not treated as fully human. We are omitted from clinical trials though new drugs and procedures are given to us anyway. Most medical education does not require training in geriatrics. It is often assumed that infirmity and pain are inevitable as we age and thus do not warrant attention. Another common assumption is that eventual relegation to institutions such as SNFs is inevitable. "Old people consume a disproportionate share of health care dollars." But do we complain that children consume a disproportionate share of education dollars? These are some of the negative results and claims of ageism and ageists in health care. Judy's panel talks about what ageism is and what we can do about it. Go Judy! Go elder-savvy nurses! top   Covid future October 12, 2021 -- Dr. Adam Lauring (my cousin, ahem) is quoted in today's New York Times article, What the Future May Hold for the Coronavirus and Us, predicting the future course of the Covid-19 pandemic. "There was, I think, a sense [that the evolution of the virus] would work in our favor, and that the nightmare scenario of it being like influenza -- constantly changing and needing updated vaccines all the time -- would probably not be the case," said Dr. Adam Lauring, a virologist and infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan. The article goes on: Eventually, as viral evolution slows down and our immune systems catch up, we will reach an uneasy equilibrium with the virus, scientists predict. We will never extinguish it, but it will smolder rather than rage... The future, [Dr. Jonathan Quick, author of The End of Epidemics] said, "depends much, much more on what humans do than on what the virus does." Translation: get your shots, people! Go Adam! Go vaccination-dispensing nurses! top   We have Covid September 30, 2021 -- No, not the disease, the assessment. Now NurseAssess users can screen their patients for Covid-19 and capture their findings in the app. The data you enter into this app screen are encoded as ICD-10-CM assessments and uploaded to your EHR when you click "Save". Useful and timely. Go NurseAssess! top   NY TriState Chapter of ANIA September 25, 2021 -- Today I gave a brief presentation at the Symposium of the NY TriState Chapter of the American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA). My topic was the research results in the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) thesis of recently-graduated student Stella Eliboh RN and now DNP. She studied the issues related to the use of professional-grade mobile applications (apps) by nurses on the job. Her case study subject was my new NurseAssess app. Here is my Powerpoint. The nurse informatician attendees were gracious and my talk was well-received. As seasoned bedside nurses, all shared our professional vexation with the documentation burdens of our work which motivated development of this app. Often we must spend more time with the computer than with the patient. The app offers a step toward overcoming this, and this audience "got" it. Go NY TriState nurses! top   Dottoressa September, 2021 -- I just finished reading Dr. Susan Levenstein's wise and witty Dottoressa (2019). She recounts her experience as an American doctor in Rome where I grew up. We are contemporaries and I recognized several of the people she mentions whom I knew during the years (1961-1973) I lived there. Also of great interest are her reflections on medicine and health care systems about which I, too, have many opinions (as readers of this blog are surely aware). Perhaps my favorite part of this book is Dr. Levenstein's observations on Italian culture -- its quirks, the wisdom and superstitions of its people, and their endless "medical" strictures. Here are some I, too, have observed: Don't swim after eating... never mind science, this is your mother speaking. Got the sniffles? Must be from a colpo d'aria (hit of air) from that open window. Feeling unwell? It's surely your fegato (liver). It's always the fegato. Dr. Levenstein's timely and polemic blog -- she waxes strident and well-informed on matters Covid -- is at www.stethoscopeonrome.com. Highly recommended. In Rome for a couple of weeks' vacation (July, 2021) I called her up. She was most welcoming to this stranger and we had an aperitivo and a chat. With our Italophilia and medical backgrounds in common, there was much to talk about. Thank you, Susan! Go expat doctors! And nurses! top   ANIA 2021 August 7, 2021 -- I'm home now from yet another enjoyable and educational American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA) national conference, held this year in San Diego. We're all vaccinated so Covid worries were none. Hurray, no masks! And as far as I know, there was no super-spreading. In the photo: front row: half the Board (Helen Lu, Tip Tilton, Dan Keller) of the Bay Area (BANIA) chapter. Back row: half the Board of the San Diego chapter (Matthew Binder, Kathy Topp). Hot topic of the day? "Documentation burden" on nurses. In other words, too much time in front of the computer. Evidently, it's a national goal to re-engineer these processes and UIs to reduce this by 75% within a couple of years or so. While well-intentioned, this misses the point. It's not that we have to do too much documentation (though we do) it's that the job definition is misguided. Much of the excessive picking and clicking is driven by that "doctor's handmaiden" view of nursing that we can't seem to shake. It's nit-picky because it assumes no clinical judgment; we must be prompted for every detail because we wouldn't think of (or do) it independently. (No one said these things in the presentations; it's my own opinion.) Nostalgia was expressed for the charting-by-exception we used to do in the "good ol' days" of paper charts. I do remember that. We got our charting done quickly that way. An efficient process that has been lost in the transition away from paper. I guess I'm an old-timer, sigh. Somebody even wistfully mentioned the Kardex. The youngsters just said, "Huh?" Go wise old nurses and smart, up-and-coming young ones! top   Hesitancy schmesitancy July, 2021 -- Why call it "vaccine hesitancy"? That legitimizes what must be called what it truly is, idiocy. These fools imperil themselves and those around them. A cynic might call it natural selection or Darwin awardees. Denial of science and well-established public health principles will remove them from the gene pool. In other words, Covid kills. A kinder view (The Atlantic, Sept. 2020, "How the Virus Won") ascribes this idiotic behavior to complacency: Vaccines eradicated smallpox and polio, and brought measles, diptheria, and rubella to heel... These achievements brought complacency. In fact, I have known people of my parents' generation crippled by polio. Suffering and death brought by uncontrolled disease was ended by science not many generations ago; have we already forgotten? The evidence is indisputable. Covid death rates are inversely proportional to vaccination rates. Less vax, more death. Simple numbers. They are not "hesitant". They are fools. To my amazement, there are even some nurses among them. We are taught -- above all -- to practice safely. Do no harm. Would these nurses infect their patients? They should be banished from the workplace until they're vaccinated or the virus subsides. Especially in nursing homes! 45% of Nursing Home Staff Still Unvaccinated Against COVID-19 -- Why do these Typhoid Marys still have licenses? Go vaccinated nurses! top   Go nursing informatics June 1, 2021 -- Are you a nurse? Of course you are; otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. Do you use computers in your work? Of course you do; we all do, especially for the electronic medical record. Do you design, build, implement, train or support users of those systems? Aha, maybe not; this is a nursing specialty still in its infancy. If you do do this, you're a nursing informaticist. You're one of us. And you should be a member of the American Nursing Informatics Association. If you live in the Bay Area, you should also be in our local chapter, BANIA. Why? Many benefits, especially professional networking. But what does that mean? Looking for a job or a gig? It's who you know. Solving hard problems? Discuss project strategies with others tackling similar issues. Share experience and wisdom. Keep on top of the hot issues of the day. See what others are working on; you may soon work on those things, too. Hobnob with the movers and shakers in our industry. Attend conferences and see the cutting edge. Another benefit is free/cheap CEUs (continuing education units): In California, to maintain our RN licenses, we must get at least 30 hours every two years. Attendance at conferences, workshops, and webinars often yield CEUs and are offered by ANIA and BANIA. Go informatics nurses! top   LACEd Up! April 30, 2021 -- We are proud to announce a valuable addition to the widely-used LOINC clinical terminology standard. This addition is the LACE scale. It identifies patients who are at risk for readmission or death within thirty days of discharge. This is of great import to hospitals in deciding whether and when it is safe and appropriate to discharge a patient. Readmission or death of a patient within thirty days of discharge is considered an "adverse event" and can result in a financial penalty to the hospital from Medicare as a provision of the Affordable Care Act. For the sakes of both the hospital and the patient, premature discharges are to be avoided. Read more... top   Covid Staffing? March 1, 2021 -- A perennially hot topic in nursing is staffing ratios: for how many patients does a nurse care at one time? It is well-proven that keeping these low saves lives. California alone in the nation legislated nurse staffing ratios with Assembly Bill AB394 in 1999. (Hospitals opposed it because payroll -- specifically nursing payroll -- is their highest-cost budget line item.) Several factors must be considered, mainly the acuity of the patients' conditions and the type of nursing unit. For example, the level of care required in an ICU is much higher than in med/surg. And, of course, when there is a pandemic everything is impacted. Read more... top   New blog March, 2021 -- After 16 years of blogging at this location (wow! we are proud!) we're moving. Going forward, please come see us at NurseAssess News! New location, new up-to-date look, same feisty nurse activism. See you there! Go nurses! top   Vaxes 'r us! January 12, 2021 -- Spectacular logistical triumph by my new employer, San Mateo County Health Department's Coronavirus program: 3000 cars/day processed in drive-through vaccinations. It's been running most of January and will continue until all San Mateans are immunized. (My photos.) Ours is the first California county to get such a program into operation (San Diego is #2). Each occupant briefly rolls down their window, gets the Covid shot, proceeds to 15-minute pause to make sure of no adverse reaction, and done. The result? We health workers can give care without fear. Teachers can return to their classrooms. People can go back to work. Grandparents can hug their grandchildren. Back to normal? We're getting there! Sounds simple... not! Logistical challenges include managing signups (online), confirming identities, managing materials (ultra-cold freezers store vaccines), tracking who's received what (the Moderna vaccine, in our case) and when they are to receive the booster (after 4 weeks), the huge facility (San Mateo Event Center), security, traffic direction, and more. My tiny role (job title: Clinical Nurse Informatics Educator) was IT support. And as a healthcare provider I, too, got the shot. Hurray! Dan gets the shot. top   Biden? Hey! Nurses! November 2020 -- My newest nurse hero: Jennifer Shepherd. She looks at president-elect Biden's Covid task force and asks, where are the nurses? "NO other profession in the world understands and deals with this more than we do! You don't get to claim nurses as heroes, be thankful for our work, and then not include us at the table!" And everyone knows, if you're not at the table you're on the menu. Go Jennifer! Go nurses! top   How to fix the pandemic November 4, 2020 -- In a succinct article, Seven Ways to Fix This Pandemic -- and Stop the Next One, Medscape maps out for us the sensible steps we must take. I hope Biden's listening. Trump sure wasn't. Clear thinking like this gives me hope. top   Wear that mask! November, 2020 -- The reason this virus is so elusive and virulent (rapid-spreading) is its two-week incubation period. People spread it when they don't yet know they have it. Most devious, that virus! The defensive strategy is obvious though, evidently not to everybody including our president: you could have the virus without knowing it, so wear a mask just in case. This will prevent you from spreading it to other people. Duh! top   Herd immunity? November, 2020 -- In an October 19, 2020 JAMA article, Herd Immunity and Implications for SARS-CoV-2 Control by Saad et al is an excellent and succinct explanation of herd immunity. We all want society to return to normal. Can we do that through herd immunity? This article gives the answer. I summarize it here. What is immunity? Having the antibodies that protect you from the virus. How do you get these antibodies? Either by catching the virus and growing them yourself as part of the defense process or by getting them from a vaccine. What is herd immunity? It is when enough people have immunity that exposure to the virus of people who don't yet is infrequent enough that the virus dies out. What percentage of the population must have the antibody to reach herd immunity? This number is different for each communicable disease. For Covid-19 it's 60%. What percentage has it today? The article posits 10% but admits that this is an assumption. How long will it take to get from 10% to 60%? The article doesn't say, but my guess is 10 years if we have no vaccine, sooner if we do. How much quicker? It depends on how many people are vaccinated and how soon. The USA has a population of 330M. Assuming that 33M (the article estimates 10% of the population) have grown the antibody themselves, 330M x 0.6 - 33M = 165M would need to be vaccinated to get us to herd immunity. To deliver that number of vaccinations will demand a massive manufacturing and distribution infrastructure. It's a tall order but we're doing it! There is an additional factor: the duration of the immunity. The article guesses 2 to 3 years but admits that this is not yet known. If immunity is shorter, the percentage of population requiring immunity is substantially higher. Conclusion? "...infection-induced herd immunity is not realistic at this point to control the pandemic." We've got to have that vaccine. Go JAMA! top   Incompetents in charge October 8, 2020 -- Traditionally, the venerable NEJM (perhaps the world's premier healthcare mag) has stayed clear of politics. Clearly, we've reached a tipping point. This scathing editorial, Dying in a Leadership Vacuum, is eloquent on the topic of our Idiot-in-Chief: Though they don't name him, much of this failure can be laid squarely at the feet of Donald Trump: "[He has] taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy." How did NEJM reach this conclusion? Here are just a few of the compelling points (quoted from the editorial): China [held its] death rate to a reported 3 per million, as compared with more than 500 per million in the United States... In general, ...many [countries] ...have outperformed us by orders of magnitude. We had ample warning [and squandered it]. We continue to be way behind the curve in testing. [In] the number of tests performed per infected person [we are] below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing capacity that we have. Quarantine and isolation are sloppy or not done at all. Masks are often not worn, largely because our leaders have stated outright that masks are political tools rather than effective infection control measures. The government has appropriately invested heavily in vaccine development, but its rhetoric has politicized the development process and led to growing public distrust. Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences... [In] the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs. The editorial is a quick read and an excellent summary of our unforgiveably mishandled crisis... no, tragedy. Go NEJM! top   Medicare and YouPays October, 2020 -- I am 66 and I've had Medicare for a year. My parents (may they rest in peace) had it, too (as do most 65+ Americans) and were pleased although, in his last two days of life, my father was not afforded a private room in the hospital (Mt. Sinai in New York City which we dubbed Mt. Cyanide) and we -- an endless stream of family paying last respects and we three his distraught offspring -- had to tiptoe and whisper so as not to disturb the saintly heart patient in the other bed. Medicare is no Rolls Royce. And it's complicated! Ok, I get the distinction between Parts A, B, and D (yup, there's no C). But that's just the beginning. ...read more top   EHR Burdens September 17, 2020 -- My friend and hero Patty Sengstack DNP RN-BC FAAN is leading yet another ground-breaking project, documented in an American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA) position paper: The Six Domains of Burden: A Conceptual Framework to Address the Burden of Documentation in the Electronic Health Record. I have groused about the heavy toll taken by EHRs on nursing and welcome Patty's formal analysis. Central to the concept of burden is what the authors term "The Six Domains" -- the reasons why we use EHRs and why they make nursing work more onerous. I have pontificated elsewhere about the motivations for EHRs and how they are the opposite of what I term "nurse-centric". The "burdens" are: Reimbursement (charge capture) Regulatory (keep the gov't off our backs) Quality (proof that we're doing a good job; when we do a great job our hospitals are paid more thanks to value-based pricing) Usability (with time we'll get this right but today the perception is that working the computers is slow and painful) Interoperability (data entered in one system must often be re-entered in another) Self-Imposed: "We've done it to ourselves" (artifacts of institutional culture and control/power structures) Let me be clear, however, that I am an enthusiastic advocate of this technology. In graduate school (1978-1983, UCSF) my master's thesis (and resulting publication) was an EHR I programmed from scratch and that was briefly used in live clinical practice (as proof of concept only). I am convinced that well-designed and well-implemented clinical data systems can and already often do much to improve quality of care, efficiency, accuracy and above all safety. However, there is also a strong case to be made that these systems sometimes have the opposite effect. One thing that makes Patty's paper especially valuable is that for each of the six burdens it gives real-life examples, most of which will be recognized by nurses and other clinicians from their experience of their professional environments. On reading it, many will be tempted to say, "Amen, amen!" Go Patty! Go nurses! top   Innovate! Perform! September 12, 2020 -- Our Bay Area Nursing Informatics Association chapter (BANIA) today delivered its summer educational event, "Leading Innovation and Creating Cultures of High Performance" taught by industry luminary Dan Weberg RN PhD who works at Trusted Health that provides tech-savvy nurse staffing services. (That is, the services are tech-savvy... I hope the nurses are, too.) He described several disruptive and innovative activities in health care. (I've blogged about him before.) One is a healthcare focused division at Microsoft, spearheaded by Molly McCarthy, pictured above. Here is one of her podcasts, on nursing, technology, and the key focus areas at Microsoft. Her title is Chief Nursing Strategist (wow! where do I apply for a job like that?) She builds cloud- and AI-based tools for clinicians. Other innovators in healthcare mentioned by Dr. Weberg include Amazon, Google, Apple, and Walmart. Big tech senses big dollars. (He didn't say that, I did.) It was a great talk. Go nurse technologists! top   Droplet? Airborne? Aerosol? All of the above! July 25, 2020 -- We used to think that the Covid-19 virus was transmitted only by droplets in the air (and, less commonly, on surfaces we touch). Droplets -- a term with a very specific meaning in nursing, and clear protocols we must follow in caring for patients who require droplet precautions -- can travel up to six feet before falling out of the air and ceasing to pose a threat. How Is SARS-COV-2 Transmitted? published today by the nurses union, National Nurses United (NNU), claims otherwise. Recent studies show there are also aerosol and airborne components in the transmission process. These travel much farther than six feet, and remain airborne longer. The danger is worse than we'd feared. Go nurses union! Educate us and keep us safe! top   Covid Screening in Madison July 14, 2020 -- Today I received on-line training to become a volunteer nurse screener of guests in a couple of shelters (one for women, one for men) in Madison, WI. The screening process, too, is conducted on-line. Folks wishing admission to these shelters (Porchlight and Salvation Army) must first stop and talk with me or one of the other volunteer RNs via an Internet-connected tablet. We screen them for Covid symptoms, make sure they're wearing their mask correctly, and if necessary, triage them to a hotel (funded by Dane County, WI) or to a nearby ED. The brainchild of nurses Tracy Zvenyach and Epic veteran Bre Loughlin (pictured above), this program is called Nurse Disrupted. To date, four dozen people like me have signed up, been trained, and staff it seven days a week, one shift a day in each of the two facilities. Forty to fifty shelter guests are screened in a typical shift. There have been no outbreaks of Covid in either. Evidently Nurse Disrupted is working well. Go Wisconsin nurses! top   Goodbye Zakheim June, 2020 -- Among my fond memories of studenthood at UCSF are the WPA-era murals by Bernard Zakheim in UCSF's Toland Hall. One of my classes was in this hall and it was a joy to attend. Toland Hall is in the handsome but obsolete UC Hospital building on the Parnassus campus. UCSF plans to demolish the building and replace it with one that's up-to-date, seismically safe and, alas, mural-less. Preserving them would cost millions and the money is just not there. Here are my photos of these stupendous works. Go see them for yourself while you still can! top   Clinicians and computers June, 2020 -- As I have blogged before, clinicians are ill-served by technology, EHRs in particular. EHRs' primary purposes are: Data gathering (legal and regulatory), and Billing ...not supporting clinicians. Here is my recent first-person essay on what this is like for this nurse. Cartoon by Charles Keller (Dan's Dad) top   RN = IT June, 2020 -- A new meaning for the term nursing informatics? I have blogged at length here about nursing informatics. Recent experience adds a whole new layer: tech support for patients. This is a thing. Requests from patients on a variety of units where I have worked recently have been for things like, "My phone's charger cable broke; can you find me another?" or "How do I get a network connection so I can Skype with my family?" Especially in these times of Covid-19 when inpatients are increasingly isolated -- for infection control, visitors are no longer permitted -- technology is essential for human contact. And often the only way to get tech support is to ask a nurse. A new challenge! Go nurses! top   What SNFs must do May 28, 2020 -- In an excellent article, Asymptomatic Transmission, the Achilles' Heel of Current Strategies to Control Covid-19, the venerable New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) offers a strategy for SNFs to combat the Covid-19 pandemic that's killing their residents: Expand Covid-19 testing to include asymptomatic persons residing or working in SNFs. Isolate infected residents and care for them appropriately. Quarantine exposed residents to minimize the risk of spread. Cohort residents and resume some group activities in nonoutbreak settings. Do routine rRT-PCR testing in addition to symptomatic screening of new residents before entry. Apply conservative guidelines for discontinuation of isolation. Periodically re-test long-term residents. Periodically rRT-PCR screen and surgically mask all staff. Extend these recommendations to all US-based SNFs. These are excellent recommendations. What are the chances that they will be implemented as legislation? I'm not holding my breath. top   Eating my own dogfood May, 2020 -- Among programmers, using the products you build is referred to as eating your own dogfood. I've been doing that. That is, on my nursing shifts, I've been using my new app, NurseAssess The verdict? I love it! Of course, I am biased. Everyone thinks their own baby is beautiful. Still, the app (entering vital signs and nursing assessments straight into the smartphone) compared to the conventional method (jotting them on scraps of paper and later typing them into the computer) is so much faster and more accurate. Seems like a no-brainer! Dogfood, anyone? top   In defense of SNFs May, 2020 -- SNFs (skilled nursing facilities, at one of which I work) have been getting a bad rap lately. Their residents suffer a disproportionate share of Covid-19 deaths. The implication in a recent spate of articles in the press is that these institutions have delivered substandard care or worse, driven by rapacious administrators and capitalistic owners to cut corners and let patients sicken and die. While such abuses have surely occurred, I maintain that these are a vanishingly small minority and that very nearly all such institutions have performed well, even in the face of daunting odds. What are those odds? They are two: SNF residents are by definition the most vulnerable demographic: elderly beset by numerous comorbidities, often surviving by the merest thread sustained only by, well, skilled nursing. Throw a deadly virus into this mix and the outcomes are inevitably poor. The designs of these places are commonly outmoded. If we were to redesign them today (and many have, for example the New York Times: As Death Toll in Nursing Homes Climbs, Calls to Redesign Them Grow) each resident would have a private room. The HVAC/ventilation systems would exhaust to the outdoors instead of recirculating. Shared spaces would support social distancing. The number of residents in a nursing unit ("pod") would be perhaps a half dozen instead of the two or even three dozen common in today's SNFs, most of which were designed many decades ago. So today the odds are against us. What can we do? Bulldoze and rebuild? Where's the money for that? In practical terms, let's do what's possible within the constraints of reality, and point fingers only when the malfeasance is real. Which it rarely is. In defense of SNFs, please understand the realities. And go (skilled) nurses! top   Big babies May, 2020 -- A recurring theme in right-wing screeds is the unuttered yet essential assumption that they can do crazy stuff knowing that responsible people will keep them safe and clean up their messes. An obvious example is the folks protesting the coronavirus lockdown. They know perfectly well that if everybody stopped sheltering-in-place as they demand, the virus would run rampant and many more would sicken and die. They don't say it out loud but they count on being prevented and thus safe. Another is the anti-vaxxers. Idiots! And there's the environment. If the regulations that keep our air, water, atmosphere, oceans, fisheries, wetlands and forests functioning were withdrawn, our planet would soon fail to support life, especially human life. They know this, and count on the people they attack to protect them. This hypocrisy must be exposed and it must end. The problems are too big and too fatal to play games. Right-wingers, stop counting on "the adults in the room" to change your diaper. Grow up, you big babies! Nurses, of course, are among the realists. We know the real issues and what it takes to keep everybody healthy. We are the adults in the room. Go nurses! top   Nursing in Covid times April, 2020 -- In most ways, it's no different than nursing in normal times. Except for two things: One: wiping, wiping. I used to be able to take a set of vitals in about four minutes. Now that is more than doubled by the time it takes to wipe down the thermometer, pulse oxymeter, blood pressure cuff/tube/gauge between patients. It's a real hindrance and I must remind myself not to get sloppy. Lives are at stake. Two: PPE (personal protective equipment). I wear (going from head to toe as nurses are taught) hairnet, face shield, N95 mask, disposable gown, gloves (sometimes doubled), booties. Communication with coworkers is rendered difficult by the muffling of mask and face shield. Most are immigrants with strong accents and this makes it worse. We tire of having to repeat everything but what else can we do? And there's a third thing: fear. Mine. When a Covid+ patient coughs in my face as I'm affixing a blood pressure cuff I wonder, was that it? The moment the virus nails me? I leap back but of course those droplets travel faster than I can. I wipe down doorknobs, faucet handles, handrails. Then someone says, did you wipe your steering wheel? And I'm, OMG. There's always something more. After a while these thoughts are exhausting and I grow resigned. So far I've been lucky. How long will that last? I do what's possible and that has to be good enough. What happens will happen and we'll come out OK in the end. top   NEJM on SNFs April 24, 2020 -- Here in the venerable NEJM is Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections and Transmission in a Skilled Nursing Facility. It posits: "Infection-control strategies focused solely on symptomatic residents were not sufficient to prevent transmission after SARS-CoV-2 introduction into this facility." This should frighten anyone who goes or whose loved one goes into such a facility. The facts are perhaps worse than the article describes. In the SNF where I work, we use infection-control strategies for all our residents, not only the symptomatic ones. Yet upwards of 70% in my unit (my unit is the Covid unit; this is not facility-wide) tested positive for the virus last week. The previous week it had been 10-20%. When a worker has symptoms or tests positive, he/she stops coming to work. (So far, I am negative, thankfully.) But when a resident tests positive, what can we do? Sending them home is not an option (as I have discussed in an earlier blog posting, "sitting ducks".) SNF residents with their numerous comorbidities comprise by far the most vulnerable demographic. My facility is doing everything the NEJM article recommends: Restricting visitors and nonessential personnel from entering the building Universal use of face masks by all staff Strict screening of staff Beyond these, we do frequent hand-washing, use full PPE, and wipe with bleach our instruments between patients. Even so, nearly all the residents of my unit have caught the bug. In close quarters, it is indomitable. We are at the limit of what's possible. Yet the near-term outlook is poor. top   SNF musings April, 2020 -- I have had the good fortune to remain in contact with the best of my teachers from the various levels of my education. In grad school, among my most inspired and inspiring were Drs. Azad Bolour and Hyo Kim who, at UCSF, taught, respectively, databases (essential to my work to this day) and emergency medicine (that informed my stints as an ER nurse). They read my recent blog about SNFs and, unsurprisingly, had insightful (and, again, inspiring) responses. "I congratulate you for being so brave to volunteer your services to the emergency situation. You may want to describe more of your emotional response which maybe more compelling. Many medical professionals are having debate as to how much to sacrifice of yourself to help in this situation. One small misstep can ruin your own life and end everything. Let us keep updated as to your decision to proceed." So I have been thinking about that: what are my feelings regarding my SNF patients, an elderly population with numerous comorbid chronic conditions? What are my feelings about SNFs? And what about the risks I take in working in a Covid-19-ridden SNF? Read my diary if you're interested. top   Sitting ducks April, 2020 -- I am volunteer-nursing on a unit in a local SNF (skilled nursing facility). Nearly all our patients have tested postive for Covid-19. We caregivers do all we can to prevent the spread of the virus. We: Get tested regularly and cease work if we're positive. Use PPE (N95 masks, disposable gloves, face shields, hair nets, bootees, disposable gowns). Wipe down our equipment (blood pressure cuffs, thermometers, etc.) after each use. Change gloves between patients. Wash hands at every opportunity. Put a mask on anyone who has tested positive and on others when possible. Even so, the virus spreads. Like a fog it surrounds its carriers and settles everywhere. Calling it a fog is not quite accurate since the virus is droplet-borne not dry, but I find the mental image useful. A virus is DNA or RNA surrounded by a thin fatty shell that is easily dissolved by soap or solvents thus destroying it. The problem is that the "fog" settles everywhere. Washing and wiping cannot reach every place the virus lands. The CDC is well aware of the risks and has published guidelines to reduce them. Both patients and workers are at risk, me among them, and I worry. Eliminating visits from outsiders and group events are essential measures but they don't solve the underlying problem, people in close proximity. Not much can be done about that short of closing the facilities and sending everybody home. Even if that were an option, it would merely displace not solve the problem. Alas, there is no good solution. The best we can do is to continue to be careful and do what we're already doing. We'll be living with this virus for quite some time to come. top   Nursing plans dead April, 2020 -- A positive side effect of the coronavirus pandemic is the forced streamlining of healthcare procedures. Nurses in acute care facilities are permitted to omit the redundant and largely pointless step of creating nursing care plans. It's about time! These were largely duplicative of physician's orders. No one ever reads them. Nursing students are required to write them endlessly though it is well understood that the exercise is a waste of time. See, for example, Death to Nursing Care Plans! in the American Journal of Nursing. The entire industry needs to relinquish this obsolete practice. Thank the virus for rubbing our noses in the obvious. Go nurses. Go streamlined workflows! top   Informatics for pandemics March, 2020 -- You thought electronic health records were a technical detail, an obscure tool, an esoteric subspecialty on the periphery of modern health care? Think again. As Rapid Response to COVID-19:Health Informatics Support for Outbreak Management in an Academic Health System (get it here if that link is broken) from UCSD Health demonstrates, the EHR is central to confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an essential tool to: Support management of patients in a standardized way Enable immediate widespread distribution of information Track transmission in real-time Provide virtual venues for meetings and day-to-day operations Manage the inventory and distribution of essential supplies Offer telemedicine visits for patients Go nurses. Go nursing informatics! top   Coronawisdom March, 2020 -- Brilliant, recently-retired Kaiser intensivist Tricia Bell shares the following wisdom about our coronavirus miseries. The number of reported cases vastly underestimates the true prevalence in our population because the availability of testing is still far from adequate. The danger, therefore, will almost certainly increase over the next few weeks. Public health department recommendations tighten up significantly every 12-24 hours. Following exactly what they do or don't recommend today looks insufficient tomorrow. We should stay ahead of the curve to protect our entire community. This article explains the fallacy of the "it's not much worse than the flu" argument. This persuasive article is about the necessity of instituting social distancing ASAP. This article shows how the pattern of exponential spread has been virtually identical from country to country, except in places like Taiwan where they instituted tight restrictions early. This video interview with one of the intensive care specialists who is leading the efforts in Italy is both fascinating and terrifying. The coordination between hospitals and ICUs in Lombardy has been stunningly intelligent and rapid. We'd be lucky to do as well in the US. The message for us is that he sees enforcement of maximal social distancing as the only hope to avert total breakdown of the health care system. They have not been forced to ration ICU beds, ventilators, or personal protective equipment yet, but at the rate cases are rising, they could be in that position within a week. And Italy has more ICU beds per capita than we do. Wash your hands. Keep socially distant. Stay safe. We'll survive this one! top   Wrongheaded graph March, 2020 -- I have seen this graph copied and pasted into numerous web sites and emails about the coronavirus. It comes from the CDC. What is it attempting to tell us? The obvious message is, use protection (social distancing, hand washing, etc.) No one disagrees with that. But the graph itself is flawed and thus serves as little more than propaganda for the unwary. What are its flaws? Firstly, what are the axes? Time (horizontal) versus number of infections (vertical). But what are the units? We are not told. The time could be days or years; the graph is purposefully vague. This makes it useless in telling us what to expect. A deeper flaw is, with protection (the gray curve) we are supposed to see that the pandemic lasts longer but infects fewer each day. Why would it last longer? The implication is that the number of infections is somehow constant and, if we protect ourselves, it is spread out over a longer period of time and thus does not overwhelm our healthcare facilities, a worthy goal. But why should the number of infections be a constant? Indeed, if fewer transmissions occur, wouldn't that number be reduced? Isn't that the goal? I conclude that this graph is -- though not intentionally -- misleading and of little use. So stop copying and pasting it, folks! top   Corona no conference March 6, 2020 -- Today, a conference I'd planned to attend (LOINC at Regenstrief) was canceled for fear of coronavirus propagation. Is this a national -- worldwide! -- obsession? Probably. Were the organizers wise to cancel? Also, probably. The risk is tiny but if something untoward had occurred, the consequences would have been unacceptable. So I am disappointed but sympathetic. Turns out medical conferences are being canceled everywhere: Which Medical Conferences Are Being Canceled by Coronavirus? We mustn't put our caregivers at risk. top   Cruel bills February 4, 2020 -- Medical bankruptcies are once again growing in America. After brief respite under Obamacare, these horrendous calamities are on the rise. In Billing Quality Is Medical Quality, JAMA today writes, In a 2018 survey of 1513 patients with stage IV breast cancer, 50% reported that they had been contacted by debt collectors regarding a medical bill, suggesting their medical bills were significantly overdue. Imagine this: you're dying of cancer and being dunned, garnished, and sued, too. Do we blame the hospitals and health care institutions for egregious business practices? Not so fast. Some, says the article, are indeed heartless and cutthroat: At [some] institutions, some patients with private or no insurance receive bills with prices that exceed Medicare allowable amounts, and many patients who cannot pay may be subject to lawsuits to garnish their wages. However, it must be recognized that in our system, healthcare is a business like any other and can't survive if it can't collect payment. Indeed, many hospitals are themselves struggling financially. I place the blame elsewhere: on the duped public that does not support reforms that would (and, briefly, did) end these cruel practices, and on the cynical self-serving politicos who promote them. The current administration is step by step dismantling the protections we all deserve. If you vote for them, you'd better never get sick. top   Year of the nurse and midwife January, 2020 -- The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared 2020 the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife. The world needs 9 million more nurses and midwives if it is to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. A lofty goal! But it's an important -- no, a lifesaving -- one. Go nurses! top   Shopping around January 16, 2020 -- In Even With Hospital Price Lists, 'Shopping Around' Still Difficult, Medscape observes that, "despite a federal mandate that hospitals publish price lists, comparing prices among hospitals can be very confusing, and information remains limited". It's a mess. You just can't figure out what your health care is going to cost you. We have complained that this should be one of the functions of healthcare portals, and their failure to provide this service is one of the reasons portals suck. Evidently we are not alone in this. top   Ber- nie! January, 2020 -- American nurses, through our biggest union, National Nurses United (NNU), are steadfast in our endorsement of Bernie Sanders for the next President: Bonnie Castillo, executive director of NNU, said, "Nurses are beyond tired watching our patients suffer and die needlessly, simply due to inability to pay, and we know Bernie Sanders is and has been leading on Medicare for All through his advocacy and Senate legislation." If you vote for anyone else, you better never get sick. Go nurses! Go Bernie! top   The checklist is ten January 15, 2020 -- This year, we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the surgical checklist. Pioneered by Dr. Pronovost and by Dr. Gawande, these checklists are, according to the New York Times in an article today entitled Where Surgeons Don't Bother With Checklists, "[in rich countries, the checklist is] used in 90 percent of surgeries... studies showed the checklist reduced deaths by 24 percent and major complications by 60 percent." The article decries the relatively poor outcomes in poor countries in which checklists are used less. Even less-used in any country are nursing checklists. We have contended for nearly a decade that the quality and outcomes of nursing care, too, can and must be substantially improved through this simple technology. Over ten thousand nurses have agreed with us and downloaded our app, NurseMind. It knows what we need to get done during our shifts and when each task is due. It makes sure none are omitted and all are on time. Another such app was recently released, as announced on September 17, 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland -- UNITAR and partners launch new mobile application on WHO Surgical Safety Checklist. But it's for surgeons, not nurses. Are we nurses to remain the second-class citizens of health care technology? Not according to Nurse Tech, Inc.! We shall continue to advocate for the central role played by nurses in every sphere of health care, and for the technology that supports us. As we have said so many times before, go nurses! top   Portals suck December, 2019 -- In 2013, I blogged/griped about "patient portals". In the years since then, they have gotten a little better... not a lot. Why not? Because their design continues to be driven by financial not quality-of-care motives. It is not only me griping. See, for example, Meaningful Use of Health Information Is Meaningless For Patients (Chuck Dinerstein, 12/11/19, American Council on Science and Health, "Promoting science and debunking junk since 1978"): only 10% of patients use this access. Why so few? Patient portals (of which Epic's MyChart is among the best), serve the interests of the health care institution (HCI) not of the patient. They do offer features that patients like, such as: showing you your lab results which saves the HCI dealing with paper and routing documents; making your appointments online which saves the HCI man-hours, etc. Yes, patients do like these but they exist not for that reason but because they save money for the institution. There are plenty of other features that could be added to portals that patients would like. But it doesn't matter what patients would like. If a feature doesn't redound to the bottom line, it is not provided. Examples: I should be able to ask, what's this procedure going to cost me out-of-pocket, in actual dollars? I should be able to view the video from my colonoscopy (for example) online after the procedure is done. I should have access to the complete record of this (or any) procedure including MD's notes, start and end time, and the names of the providers involved and their roles. (This information is in the EHR; it's just not available to patients.) I should be able to enter, review and correct data from out-of-network sources, e.g. my childhood immunizations. I should be given links to reputable web resources, not just to the institution's rubber-stamp patient info brochures. But that would be expensive to maintain and wouldn't generate revenue so it's not provided. We'll get these things (if ever we do) only through legislation. Which is today being weakened not strengthened. So I still contend that portals suck. top   Nurses assess December, 2019 -- It is said that doctors diagnose and nurses assess. Indeed they do -- time after time, all shift long -- even better with our new nursing assessment tool. It's out! Following a two-year non-stop gestation, the NurseAssess app has been released. This represents a major milestone for Nurse Tech, Inc. This is a "soft" release; the big one will happen in a couple of months when integration with Epic is complete, a feature requested by every reviewer. Cerner and Meditech integration are not far behind. Ready to give it a try? Get it for your iOS/iPhone Get it for your Android phone And please let us know how it goes. At feedback@nurseassess.com. Was your experience with the app good? Suggestions for improvements? Here are answers to Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ). We are excited and proud! top   Another behemoth fails? December2019 -- This review is two years late but still relevant. Announced January 24, 2018, the the Apple Health app (that comes free with your iPhone) was given an "...updated Health Records section [to bring] together hospitals, clinics and the existing Health app to make it easy for consumers to see their available medical data from multiple providers..." The concept is good -- Apple attempts what Google Health attempted (and failed) -- to popularize a user-controlled repository for 1. locally- and 2. provider-generated health data. Access to the platform (iPhone) gives them a big advantage. They can collect things like sleep data from other apps, number of steps walked from the accelerometer, and so on. Google Health couldn't do that. The provider-generated part is a good idea but doesn't yet work well. I was able to connect to Labcorp and to Kaiser (where scraps of my medical data reside) because evidently both of them have invested the IT resources (not much but not zero) to build the FHIR interface. The list of providers that have done this is long but I surmise it's still a small minority of the providers in the US. Google Health had the same problem -- convincing third parties to make the investment. Many didn't. Perhaps it will take legislation -- the interoperability parts of ACA and HITECH, perhaps? -- to make this happen. Alas, my primary care provider, One Medical, has not done the programming so their data about me remains inaccessible. I have asked them to remedy this... Stay tuned. Does this demand fall within the mandate of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) which is responsible for advancing connectivity and interoperability of health information technology (health IT)? Section N (p.43) of Connecting Health and Care for the Nation, A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap calls for "Individuals [to] Have Access to Longitudinal Electronic Health Information, Can Contribute to that Information, and Can Direct It to Any Electronic Location". Might such locations include apps such as Apple Health? I think Apple is on the right track with this, in the sense that it does something that I (but not most others) find useful and interesting, and it will fail for the same reason Google Health did. That is, there is no compelling reason for most health care consumers to take the time that I took to enter demographics and to connect to third parties. (Instructions) It's only engaged, technophillic patients like me who will do this. In other words, not a market big enough for Apple. top   Rethinking nutrition December2019 -- The China Study, first published in 2005, is a bestseller and perhaps the most influential book about nutrition. It advocates a whole foods plant-based (WFPB) diet and the avoidance of animal-based foods for health and weight loss. This stance is based on the strongest dietary evidence to date: a 20-year research study with hundreds of thousands of subjects. Disease rates in Chinese counties are correlated with diet (animal-based and not). The conclusions are indisputable. The authors, T. Colin Campbell and his son, Thomas M. Campbell II have rocked the world of nutritional science. Adherents (Bill Clinton among them) are legion and I, too, have joined their ranks. Some side issues the Campbells raise: Modern science suffers from reductionism. In the case of nutritional science, the exclusive focus on micro-nutrients (e.g. are "carbs" good or bad? vitamins?) misses the point. They call it, "This mistake of characterizing whole foods by the health effects of specific nutrients... For example, the health effect of a hamburger cannot be simply attributed to... saturated fat... [that is] merely one ingredient. Even if you change the level of saturated fat, all of the other nutrients are still present and may have still have harmful effects on health." [p. 267] The way we study nutrition does not give us good guidance for how to eat. Studies by Western scientists have typically been based on groups that are too homogeneous to yield scientifically-valid results. There have been no control groups. For example, the Nurses Health Study (go nurses!), described by the Campbells as using the best experimental design (prospective cohort, i.e. following a group of people and recording diet information before disease events are diagnosed) is nonetheless fatally flawed, they say, by the homogeneity of the cohort -- all meat eaters. There is nothing to compare them to (no control group, i.e. plant eaters). Vegan and WFPB diets are not the same. "A vegan diet doesn't use foods of animal origin but can still include... processed foods, and is often high in fat, sugar, and salt, which compromise human health." [p. 240] Beware, fellow vegans! There is a political angle, too. The WFPB approach to health as opposed to traditional medicine's heroic procedures such as coronary bypasses and expensive medications "[threatens] the status quo by circumventing standard treatments... 'I'm making a freakin' fortune and you want to take it all away?'" [p. 324-325] Yes, we do want to take it away. For most chronic diseases (diet-caused), conventional medicine is a failure. The China Study demonstrates that there are better (and cheaper) ways to live, eat, and stay healthy. We need, they say, to make a "...radical shift in [our] thinking about food." [p. 238] We must relearn a lifetime of habits -- shopping, cooking, eating, feeding our loved ones, and the culture that drives all this. Read this book! Join the movement toward healthy eating! Book cover image courtesy of Wikipedia fair use, link. top   RN, heal thineself December, 2019 -- I am disheartened by the number of nurses who, though competent, compassionate and even inspired on the job, suffer from maladies and miseries from obesity and addiction to depression and burnout. What is it about this job that takes so much out of us? And what can we do about it? One solution is work/life coaching. I recently discovered (by chatting with her brother-in-law) Abby Sanchez, an Oregon RN. She offers a podcast (The Thriving Nurse -- I'm an enthusiastic subscriber), a web site (www.glowingnurse.com), and coaching -- you can make appointments for phone calls that, according to her testimonials, can be life-changing. I haven't yet tried those, but I have seen so many nurses whose lives do need change. Nurses, heal thineselves! top   Still volunteering October 16, 2019 -- As I have dozens of times before (see earlier blog postings e.g. PHC 62), today I worked a volunteer nursing shift for Project Homeless Connect. This was PHC's 75th such event -- quite a milestone! We continue to be proud of the good work we do and horrified that it continues to be necessary. Indeed, San Francisco's homeless population is growing. Here are a few statistics about what was accomplished today: 1,100 participants were served. In Nursing, we saw 75 of these. I personally triaged 14. And some stats (source: Applied Survey Research, 2019, SF Homeless Count and Survey) about SF's homeless population's self-reported health conditions: 42% alcohol and drug use 39% psychiatric/emotional conditions 37% post-traumatic stress disorder 31% chronic health problems 27% physical disability 15% traumatic brain injury HIV/AIDS related illness As always, I am saddened by the severity of the afflictions I see (a bad case of cellulitis, a bulging tumor, much drug addiction, HIV, scabies, mouth abscesses, drug injection site infections, kidney failure, psychoses, and much too much more) and heartened by the frequent cheerfulness of the sufferers despite the adversity they confront. Peoples' resilience is amazing. Governor Gavin Newsom is a big booster of this community service. When it was first started around 15 years ago, his involvement was pivotal. (Back then he was San Francisco's Mayor, one of the best we've had.) Do-good volunteer organizations like PHC will continue to be necessary as long as our country continues to be inhumane and exclusionary. America's social safety net is inexcusably inadequate. It's a sad state of affairs but we're doing what we can. Join us at the next one! top   Vegan works September 20, 2019 -- An article in today's Medscape -- Vegan Diet Alters Microbiome and Insulin Sensitivity, Drops Weight -- describes a study of vegan diet outcomes. The diet called for low-fat, calorie-unrestricted, no-animal-products (vegan) eating. The control group ate an everyday, non-vegan calorie-unrestricted diet. The outcomes: Weight loss of a pound a week, on average Beneficial changes in the gut microbiome Increased insulin sensitivity (diabetes reduction/prevention) The researchers write: "Eating a plant-based diet with ample fiber changes the gut microbiome composition for the better by feeding the right kind of bacteria... notably short-chain fatty acid producing Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, [which] deliver many metabolic benefits including weight loss, increased insulin sensitivity, and fat loss, including visceral fat loss." They caution (as they always do) that this evidence is not definitive and more study is needed before specific dietary recommendations can be made. But this is certainly support for the diet choices I've made (whole foods, plant based (WFPB)) and the outcomes I've observed in my own life (weight loss, resolution of prediabetes). Go vegans! top   Patient engagement September, 2019 -- "Patient engagement" is the buzzword du jour on healthcare technologists' lips. I have even attended conferences of which this was the title. Yet, it's not happening. It is disappointing that tools and resources such as Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault didn't catch on with the public. We consumers of health care products and services could not be convinced to take charge of our health data and decisions. Why not? In August 21, 2019 NEJM, A Taxonomy to Engage Patients: Objectives, Design, and Patient Activation the writers (from Harvard's Kennedy School) suggest that the poor quality of the tools constructed to date have prevented them from engaging patients and consumers. "designs... are not user-centered... and inattentive to users' needs." I have also blogged that "patient portals" suck. How can we fix this? The authors propose a three-part strategy: Give patients access to health information and data; Let patients produce and share their own health data; and Enable patients to connect with other patients, with their providers, and with research groups. On-line portals and communities do provide these capabilities but no single provider or site offers them all and none in a compelling way. The authors survey on-line health resources and describe how the successful ones succeed. We need, the authors posit, to "[focus] on objectives and [understand] patients' motivation to engage." Notable successes are "peer-to-peer platforms (e.g., MyHealth Teams and Breast Cancer Straight Talk Support Facebook Community) [that] engage large numbers of patients... [providing] information as well as emotional support." They observe that "...moderation is key... conversations [must be] carefully moderated to eliminate content that is inappropriate or not backed by scientific evidence as well as to maintain respectful interactions." Also essential is ease of access via popular platforms such as Facebook with web and mobile (smartphone) apps. What are the objectives of such sites and apps? The authors identify four: "Those that join patients... to health care providers;" "Those that connect patients to each other for support and peer advice;" "Those that make clinical information available to patients; and" "Those that [gather] data and ideas from patients... to advance research." These are good objectives but can they be achieved? Will they engage patients? For highly-motivated populations such as disease sufferers, this is already happening. But what about the general public? When, will the majority of consumers say, as Dave DeBronkart famously said, "Gimme my damn data!"? Alas -- given what I've seen of a passive public too readily accepting a paternalistic healthcare system and providers -- I remain skeptical. top   Linked In September, 2019 -- Social networking -- can't live with it, can't live without it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and more every day. So what is the busy professional to do? LinkedIn, of course! There, you're not bombarded by political screeds and worse. It's where people look for jobs and recruits, so everyone is on their professional best behavior. It's also where projects and products are announced... Ahem... Here is ours: be a NurseAssess beta tester. top   Afib July, 2019 -- A friend was recently diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. Afib is serious but not usually fatal. Here is what he needs to know, in a paper I wrote for nursing school many years ago. top   Goodbye Kaiser June 19, 2019 -- Yesterday I had my final appointment in the Kaiser HMO medical system. It was not serving my needs and, I argue, does not serve the needs of many of its members. In our too-brief-as-always meeting, my smart-but-doctrinaire MD Saruchi Tandon acknowledged that Kaiser is "conservative and evidence-based." She was half right. Kaiser is indeed conservative, in the sense that the status quo is maintained, whether or not it means good care. Medical decisions at Kaiser are decidedly not evidence-based. Rather, they are made by habit and tradition. For example, much could be done for sufferers of chronic conditions -- notably hypertension and diabetes -- but Kaiser persists in simply doling out pills (just like the rest of mainstream American healthcare) rather than curing. The evidence -- if only they would look at it -- shows that cures are often possible. I am living proof. Until a month ago, I had a diagnosis of prediabetes. My fasting blood glucose was measured at 107 mg/dL, exceeding the guideline of 99. A medically-supervised fast and lifestyle change to a plant-based diet have brought my blood glucose back down to a healthy level. (Today it is 84.) However, in my decades at Kaiser, I have never heard the words "plant-based" nor "fasting" uttered. Had I not taken matters into my own hands, Kaiser would have permitted my diabetes to worsen to the point of no longer being "pre-" and thus requiring a lifetime of Metformin and insulin and the ugly sequelae of that awful disease. Did Dr. Tandon ask me how I achieved my remarkable outcome? Nope. Not interested. In our meeting, I attempted to describe it. She changed the subject. Another example, equally anecdotal but equally relevant to my life, is my girlfriend, also a longtime Kaiser member. She has suffered from hypertension for much of her adult life. Kaiser gives her a handful of pills to take daily -- ACE inhibitors, beta blockers, diuretics, etc. Kaiser was guaranteeing that she would remain hypertensive for life. They don't cure, they "manage". Unbidden by Kaiser, she, too, has converted to a plant-based diet. We are seeing her blood pressure numbers drop and she is weaning herself off those pills. Like me, she has never heard anyone at Kaiser utter the words "plant-based". So I've decided -- after decades of Kaiser membership -- to ditch 'em. My girlfriend still drinks the Kool-Aid and is not yet ready to jump ship but soon she will see how much better medical care can be. I am switching to One Medical where health care providers are not limited to ten minutes, are not bound by tradition and habit, and health care is not delivered by an assembly line. Goodbye Kaiser! Hello health! top   HIMSS hype June 13, 2019 -- At the HIMSS Innovation Conference and Showcase in San Jose today, one of the speakers was Graham Grieve, called the father of FHIR (about which I have written before). Electronic Health Records are a young, immature technology. Often, clinicians hate them; technology should reduce workloads but has the opposite effect. As the technology matures, this and other problems will be solved. What will that solution look like? It's been predicted that the EHRs will eventually be relegated to data stores. They will evolve into backends that users won't experience directly. The parts that users will see will be apps, GUIs, and fine-tuned solutions created by third parties such as Nurse Tech. What will it take to make this happen? At today's conference, we're told, the answer is APIs. And the API of choice in healthcare is FHIR. Good marketing, Mr. Grieve. But not good talking. He emitted a stream of marketing buzzwords and we're-smarter-than-everybody-else cheerleading. Not much tech in the talk. This is what I'm learning to expect at HIMSS events: hype is the key to success. Thanks but no thanks. top   Not interested June, 2019 -- A few months ago, Microsoft announced that it would close its HealthVault service, effective Nov. 20, 2019. I have blogged about HealthVault before, e.g. here. It will follow Google Health (blogged here) down the ignominious path of project failure. But why these failures? I had predicted that patients would want access to (if not control of) their health data. Others had made similar demands. Yet, consumers remained resoundingly uninterested. A compelling case for us each to take charge (or at least acquire visibility) could not be made. No business model emerged. For me as a champion of empowered patients and the information must be free movement, this is a profound disappointment. Hey, patients! Get with it! top   Numbers June 5, 2019 -- Just a quick update on my progress here at TrueNorth: my numbers. Better than I could have hoped. And, after three weeks, I get to go home, a week earlier than planned. I love my flat belly! Weight down from 186 to 157 lbs. Woo hoo! Fasting blood glucose (my primary objective achieved: no more prediabetes!) from 107 mg/dL to 69 (above 99 is considered prediabetic.) Systolic blood pressure down by 20 mm/Hg to 107 and diastolic down by 15 to 73. Thrilled! I was never on any meds for any of these conditions but most of the others in attendance here were (and were sicker than I) and all of them leave med-free and with numbers like mine. This is no fad diet; it's the real deal. A lifetime of change. top   Break fast May 31, 2019 -- If I haven't yet bored you with my incessant blogging about my TrueNorth fasting experience, here's another one. We get a couple of lectures every day, mostly on medical topics. I've learned a lot and captured some of that here. Today I broke my fast (as planned) after eighteen days of water only. TrueNorth's protocol decrees a "refeeding" period of half the length of the fast so, for me, that will last nine days. They start us on light juices (breakfast: celery and raspberry -- yum!) and gradually lead us to solid foods and a "normal" diet... if you call SOS/vegan (vegan plus no salt, oil, or sugar) normal. Which it shall be henceforth... my new normal! How did it go? Evidently, my journey was easier than most people's. Common symptoms are nausea, lightheadedness, headaches, and other miserable stuff. I had none of those. During the first week, I did endure some back pain -- I've occasionally had that in daily life and fasting magnifies aches and pains temporarily. By the second week, it was gone. I've taken great joy in seeing the number on the scale dwindle. I've lost thirty pounds! I got my blood test results, too. I had been diagnosed with prediabetes. The healthy blood glucose range is 65 to 99 mg/dL. Mine had been 106. Today it's 69. I feel great! Want to overcome a chronic disease? Want to lose weight? This regimen -- and TrueNorth -- is highly recommended. top   It works! May 25, 2019 -- It's Day 12 of my water-only fast here at TrueNorth in Santa Rosa, California, and it's going so well that I have decided to extend it from the originally-planned 14 days to 18. Despite the naysayers -- and they are legion -- this procedure (and the lifestyle changes that follow) really work. I am already down more than 25 pounds, and I am certain that my prediabetes is being vanquished. (These were my two goals.) I am thrilled. And it's not just me. The woman in the room next to mine came here to get off her blood pressure medications -- she had been taking seven, including two diuretics -- and after only a week, she has achieved that. She is now normotensive, and she feels great. She fully expects never to take those pills again. Her story is not unusual; indeed it's business as usual here. The conversation we all have -- almost daily -- is, why is this not mainstream medical practice? The body's ability to heal itself so vastly outstrips what conventional medicine can achieve with pills and procedures, it's perhaps literally criminal that "modern" healthcare refuses to consider this modality. They offer a couple of lectures every day, and I've been learning a lot. Think about it... Read the evidence... Don't drink the kool-aid... Drink water! top   Get well May 21, 2019 -- Today I finished reading The Pleasure Trap (2003) by Doug Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, the "bible" of this place -- TrueNorth Health Center -- where I am undergoing a medically-supervised water-only fast with the intention (which I'm certain will be fully realized) of overcoming my pre-diabetes and losing 30 lbs. This book describes the philosophy that underlies what is done here. More than that, it offers a prescription for what ails so many Americans and eaters of the "western" diet worldwide. Here's the idea: Our bodies evolved for food that's different from what we eat today. We can process it but not well. So we are often sick and fat. The solution is to eat the right food (SOS/vegan). And the process of healing can be jump-started by water-only fasting. The body has remarkable abilities to heal itself -- far better than any medical care -- if only we let it. Applying this strategy has achieved astonishing -- almost unbelievable -- results. Yet, they are true and well-documented. So what is the "pleasure trap"? The book's subtitle is, "Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness." That force is human motivational mechanisms that drive us to seek food that, evolutionarily speaking, was rare and precious: calorie-dense foods. These foods are now abundant and we eat them in great quantities. Our bodies are equipped only for small amounts; mostly, we are geared for low-calorie-dense vegetables and fruits, not oils (a modern invention), meat and fish (infrequent in prehistoric diets), refined grains (another modern invention), added salt and sugar (absent in food until recently), and the like. Thus, our instincts no longer drive us to do what's best for us. The book teaches us about this trap and how to avoid it. Once we get the message, many chronic diseases -- increasingly endemic in modern life -- will be overcome. The forces arrayed against this potential revolution in health recovery are numerous and powerful. It challenges the dogma in our culture that protein from meat has the highest quality, essential for nutrition; and that calcium for strong bones comes from milk and dairy. It threatens the makers of the food that makes us sick: meat and dairy industries, food processors (most processed foods are too calorie-dense and laden with fat and salt). Also threatened is the medical establishment protecting its hegemony and coming from a mindset that cures can result only from "doing something" -- a pill or a procedure. Fasting, by contrast, is essentially doing nothing; get out of the way, let some time pass, and watch what happens. The results are nearly miraculous and should be standard practice. Take heed, America! Take heed, world! You have only your health to regain! top   Allopaths 'r us May, 2019 -- Practitioners of alternative medicine like to refer to their conventional counterparts (MDs) as practitioners of allopathic medicine. I've never seen this word used in another context and believe it smacks of disdain. There is also disdain for those who use this word. Dr. Kimball Atwood IV writes in Medscape General Medicine Naturopathy, Pseudoscience, and Medicine: Myths and Fallacies vs Truth (2004): There is no such thing as "allopathic" medicine, a pejorative term coined by the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann. Those who use it to describe modern medicine only betray their ignorance. [emphasis mine] ...Hahnemann meant by "allopathic medicine" -- the prescientific, highly toxic practices of bloodletting, purging, scalding, etc., based on the "four humours". So the naturopaths and osteopaths look down their noses at the people they call allopaths. The MDs ("allopaths") give little credence to the so-called sciences of naturopathy, homeopathy, and other "complementary and alternative medicines" (CAMs). Each defends their turf. I guess it's clear which side I'm on. Practice must be substantiated by evidence. In other words, science. Call that allopathy if you like... It's just a word, a word that reveals your bias, a bias I don't share. top   Going fast May 16, 2019 -- "How long are you in for?" The question is like the one inmates ask each other. Here at True North Health (TNH), though, it means, how long is your fast? Mine is 14 days, followed by 7 days of "refeeding". During the fast, I get only water. Refeeding (I wish they'd come up with a better name) starts gently with light fruit juices for a couple of days, then stronger ones, then a little light solid food, and so on. True North is a comfortable place. The rooms are well-appointed. Everyone is friendly. There are classes (yoga, stretching, mind/body, meditation) and lectures (mostly medical topics). Between these things, there is lots of free time. I brought my laptop and plenty of work so I am keeping busy. I am treating this as a working vacation. It's a vacation with some benefits: health, weight loss, education, and lifestyle change. I am also participating in a research study. I am one of a few dozen subjects selected per strict criteria. Blood test data is collected, as well as body measurements. The exact goal of inquiry is unknown to me, as it should be. It's a double-blind, controlled, randomized clinical trial. Of course, not eating for 14 days (or whatever duration you choose; the upper limit is 40 days) is not easy. I am in my fourth day now and so far have experienced no ill effects except hunger, that is surprisingly mild and fleeting. I love getting on the scale each morning and seeing another pound or two gone! Our fasts are medically supervised. Blood is drawn and analyzed. Urinalyses, too, are done. Twice a day our vital signs are checked (pulse, blood pressure, temperature) and a physician checks on us and reviews our progress. The process is remarkably pleasant. And it has real science supporting it (more about that in a future blog.) Why fast? The health benefits are numerous and well-documented. Some, like me, come here for a tune-up and weight loss. I was recently diagnosed with prediabetes -- at 106 mg/dL I am just over the recommended maximum of 100 -- as is half the adult population of America. But just because it's normal doesn't mean it's good. As a nurse, I have seen what diabetes does and I intend to go nowhere near it! Some come here with more serious diagnoses. One of the most dire is lymphoma (cancer of the blood) and TNH has actually resolved this. Another is multiple sclerosis (MS). Along with rheumatoid arthritis and many more auto-immune diseases, MS can be cured by fasting and diet change. So can hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and many more. People come to TNH for all kinds of reasons. In its 35 years of operation, 20,000 people have fasted here. All have benefited hugely. There has not been a single death. It's a remarkable track record. As a medical professional, I know that we're not supposed to say something is cured; we must say (especially regarding chronic diseases) that it's managed. But that's the problem: allopathic medicine (as these alternative medicine folks like to call it) doesn't cure. Well, that's not true; it has has had tremendous successes with bacterial diseases, genetics, immunization, surgery, orthopedics, and many more. But still... Given TNH's record of accomplishment, one can only wonder, why is this not mainstream? Theories abound. Their essence appears to be resistance to change (by the medical establishment) and threats to sales (by the pharmaceutical, meat, dairy, and refined grains industries). Indeed, one of my best buddies, an MD, became enraged when I extolled the health benefits of fasting and the vegan/SOS (no salt/oil/sugar) diet. There's no science behind it, he said. (There is; numerous studies support this.) The people who sell this are quacks, he said. (They're not; they have done substantial research and publishing in peer-reviewed journals.) And the best evidence: the thousands of folks who have gotten off their meds and had their quality of life -- if not their life itself -- restored are proof to the contrary. Fat and sick? This is the place for you. top   Free radical May 13, 2019 -- I am undergoing a two-week, medically-supervised, water-only fast (about which I will blog soon) at True North Health Foundation's residential treatment facility in Santa Rosa, California. True North's founder is the remarkable Alan Goldhamer, DC. I have attended his lectures, read one of his books, watched his videos, and chatted with him over an SOS-vegan dinner. The work he does is radical and has hugely impacted the lives of the 20,000 people who, like me, have fasted at True North to maximize and regain our health. His institution runs smoothly, is remarkably affordable, and achieves health results that are nothing short of miraculous. Until you study the science... Then it's obvious and inevitable. About that, I'll blog later. Goldhamer confronts (and often antagonizes) the medical establishment and food industries, both of whom are contributing to (or at best not curing) growing nation- and world-wide epidemics of diabetes, hypertension, and auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. It is a battle that will be won -- people want health! -- but the struggle is uphill and we have a long way to go. He has been waging this war for forty years. During this journey -- which demands repeated explaining and convincing -- he has come to repeat certain phrases so often that he now utters them in a hasty blur of syllables, almost as if they were a single word: Of typical Western food, he says, "We must stop eating that greasy-fatty-slimy-diet of dead-decaying-flesh." The rare physicians who, instead of prescribing lifetimes of pills that "manage" not cure, dare to promote fasting interventions and lifestyle changes that actually help patients get well, he calls, "Doctors who want to do something worthwhile with their lives: heal their patients." Goldhamer does not mince words. top   Nurse informaticians 'r us! April 13, 2019 -- Today is the last day of yet another superb conference (the 19th) of the American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA). I always learn so much and meet people who inspire! The photo is a selfie with a nurse hero, Diane Humbrecht DNP RN-BC, past president of ANIA and now CNIO (wow!) at Virginia Mason Medical Center (double wow!) in Buckley, Washington. Diane has done much to advance the field of nursing informatics both professionally and academically. One of those inspiring ones! There is much to blog about. F'rinstance: Lots of work on alarm fatigue. Big data! Lots of talk... but who really "gets" it? Real-time, point-of-care documentation... Hey, this is what I'm building with NurseAssess! How do we pave the way for the next generation of nurse informaticians? Is it just me or do I observe that most of us at this conference are in our 60s? Where is the fresh, new energy? Patient engagement... We know that involving patients in their own care yields better outcomes. But why is it so hard to do? Why don't they use the so-called portals the provider organizations build and tout? Because portals suck! But that's a topic for another screed... er, blog... Stay tuned! And join us at ANIA #20 next year in Chicago! top   EHR report card March 18, 2019 -- In this excellent article, Death by 1,000 clicks: where the electronic health records went wrong, Fred Schulte and Erika Fry of Fortune magazine and Kaiser Health News (an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Health Foundation) give us a thorough look at the status of EHRs today, especially in light of the strong financial push they got from Obama's stimulus package. Most hospitals and many doctor's offices have them now. How's it going? Were they a good idea? Well, yes and no. There is much we could have done better. For example, George W. Bush's healthcare tech czar David Brailer said, "HITECH should have spent its $30 billion on standards, interoperability, a "Geek Squad" to help with training and implementation, and creating a cloud-based 'medical Internet'." He's right. We were naive. 20/20 hindsight! Here are some of the main issues discussed in the article. In some cases, EHRs have actually caused patient harm. Software glitches, user errors, and system flaws have caused orders to be lost, erroneous diagnoses and prescriptions, and many more. Deaths, serious injuries, and near misses have resulted. EHRs facilitate "upcoding", the practice of overcharging by changing billing codes to more expensive ones. This is, of course, fraud. Settling such allegations has costed vendors more than $200 million. Interoperability -- the ability to exchange data among EHRs so patient records could be shared with doctors and hospitals anywhere in the country -- is a promise that remains largely unmet. Doctors (and nurses!) are burning out. Now they must spend so much of their time clicking menus and typing -- up to half of their working hours, by some estimates -- that the frustration from not instead spending this time with patients has caused many to quit. This is termed by some to be a healthcare crisis. The EHR vendors routinely contractually obligate their customers to withhold information about product and system failures. These "gag clauses" hinder public scrutiny of safety issues and failed software installations. My opinion: EHRs are harder to do than we thought, and our early efforts are more painful than we expected. It's a new technology, still in its infancy. It will be decades before it's seamless. But let's not give up! top   Paying for Medicare for All March, 2019 -- Medicare for All (M4A) -- great idea, right? But how do we pay for it? Here is an Economic Analysis of Medicare for All by an authoritative group including Don Berwick, former head of CMS. It has plenty of opponents. At the heart of every right-wing position is opposition to taxes. That's why they hated the ACA; it had new taxes for the wealthy (though they pretended to have other reasons; the greed exposed by the truth would have been too obvious). They hate M4A because it includes a net worth tax. That will hit rich people hardest. It also proposes to abolish capital gains taxes, taxing them as ordinary income. It's the right thing to do. But they'll fight it as they always have. One thing I would change is continuing to tie health coverage to employment. I think people should buy their own healthcare (even if that means paying into M4A) instead of getting it from their jobs. What employers spend on healthcare should instead go into paychecks. I also oppose funding M4A with a sales tax; such taxes are regressive. Read it yourself. See whether you agree. top   Bad behavior points February 20, 2019 -- Should we forgive the Virginia Governor's youthful bad behavior? The answer is spelled out in this article in Medscape by Dr. Arthur Caplan. It boils down to, "No!" It's especially serious given the special faith placed in medical people, says Caplan. (Governor Northam is also a pediatrician and neurosurgeon.) I am troubled by the inflexibility of this zero-tolerance approach. I remain convinced that Al Franken's treatment was too harsh. So I propose a more nuanced method for dealing with bad behavior by public figures. It's a point system. Get 20 points and you're out. Rape is 30 points. Off-color jokes (in settings other than bars and such) get 5 points. Overt racism, 10. Unwanted touching, 8. Your points are diminished by 1 for every 3 years that have elapsed since the act in question. We could debate what the right numbers are, and the list of transgressive acts, but the concept seems useful. Could we get it added to the code of conduct of the US Congress? The political parties? top   No vax? Die! February 5, 2019 -- "Measles: Will It Take a Death to Get Kids Vaccinated?" Dr. Paul Offit asks in this article. He writes, "Invariably it's children who suffer our ignorance, and it is unconscionable." Nurse hero Terri Olson writes: This is a perfect example of what happens when people fail to listen to FACTS. You cannot make health decisions by listening to anecdotes on the internet. This happens primarily in the more affluent communities where parents spend more time on the internet and think they have more leverage to make decisions they are not equipped to make about their children's health. My experience was that most of the immigrant moms raced their kids into the clinic to have them properly vaccinated and viewed it as almost a luxury. Sadly, with the loss of regard for FACTS, we will have more issues such as this. top   Still turkeys December 29, 2018 -- In an earlier blog the joke was that folks opposing the ACA were like British turkeys voting for Christmas. (In the UK, the traditional Christmas dinner is turkey.) They're still turkeys! In an op-ed (Everyone Gets Sick) in today's NYT, California Senator Kamala Harris (whom I hope to help elect president in 2020) lists the folks who will suffer as a result of a partisan Texas judge striking down Obama's landmark legislation: People with "pre-existing conditions" could once again be denied coverage. Insurance companies would once again be allowed to discriminate based on age and gender. People in their mid-20s would get kicked off their parents' plans. Lifetime coverage caps could come back. Out-of-pocket costs would no longer be capped. The expansion of Medicaid in dozens of states could be reversed. More than 50 million Americans could be rejected for coverage by health insurers. 20,000 to 100,000 people could die each year due to decreased healthcare coverage. Surely an awful lot of these folks vote Republican. When will the turkeys stop voting for Christmas? top   Nursing orders October, 2018 -- Doctors order things all the time -- diagnostics, medications, treatments -- and so do nurses, within their scope of practice, of course. But we don't call them nurses' orders, observes nationally recognized Electronic Health Records expert and industry thought leader Ann Farrell, BSN. Instead, we call them care plans. This is a problem. For one thing, hospitals cannot charge for them, weakening nursing's political and organizational influence. Also, nursing care plans are not tracked well -- though nursing care is essential to value based pricing (VBP) which ties revenue and penalties to outcomes. And of course outcomes are dependent on, more than anything else, nursing care. Ms. Farrell writes [personal communication]: Do we REALLY know which are key OBSERVATIONS (we forget this when replacing RNs with lesser educated and experienced staff) and interventions RNS do that impacts outcomes? Hospitals want the cheapest staff possible which makes nursing vulnerable. A set of MD's orders is an "order set", and a set of RN (and therapist) orders is a "care plan". Together, they provide an "integrated plan of care" which brings together the entire care team, and should increase stature of nursing role. Alas, nurses are considered "task masters" -- following MD orders. People don't understand the role nursing has in CREATING part of the plan of care. People think of RNs "passing meds" as if there were not a critical thinking process. The MD order may be perfect when it's written but patient status changes from moment to moment. EVERY TIME an RN administers a med they evaluate its appropriateness. People think it's just an assembly line from drug cart to patient, RN role "transport". NO ONE has been able to explain what nurses DO! [We also] lack a common "framework" or terminology to guide profession and industry... it's painful to reflect on the damage to nursing due to lack of data (and leadership) to support what value [we] bring. The words we use to describe nursing's contribution denigrate it. By continuing to undervalue the role of nursing, we deliver health care that's not as good as it could be. What's needed, says Farrell, is deeper thinking by our nurse leaders and less simplification of complex issues. Nurses must participate more fully in technology design and deployment decisions. We nurses have largely abdicated those responsibilities. For our jobs and our patients, this must change. In a time of tremendous economic pressures and disruptive technologies, Farrell's is a rare voice of reason. top   Sugar = poison Aug. 21, 2018 -- We've known for decades that sweets are bad for us. The evidence continues to mount and today Medscape has published The Case Against Sugar: It took more than 40 years from the publication of studies that pointed to the dangers of smoking cigarettes to begin to rein in the tobacco industry and reduce cigarette smoking among the public. Now, we are seeing similarities with the sugar industry, which is wreaking havoc on public health by influencing both science and public opinion. Here is what we must do: Educate the public. Ban sugar promotion at sporting events. Ban sugar product promotion in grocery stores. Tax sugar-sweetened products. Ban sugar product advertising. End food subsidies. Ensure that dietary advice is independent of bias. Separate diet and exercise goals. It will take time, but the payoff will be better health for Americans. top   Another nurse hero June, 2018 -- I first met Suzanne Bakken when she was on the faculty at my alma mater UCSF, perhaps fifteen years ago. She taught the only informatics course in the School of Nursing, and there hasn't been another one since she left. As I have blogged before, this is a grievous omission. A few years ago, I reached out to the Dean (who shall remain nameless) and proposed a modest informatics curriculum. No interest. Su, we need you back! But we surely won't get her back, and for good reason. She went to Columbia in New York City where she is now a full professor and publishing mightily as always. I applied to Columbia (MSN program) a decade ago, was accepted, and almost followed her there... but I decided not to abandon my family in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, Su has been super-productive, most recently becoming Editor-in-Chief of JAMIA, AMIA’s flagship informatics journal (read the press release). It's great to see nurses breaking through that glass ceiling. Go Su! top   EHR market shares June, 2018 -- I have blogged about Epic before -- the 800-pound gorilla in the EHR marketplace -- but there are a couple of others -- Cerner and Meditech -- snapping at its heels. top   Reboot education June 2, 2018 -- Attending my alma mater UCSF's annual Alumni Weekend today, I heard a fascinating talk by the acclaimed Dr. Eric Topol, named the most influential physician executive in the United States. In his wide-ranging talk, Dr. Topol touted some amazing new devices available (or soon to be available) to consumers including a continuous blood pressure monitoring wristwatch, a non-invasive blood glucose monitor, an EKG watch with more accurate readings than most cardiologists, and so on. The technology of health care is changing fast, he told us, and the role of the clinician is changing from that of data gatherer to that of data interpreter. Thanks to artificial intelligence, it will soon be more important for doctors to be good communicators than "brainiacs" (expert diagnosticians). How do we get there? "Reboot education," he says. Among other radical changes, this means teaching more about technology. My own nursing school experience -- not so long ago -- confirms this. We had not a single lecture on, for example, the topic of the electronic health record (EHR) let alone an entire class... Despite the fact that nurses quite literally spend more time in front of the computer than in front of the patient. Reboot education indeed! top   Gun research April 10, 2018 -- Gun violence is a public health issue. It should be studied. Perhaps research can suggest solutions. The Dickey Amendment prevents the federal government from doing this... scoring a bullseye for the gun lobby. Why suppress research? The reason is obvious: the gun industry knows it would reveal what they don't want revealed. But today Kaiser has stepped in, with an ambitious plan to research gun violence (Washington Post). Thousands of Kaiser patients must be treated each year for gunshot wounds. "We should be thinking about this problem and studying interventions for it in the same way we study heart disease or diabetes or any other leading cause of death." Go Kaiser! top   Epic Mecca December 28, 2017 -- Today I went to Mecca. (Click image for full size.) Well, not exactly Mecca, but certainly the center of universe of EHRs (electronic health records) -- the opulent corporate headquarters of Epic in Verona, Wisconsin. (I have blogged about Epic before.) It is by far the leading vendor of these systems, with the largest market share and growing. The EHR (formerly EMR, electronic medical record) is a passion of mine. I built one back in 1980-1983 as my Master's thesis when I was in graduate school at UCSF. It was a real one and was even briefly in live service in UCSF's outpatient dermatology clinic. (I had this access because my thesis advisor, the reverently-remembered Dr. Marsden Scott Blois, was a practicing physician in that clinic... And HIPAA did not yet exist.) Its name was Encounter Data System (EDS) because its function was to capture and report information about patient encounters: demographics, diagnoses, procedures performed. It was written in C, ran on a Digital Equipment Corp. VAX computer running Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix, with a UC Berkeley-developed database named Ingres (that "spoke" not SQL but Quel, a predecessor) as its backend (data storage and retrieval). It really worked. I suppose I could have made a career of it; Judith Faulkner (the sole owner of privately-held Epic and now one of the richest women in the world) certainly did. Alas, being too early is just as fatal as being too late. I mean no sour grapes to Ms. Faulkner nor to her company; their product is in many ways brilliant and their success is well-earned. And -- as I saw today -- the offices that success can build are spectacular indeed. Click the thumbnail image to see it full size: yours truly at the head of an Epic Boardroom table. top   Not Documented Not Done January, 2018 -- "If it wasn't documented, it wasn't done." We nurses have had this drummed into us. Seems logical, right? Our coworkers need to know what care has been delivered (or not delivered) and the lawyers do, too. Or do they? It's counterproductive! We waste so much time in front of the computer. For example, why document hand-washing? There are only three reasons to document in healthcare, and CYA isn't one of them. The three reasons are: It is meaningful for patient care. It is necessary for regulatory requirements. It is needed for billing. As EHRs mature and begin to support -- not impede -- nursing workflow, dogmas such as this one are at last being abandoned. Cartoon by Charles Keller (Dan's Dad) top   Healthcare Econ 101 January, 2018 -- It is well understood that our health care system is expensive and dysfunctional. We pay too much and, in terms of outcomes, get too little, especially by comparison to other countries. Why? Here are a few of the basic economic principles at work in our health care system. Principle #1: Follow the money. Financial rewards are the primary motivator -- indeed the raison d'être -- of every business, and in the United States health care is a business. But here is the problem, as stated in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2003: "The United States alone [among wealthy countries] treats health care as a commodity to be distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a social service to be distributed according to medical need." Principle #2: Regulate. I am as much a capitalist as the next guy and am clear that business is what makes our high standard of living, but it must be regulated. Well regulated. Such regulation must enforce basic human rights including the right to health care. Leaving people without health care, medical bankruptcies, exclusion for pre-existing conditions and so on, are travesties and should not be permitted. Principle #3: Payment models matter. In an ideal system, providers are rewarded for outcomes. There are some incentives for this in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and in Medicare including patient satisfaction surveys that have been made a factor in hospital reimbursement by government. However, the predominant models are driven neither by outcomes nor by quality. Principle #4: What is rewarded increases. A traditional model is fee-for-service. The result is, of course, more service. (This was discussed in my blog post Doctors as Businessmen.) Another common model is capitation -- a provider network is reimbursed a fixed amount for each patient. So the result is more patients. In capitation models, the scramble is for market share. In any model, the physician says, when the patient is in front of me, he is the most important person. After he leaves, the most important person is the payer. The intersection of healthcare and economics, alas, will always be an uneasy one. Cartoon by Charles Keller (Dan's Dad) top   Nursing the system November, 2017 -- There is a new role for nurses: the Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL). Well, relatively new; certification for this job role began only ten years ago. It comes with some new vocabulary. For example, a microsystem is a hospital unit. Here are a couple of fascinating Medscape articles by Linda Borns: The Clinical Nurse Leader Role, and A Day in the Life of a Clinical Nurse Leader. Ms Borns' microsystem is a 24-bed medical telemetry/oncology unit. Her work there demonstrably improves outcomes and reduces costs. Wikipedia defines the CNL as a healthcare systems specialist. The idea of applying systems approaches to healthcare delivery is a good one, and timely. top   Choke it down June, 2017 -- Call something a conspiracy theory and you stack the deck. But with Big Pharma, the conspiracy is real. To nurses, the evidence is stark. We see that our primary function often is merely the administration of "meds". This is how we manage chronic diseases, which for many of us comprise the bulk of our patients' conditions. Very little of our work is prevention. Rather, we dole out pills and drive a trillion-dollar industry. It is also driven by a powerful lobby. Notably, Big Pharma wooed the Bush administration who gave us Medicare Part D that both bolstered pharmaceutical sales with tax dollars and outlawed discounting to the federal government, Big Pharma's biggest customer. This made a gaggle of these lobbyists rich and a profitable industry more profitable than ever. My opinion of Trump is low but I do agree with his statement that drug prices must come down. Let's see whether he delivers. Let's take things a step further and redesign our healthcare system to be more than a drug-selling machine. We nurses need to be more than pill-dispensing servants. Hey nurses, remember that oath we swore the day we got pinned? Our work is to benefit our patients, not to enrich an industry. top   Kaiser Ed May 2, 2017 -- I am a Kaiser patient (a "member"). Recently diagnosed with pre-diabetes, I signed up for a class on this topic. Presumably, Kaiser's goal in offering such classes is lifestyle modification. The benefits would be enormous, both for Kaiser's bottom line and, even more importantly, for the health and quality of life of its patients -- people like me. Yesterday, I attended the class. What I learned is that health education at Kaiser is merely a formality, and is unlikely to achieve any positive outcomes. This is clearly a missed opportunity. In this essay, I propose some remedial actions that could be taken at Kaiser, and suggest that the payoff -- both to the organization and to its patient members -- would be immense. Cartoon by Charles Keller (Dan's Dad) top   Never events April, 2017 -- What's a "never event"? It's one that should never happen, a failure by a caregiver or organization, technically termed a serious reportable event. The National Quality Forum calls itself "...a not-for-profit, nonpartisan, membership-based organization that works to catalyze improvements in healthcare" and it identifies 29 never events. Of particular interest to med-surg nurses -- considered important measures of quality (or lack thereof) -- are falls (4E in the above-linked document) and bedsores (4F). Fascinating reading! top   Reconciling April 10, 2017 -- Reconciling the meds (that is, answering the question, what is the patient taking?) is one of the maddening, time-consuming, excessively-repeated tasks nurses must do and rarely get right. My friend Claire writes: I have been an inpatient in 4 institutions in the last 6 months, and the quality of care varies wildly. I take several meds in the morning and several in the evening. I take pain meds PRN 3-4 times per day. But I also have two glaucoma drops, a shot for bone density, and inhaler, and a few OTC meds, and they started me on vitamins and iron because I was anemic. I always bring my own meds because I know that they will not have them all for at least 3 days. I surrender my meds to the pharmacy and then they dole them out to me. In hospitals it's a giant pain in the ass to dispense even an aspirin. The problem there was always just getting the meds at all. At the rehab place, where I was an inpatient a much longer time, I had to insist that they put each med in a separate cup, labeled. They still left out half the meds and/or gave me the wrong dose most of the time. I was able to insist that they do it right even if it took 3 trips back and forth. Now just imagine I was one of the typical elderly patients there. If they are members of our parents' generation, they ask no questions, and many people don't know what meds they take or what they are for. It won't happen to me because I am on the ball. But most inpatients aren't! They trust that they will be given the right meds at the right time, the right dose. My experience was that only by the third week did they finally deliver the right thing. It took two weeks of doing it wrong before they learned. I was also there for 5 weeks in Oct/Nov, and in order to get cooperation on giving me the right drugs, I had to email upper management. Shame on us! top   High reliability April, 2017 -- Another fascinating talk at ANIA 2017 was Amy Edmondson, “Managing the Risk of Learning: Psychological Safety in Work Teams”. She, too, offered an interesting metaphor: when you get on a plane, you don’t do it saying, “This will be a good flight because Jane Smith is at the controls.” Yet, we do that in health care. Unlike when we fly, we don’t assume that the care team is thoroughly trained and expert in delivering the best-researched and best-engineered standard of care. Aviation has known for decades that it is a team — not a heroic individual — that makes it safe. In healthcare, by contrast, we often say things like, “I had the world’s expert in [disease X — my disease] treating me.” The implication is that another provider would have delivered inferior care, and that there are not standards for consistently delivering best practices. This is changing. We are starting to talk about making health care organizations be HROs: High Reliability Organizations. One standards body addressing this is the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) that is working on, among other things, the five components of safety culture (see p.477). One such component is psychological safety: no penalties for errors nor for asking for help nor for providing feedback. These are essential for an O to be an HRO. It is more emotionally satisfying to praise (or blame) people than systems. This is one of many habits we in healthcare must overcome. top   Comms metaphor April, 2017 -- At last week’s ANIA 2017 conference in New Orleans, one of many fascinating presentations I attended was “Scalable Communication Strategy” by Rhonda Collins, CNO of Vocera and a colleague of my friend Kathy English (VP of Global Marketing). Ms. Collins offered an interesting metaphor for the structure of communications systems: the mobile device is UPS or the postal service; it just delivers. The EHR and other HISs are Amazon; they supply the full spectrum of “products” users consume. Connecting these two is the “fulfillment company” (such as Vocera) that packages and ships what’s been “ordered”. Useful metaphor! Another interesting observation she made: NO technology is inherently HIPAA-compliant. No matter how water-tight a system has been engineered, misuse can create security leaks. Ultimately, it’s the users who are responsible. She also said, “Just say no to Big Bang. Instead, use rolling adoption. For example, start in the ED and then roll it out unit by unit to the rest of the hospital. Each must commit to change, maintenance, upgrades, education and support.” She recommends a shared governance strategy. “Plan and implement your communications strategy as carefully as you do your EHR strategy.” Words for the wise. top   Pleading the fifth February 28, 2017 -- How do you know your patient is in pain? "He/she says so." How much pain? "He/she tells you a number from zero to ten." This is what we are taught in nursing school -- the "fifth vital sign" -- and it is an article of faith. However, it is fraught with issues, not the least of them that it has legal repercussions, providing the foundation for lawsuits and in some cases substantial penalties. But is it a reliable indicator? Not much, says Diane M. Goodman in The Pitfalls of Pain Scales in this month's Medscape. This is a fascinating read, and an important issue for nursing and quality of care. top   Synapse firing October, 2014 -- Whoops! I forgot to toot my own horn! Here is a link to an interview from three years ago. The publication is UCSF's Synapse. The topic is NurseMind and Nurse Tech, Inc. Better late than never? NurseMind App Keeps Busy Nurses On Target. top   Gold standard January, 2017 -- When doing medical research online, professionals do not use Google and Yahoo. Anybody can write anything on the Web. Much of that is bunk. Instead, base medical decisions on the gold standard: controlled, randomized, double-blind clinical trials. Official sources: Cinahl, PubMed, and Medline. These are vast databases. In them resides the most authoritative medical and nursing data. To search in them, use MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), a system maintained by the National Library of Medicine, a limb of the National Institutes of Health and (ahem) the source of some funding for my advanced degree. Do your search using MeSH terms. Here is an example of MeSH terms from my own specialty, medical informatics. One way to select MeSH terms is with the MeSH Browser and with the MeSH on Demand service. Best of success to you in your search! top   Data for sale January 20, 2017 -- Our medical data is valuable and is bought and sold without our permission or even our knowledge. Many people are worried. About this, Adam Tanner has written Our Bodies, Our Data. He says (in an interview with Reveal) that people would be "creeped out" if they knew. My own feelings on the topic are mixed. It is true that certain types of medical information -- substance abuse history, sexual history, psych history, HIV status -- are very private and should indeed be protected. Other kinds of information, e.g. info that might influence an insurance carrier's decision, should also be protected, at least from that kind of user. However, some data mining, e.g. population health and epidemiological studies, are beneficial and should be permitted. Most of my own medical data I don't care who sees. You want to look at an x-ray of my broken arm? Go for it. You want to know when I had a flu shot? Knock yourself out. We are excessively protective of much of this data, and it creates obstacles to care that are unnecessary. With a little education, the knee-jerk instinct to hide it unconditionally could be relaxed. On the other hand, I do think that the uses of this data should be more transparent. Some of the uses, e.g. marketing data for drug manufacturers and retailers, should be tightly regulated and consumers should be able to find out about it if they want to. top   Quandary solved January, 2017 -- RoseAnn DeMoro bills herself (on Twitter) as Social Change and Activist for Life and is the Executive Director of National Nurses United, the largest American organization of nurses. She offers the Republicans a solution to the quandary in which they find themselves, having vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act but having nothing with which to replace it. "Medicare for all," she proposes, following in the footsteps of would-be presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who was himself not the first to propose this. Whatever its provenance, it is an excellent idea. In effect, it would eliminate the insurance company middlemen (parasites, I call them, as they add to the cost but not to the value of health care) and would move us to a single-payer system. This would yield numerous benefits, including the bargaining power to hold costs down and to establish enforceable standards of care. Is this not that what Mr. Trump promised (in words with fewer syllables)? Even so, it is not a quick fix, requiring much careful planning and considerable complex language. How would it be paid for? What should businesses do with the money they would no longer need to spend on health insurance for their employees? Numerous questions arise, all of which can be solved. Radical though this proposal may be, the Repugs should embrace it as it enables them to keep the absurd promise they made. Everybody wins! Go nurses! top   Nurse, Advocate January, 2017 -- Nurses are not known for being articulate. Other skills are more relevant to the job. In nursing school, my writing skills were not recognized nor, indeed, of much use in nursing work. Instead, what is respected is competence and, most of all, expertise. The downside is that competent and expert nurses sometimes do not express themselves well. Nurses are wonderful advocates for patients but poor ones for themselves. The following brief treatise in defense of nurses (especially in light of strikes and other conflicts with management) is the words nurses might not find to speak or write but nonetheless feel in their hearts. Here is an attempt to say what often is not said. “I have a lifetime of experience doing this work, and every day on the job I give it all to my patients. They get everything I’ve got and that’s a lot.” “The hospital wants to haggle over things like PTO (paid time off) and other benefits. No amount of PTO is equal to the genuine caring and — let’s say it! — life and health my patients get from me. It’s not something money can buy.” “Given how much my extraordinary hard work and commitment contributes to (and sometimes saves) the lives of others, my own life outside of work should be trouble-free, to the extent that a paycheck and benefits package can provide. To haggle over compensation for something that is so precious and given so limitlessly demeans us all. It denigrates the priceless thing our patients seek when they come to us.” It has been said, "Physician, heal thine self." To this we add, "Nurse, advocate for thine self!" top   Escaping the spotlight December, 2016 -- The new President has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare). Fortunately, there are other important health care legislations that -- escaping the spotlight of campaign rhetoric -- are evading his attack. That's good because they, too, do things that are good for the American people. Here are a couple of them. On October 14, Medicare payment reform legislation (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, MACRA) was finalized. In essence, this law creates new, better ways for providers (mainly doctors) to be paid. Of these, perhaps the most radical is termed the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System. It creates incentives for quality (make more money when you give better care) and -- dear to the hearts of us informaticians -- substantial incentives for the use of electronic health records (EHRs). This latter initiative -- that has propelled our health care system toward electronic in place of paper record-keeping -- has been driven by a program termed Meaningful Use. It is part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, a component of Obama's economic stimulus package, crafted early in his first term, a year or so before the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed. Meaningful Use offered strong financial incentives to hospitals and to physician practices and has been effective indeed. In the seven years since HITECH was passed, adoption of EHRs by hospitals has gone from near zero to 96%. Having escaped the spotlight, HITECH and MACRA are likely to survive the new President's push to "repeal and replace". And that's a good thing! top   TrumpCare? December 5, 2016 -- Ann Farrell forwarded to me a copy of the letter Pam Cipriano, President of the American Nurses Association (ANA), wrote today to president-elect Donald Trump. Ms. Cipriano's heart is in the right place but in my view -- especially given the misogynistic and obstruct-Obama-at-any-cost attitude of the incoming Administration -- her plea for reason is rather anemic. Most of what she requests is already granted by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Thus, this letter serves as a thinly-veiled intercession for its preservation. Alas, there's not much hope for that. What the letter doesn't say is that nurses had little input into the writing of the ACA in the first place and should -- no, must -- be involved in the drafting of any such legislation as we go forward. Pam, stop pulling your punches! top   Nursonomics November, 2016 -- The economics of nursing is complex and important. Typically, the cost of nursing service in a hospital is bundled into the room rate and not billed separately. It is not a revenue center; it does not generate income. Thus, nursing -- in most hospitals the single largest payroll category -- is treated as a cost center. So -- as with any expense -- the conventional strategy is to minimize it. This means hiring as few nurses as possible. That's different from, say, the expense of a new CAT scanner machine. The CAT scanner generates revenue each time it's used. Nurses don't. Yet without them hospitals are useless. With too few of them, patients die. As reported in Medscape, The More RNs, the Higher the Patient Survival: ...each additional patient per nurse on a medical-surgical unit was associated with a 5% lower odds of survival ...below-target RN staffing patterns and high patient turnover increased the risk for patient death. So what's good for patients is bad for hospitals' bottom lines. With new mandates that tie reimbursements to outcomes, however, this is changing. The time is ripe for new economic models for nursing. top   Trumbers October 11, 2016 -- If you are the Donald, Obamacare is a disaster. You cherry-pick your numbers to construct the worst possible picture. But for plenty of folks, Obamacare is a success: Trump’s Debate Claim On Health Care Costs: It Depends What You Mean By 'Cost': "...when it comes to health care, there are many different types of costs: those for governments, employers and individuals. And those costs don’t always go up and down at the same time... Health care spending overall (as measured by the federal government) continues [to grow] at a historically slow rate." There are plenty of numbers to paint whatever picture you want. top   Nurses, learn informatics! August, 2016 -- Why learn informatics? Nurses use computers every day. They need to be good at it! And nurses need to be more involved in decision-making about technology tools We must advocate knowledgeably for what nursing needs. When we are ineffective with technology, we are held back as professionals and as industry strategists. How should we learn informatics? Read my brief article, Nurses, Learn Informatics! top   Balancing act August, 2016 -- You’d think that everybody in health care would want the same thing: health. More formally, we call that outcomes; the goal of doctors, nurses, and of course, patients should be the achievement of the best possible outcome in the situation, even if that is, say, a death with pain minimized, or a chronic disease managed. But it’s not so. However, the wants of each player are surprisingly different. Here I’ll discuss the situation that is most familiar to me, the acute care hospital. When he is there, the patient wants meals, to be warm, to receive timely responses to his call bell, and to be helped to the bathroom ASAP. The nurse, on the other hand, has quite a different list of wants. She wants to know clinical data such as WBC (white blood cell count, a measure of response to infection) as part of her mental model of her patient’s health status, to be able to deliver meds on time because that is an important measure of her performance, to prevent falls and bedsores because these are indicators of quality of nursing care, to be confident of the appropriateness of meds orders since she, ultimately, is the one administering them, and that pain meds are adequate because she is the one witnessing suffering and managing it within parameters determined by others. Sometimes these differing goals are in conflict. For example, going to the bathroom might risk a fall. Letting a patient sleep undisturbed might risk a pressure ulcer (bedsore). In summary, health care processes are complex and the motivations of its participants are surprisingly divergent. Managing all this so that all needs are met is a remarkable balancing act that nurses do every day. top   It's the workflow, stupid August, 2016 -- When nurses complain that the technology-based tools (especially EHRs) that they are tasked to use slow them down, usually what they mean is that these tools don’t model their workflow. We talk about workflow a lot! But what is it? Why is it so important? And why is it so hard to model with computerized/electronic/mobile tools? Please see my August 2016 NurseMind blog entry for the full story. top   RN + Rx? July, 2016 -- Should RNs prescribe pain meds? Our scope of practice denies us this important function, perhaps appropriately so. We don’t want this responsibility but we often want more participation in the decision. Often, the order is insufficient and the patient is suffering (perhaps due to the prescriber's addiction phobia), or it is excessive and the patient is being snowed. The RN is more in touch with the patient from moment to moment and, at least in terms of pain, often has a better sense than the MD of what’s really going on. We do have a professional certification for pain management and even the American Society for Pain Management Nursing but even the best-equipped nurse can be no more than a "caring advocate" and an advisory (not decision-making) member of the professional team. Is it time to enlarge our scope of practice? top   More war stories June, 2016 -- Here are some more war stories, focused on issues with the EMR. My friend Pat works in a peri-op unit, so her stories relate to peri-op workflow. Here are four. War story 1: The patient's chart says NKA (no known allergies), and that it's been reviewed by another RN. However, at admission, the patient says yes, they do have allergies to several meds. So Pat asked the RN who had left the allergies field blank why. That RN said, allergies weren't relevant at the time; "I was working on something else and had to click through that screen to get to the part where I could do what I needed to do." In other words, the EMR did not model that nurse's workflow. A serious medical error was narrowly averted. War story 2: When you scan a document, a stripchart, or an image into the EMR, you must name it. What name should you use? Into which folder should you store it? There is no standard. Different departments use different conventions. Thus, it is often difficult to find a document or image scanned by someone in another department. You must call and ask them what it is called and where to find it in the EMR. War story 3: HIPAA rules create obstacles. For example, a patient recently had an EKG at another site and didn't sign a release. The RN at our site needs to see the EKG in preparing the patient for the OR (operating room). So she gets another (redundant, expensive) EKG. This is quicker than attempting to obtain access to the existing one and enables Pat to get the patient to the OR on time. War story 4: Reconciling a patient's meds must be done in preparation for an OR procedure. It takes an hour to do. Shortly thereafter, the doctor or the patient decides to delay the procedure by a week. A week later, when the RN re-does the admission process, she cannot find the existing medication list and must repeat the one-hour reconciliation process though nothing has changed. The information is in the system somewhere but the RN can't find it. It's a war out there... but with whom are we fighting? Often, it's our own tools and processes. top   Nurses are underserved June, 2016 -- Nurses are surprisingly underserved by technology. Paradoxically, much of what they do involves computers and complex electronics such as pumps and monitors. In particular, nurses spend a lot of time working with electronic medical records. However, these tools are patient-centric, not nurse-centric. In other words, using these tools, nurses contribute substantially to the quality of patient record-keeping, care delivery, and billing, but the tools do little to support the work of nurses themselves. There is a large gap in the spectrum of nursing knowledge- and process-based tools. The reasons are twofold. First is economics: nursing is a cost center rather than a revenue center. Unlike medical procedures and supplies, most of what nurses do is not directly billable. For example, an appendectomy or a pill generates a charge on a bill for which a medical institution is paid, whereas most of the expense of nursing is, from the financial standpoint of the institution, overhead. The cost of most nursing care does not appear as line items on medical bills; it is bundled into hospital room rates and into the charges for procedures. As with all bundled expenses, the incentive is to reduce them. Whenever possible, spend less on nursing. This makes tools for nurses hard to sell and thus industry rarely develops them. The second reason is the complexity of nursing work and its workflow. At Nurse Tech, Inc., we have given this much thought and propose that a good starting place is, as Drs. Gawande and Pronovost have done for surgeons, the creation of checklists for nurses (NurseMind). Unlike surgeries that are discrete units of work, usually comprising a clearly-defined set of goals and predictable branching paths through the course of procedures, nursing work encompasses entire work shifts and are more varied and fluid in how their content evolves. They would be impossible to capture in static printed checklists. Rather, they require the more complex support that can be provided by algorithms (such as the one we have patented) on mobile devices such as smartphones. In this environment, an app can build nursing task lists by drawing on a variety of sources: nursing units' descriptions of how they provide care (e.g. who takes vital signs? who manages physical resources such as carts and trays?), what diagnoses patients have that demand additional nursing tasks (e.g. diabetes care, central and intravenous lines, catheters), new orders that are received during the course of the shift, changes in patient status, and follow-ups (e.g. lab results, communications with colleagues, requests from families) that must be remembered. The context and its demands are fluid and rapidly changing, and the checklist tool must reflect that without slowing the nurse down. We believe that in the app we have built we have largely satisfied these demanding and complex goals. No app can replace the nurses' clinical judgment and critical thinking. In early versions, we attempted to build algorithms for assigning priorities to tasks but soon concluded that there is no way to automate this. However, it is appropriate for nurses to have tools that support them in the routine parts of their work. This enables them to make fewer omissions and consistently deliver top-quality care. Most importantly, by relieving the cognitive burdens of the routine work, mental space is freed for the higher level thought processes. It is time for nursing to receive the technology support that it needs and deserves. top   War story June, 2016 -- I love the war stories recounted by nurse heroes. Here is one by my friend Terri Olson. She recounts: In 1984, I went to Eagle Pass, Texas for a travel nurse assignment. There I saw some things I will never forget. The hospital had a splendid view of the Rio Grande. From the windows, we could see people wading over from Mexico to deliver their babies. Thankfully, in recent years the quality of care in Mexico has mostly caught up with ours. I was assigned to a med/surg unit, which was where they put patients of every description. Med/surg served as the catch-all unit, providing services that should have had specialized units such as peri-op. We received patients directly from the OR on monitors and requiring constant surveillance. However, the monitors were in the patient rooms not at the nursing station, so we were unable to watch them. So I literally ran from room to room in constant panic hoping I wouldn't walk in and find a dead patient. None of the other hospital staff thought that was a big deal. I had a hissy fit and quit after six weeks. Thankfully, the design of hospital nursing units has gotten a lot better since then. top   Bundling and engagement April 5, 2016 -- Today I attended Northern California HIMSS's 4th Annual Patient Engagement Summit at Stanford University. A majority of the attendees were, like me, vendors of healthcare technology. The experience was most worthwhile. We all learned a lot. Perhaps the most interesting session was entitled Payer Challenges. Payers include insurance companies, health plans, and the data analysts who work for them. It was eye-opening to hear their side of the healthcare story. We learned that this month, under a provision of the ACA, bundled payments have gone into effect. This replaces -- on a voluntary basis -- the more traditional and likely less effective (from a cost-savings and quality-of-outcomes viewpoint) fee-for-service payments. At the CMS web site, the concept of bundled payments is described: Traditionally, Medicare makes separate payments to providers for each of the individual services they furnish to beneficiaries for a single illness or course of treatment. This approach can result in fragmented care with minimal coordination across providers and health care settings. Payment rewards the quantity of services offered by providers rather than the quality of care furnished. Research has shown that bundled payments can align incentives for providers – hospitals, post-acute care providers, physicians, and other practitioners – allowing them to work closely together across all specialties and settings. A bundled payment is for a single episode of care (e.g. a hip replacement) and is made to a hospital that then pays the various caregivers such as the surgeon, the physical therapist, the pharmacist, etc. The amount of the payment remains fixed even when the patient must be readmitted to the hospital within 90 days. If that happens, the hospital will likely lose money. Thus, the incentive is strong to coordinate caregivers to work as a team, focusing above all on outcomes thus avoiding that readmission. Indeed, research has shown that the incentive works -- costs go down and quality of care goes up. Here is a brief tutorial and video about bundled payments. Not by accident, an effect of bundling payments is the incentive for patient engagement, the topic of today's conference. Involving the patient in their own care is essential for good outcomes. Also, the provider becomes motivated to pay attention to patient-reported outcomes. Now the financial rewards are aligned with these care-improving behaviors. I have written about this concept of patient engagement in a different context, that of healthcare's shifting paradigms. The old paradigm was discharge planning. Now we strive for lifestyle change. Today's conference was timely indeed. top   PHC 62 March 23, 2016 -- Another amazing day (#62) with Project Homeless Connect. I saw sixteen patients. Yes, we're supposed to call them clients, but their medical needs were so great. I saw meth users, a MRSA victim with an active infection, lots of lice, a paranoid schizophrenic, and a guy who had been awake two days straight, walking around the city, because he has no place to lie down. PHC provides an amazing array of services, everything from banking to foot washing. Society at large does little for these folks. It falls to volunteers like me and the heroes who run PHC. Is that any way to run a country? top   Little guys March 18, 2016 -- Sometimes it's not the big guys who are at the top of the nursing education game. Unlike the major nursing schools of the Bay Area, little Holy Name U. has Nursing Informatics course offerings in its curriculum. Not only do the bigger players (I won't name names, but you know them!) have no such courses, they are not interested. Given that today's nurses spend more time in front of the computer than in front of the patient, why don't all the schools do what HNU is doing? Today I attended HNU's annual nursing symposium. Though the essential purpose of events such as this one is recruitment, I did learn a lot and found the majority of the presentations valuable and even eye-opening. Go little guys! top   Financial incentives March, 2016 -- I believe that people who call for abolition of the ACA would not do so if they knew what's in it. So here's another little bit of ACA 101. We all want better, cheaper healthcare. The ACA drives improvements in quality and decreases in the cost of healthcare. One of the mechanisms for accomplishing this is financial incentive. The ACA has three specific financial incentive programs: Value based purchasing (VBP) — outcomes, satisfaction, quality, safety — metrics that drive "booster" payments. Readmission reduction program (RRP) — reduce 30-day all-cause readmissions for patients with CHF, pneumonia, and other conditions that can best be treated at home. This can be accomplished through coordination of care providers, patient education, and more. Hospital-acquired conditions (HAC) — Medicare and various ACA programs no longer reimburse for the curing of falls, air embolisms, urinary tract infections, central line-associated blood stream infections, surgical site infections, and various others including MRSA, CDI (Clostridium Difficile infxn). These are all common sense, evidence-based measures to help change healthcare in directions we all support. top   Big Data March, 2016 -- Can machines discover medical knowledge? In a frank interview with Dana Ludwig, MD, this notion and many more are discussed. Medical data is huge and complex. The Epic electronic health record alone has 13,000 tables, and there are many more databases to mine. Ludwig says, Machine learning algorithms might find associations that I don't know about by crawling through the massive tables. Given the 100,000 variables that we have on line, have the machines crawl through and see which ones are predictive of [some] diagnosis code. I don't know whether the algorithms can do a better job than the experts can do, but I'd like to find out. The goal of the neural networks is to let the algorithm discover the attributes that are predictive rather than presupposing that the experts can name them. Can machines make discoveries that human experts cannot? Read the interview here. top   Vaccinations Revisited March, 2016 -- Remember back in 2009 when I listed all the vaccinations? Here's the real list, the CDC's Code Set CVX -- Vaccines Administered. top   Healthcare Econ 101 February, 2016 -- With ours being the most expensive healthcare system ever, its economics are increasingly topics of debate. Here are a few basic principles that drive our dysfunctional system. Financial reward motivates every business, healthcare among them. What is rewarded increases. In an ideal system, providers are rewarded for good outcomes. There are some incentives for this in the ACA and in Medicare including patient satisfaction surveys that have been made a factor in hospital reimbursement by government. However, in healthcare's predominant economic models, the rewards are neither for outcomes nor for quality. One such traditional model is fee-for-service. The result is, of course, more service. (This was discussed in my blog post Doctors as Businessmen.) Another common model is capitation. A provider network is reimbursed a fixed amount for each patient. So the result is more patients. In capitation models, the scramble is for market share. In any model, the physician says, when the patient is in front of me, he is the most important person. After he leaves, the most important person is the payer. The conclusion: healthcare and economics will always be an uneasy mix. top   Obstacle? Opportunity! February, 2016 -- The first obstacle a new grad nurse encounters is the dearth of jobs for new grads. It's easy to get into nursing school. Afterward, it's hard to get that first job. The schools don't tell us this. Reluctance to hire new grads is understandable from the hospitals' point of view; a new nurse is a big investment. It can be months before she (almost always a she; my graduating class was 85% female) reaches full productivity. Something that is also not discussed is the content of nursing education. The schools are obsolete! What I saw in nursing school: a bunch of grizzled old farts who couldn't cut it as actual nurses ("those who can't, teach") and who haven't kept up with the rapidly-changing world of healthcare. Case in point: today's nurse spends quite literally more time in front of computers than in front of patients (proven by numerous studies). Yet informatics courses in nursing school curricula are rare. Even at national leader UCSF, my alma mater, Dean Vlahov declined my request to meet to talk about this. The result? Nurses helpless and frustrated by technology, decreased productivity and reduced safety, defying nursing's #1 mandate. The upside? This is an opportunity. My software projects will enable technology to be a help rather than an obstacle for nursing. top   Get real February, 2016 -- In today's climate of presidential campaigns, right-wingers are still calling for repeal of the ACA? Get real! Deep down, those echo chambers know how badly that would backfire. Insurance companies -- huge campaign donors -- would see a steep drop in profits. Lots of ordinary folk would suddenly lose healthcare coverage. People with "prior conditions" would be back out in the cold. Medical bankruptcies would resume. Hospital and provider revenue streams would be disrupted. A lot of people would be very angry. I think what's happening is -- as they do with environmental and other regulation -- the right-wingers clamor in public but in private they count on cooler heads to keep them safe. top   Cool gig January, 2016 -- Here is Dr. Dan Weberg RN speaking at a medical technology conference. He works for Kaiser. His title is Director of Nursing Innovation. Doesn't that sound like the coolest gig in the world? top   Work to do November 18, 2015 -- Today at the AMIA conference, Dr. Bob Wachter, faculty member of my alma mater UCSF and author of the thought-provoking The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age, gave a great talk on that theme. As is unmistakeable in this wonderful image he showed -- "A 7-year old girl's depiction of her MD visit" -- in which the MD is completely focused on his computer not on the patient (click to see it full-size) we in medical technology have a lot of work to do. top   General Zuckerberg November 21, 2015 -- Today I attended the ribbon-cutting dedication of the new Priscilla and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) and Trauma Center building. Present at the occasion were Zuckerberg (in his trademark tee-shirt and jeans, chatting with California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom in my photo), Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi and Jackie Speier, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (wielding the giant scissors), venerable news anchor Belva Davis, and many more. The building itself ($880 million) was paid for by a City bond. Zuckerberg's gift of $75 million paid for the equipment and technology inside it. We toured the new facility. It is the most efficient, high-tech and well-designed emergency department I've seen. Having volunteered in its predecessor (across the courtyard, still running) I have seen the superb medical care that is delivered here. When the new facility opens in March, 2016, it will be even better. top   Coding Nursing November 18, 2015 -- Here is another reflection following the American Medical Informatics Association's 2015 meeting (AMIA) that ended today. It regards data coding standards for nursing and is woefully neglected, even here at AMIA. The topic is important for nursing because without a good coding scheme, we cannot capture data about what we do. Without that data, we cannot make the important case for the value that we create for healthcare. As I have discussed here, there are several encoding schemes for nursing data. The best one for the purposes of nursing and data processing is Virgina Saba's (about whom I blogged briefly here) Clinical Care Classification System but alas it hasn't received the wide uptake it deserves. Dr. Saba herself attended the conference (we lunched) and -- as one of the grand dames of nursing informatics -- presented the Virginia K. Saba Informatics Award. At AMIA, the only nursing coding scheme I saw discussed was International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP), an international standard and nursing-centered but not as well suited for computerization. Perhaps this is an area for discussion at a future AMIA. top   AMIA 2015 November 18, 2015 -- Today was the closing day of the American Medical Informatics Association's 2015 meeting (AMIA). As always, I learned a lot from the technical talks and came up to date on issues and trends in this busy, burgeoning industry. The closing keynote speech was by Dr. Bob Wachter (here is his blog, Wachter's World) in which he gave us an impassioned exhortation to remedy the numerous ills of healthcare IT. The audience clapped frequently, sharing his enthusiasm for the as-yet-to-be-realized potential (and numerous humorously-described flaws) of the immature technology we're all working on. For example, he observed that it is not enough to write good software; we must also reimagine the work itself. Wachter's talk largely paraphrased his recent book, The Digital Doctor that I have mentioned here and of which I promise a review soon. The book was a terrific read and the speech today was equally heartening. Go Bob! Go AMIA! top   Innovate! November 12, 2015 -- Today I toured Kaiser's Garfield Innovation Center where they simulate hospital and home environments for testing new technologies and refining caregiver workflows. As with the military, Kaiser's processes for evaluating, selecting, testing and rolling out new tools and technologies are ponderous and lengthy. Often, by the time all the maintenance and support procedures are implemented, impacted work processes are updated, and staff are trained, the tool or tech is old news. But there are no short cuts. When you are steering a battleship, you must turn the wheel five miles before the ship responds. One such innovative change touted at Garfield that is already old hat to us nurses is the don't-interrupt-me-while-I give-meds yellow sash. Simple as it is, it does work. Uninterrupted, the nurse is less likely to make a medication administration error. Yet it had to be tested in a safe environment, and the Garfield Center served this purpose well. Today, most nurses in hospitals use these sashes (or something similar) and error rates have gone down. Another new technology -- this one dear to me as a proponent of mobile solutions for nurses (such as my NurseMind app) -- is smartphones. Kaiser is evaluating various ruggedized versions and deploying them for a variety of purposes such as secure messaging. I hope they will also consider checklists such as the nursing one I have built... And deploy it at the Garfield Center! top   Boot camp September, 2015 -- Nursing Informatics Boot Camp was this week. Organized by the Northern California chapter of HIMSS (thanks!) The instructor was my friend Susan Newbold. She knows her stuff. Glad I went! top   Yes vault! September, 2015 -- Success! Kaiser and Epic came through after all. And so did HealthVault. If you're a Kaiser member, you can download the last five years or so of your electronic health record in CCR format. Here is how: Login to Kaiser's web site. Find the medical record page and click the download link. You'll get a zipfile. In the zipfile, find the file named DOC0001.XML Upload it to your HealthVault account. Bingo! And thank Obamacare Meaningful Use Stage 2. We can all have our data in our PHRs now. Hurray! top   No vault September, 2015 -- Here's the main part of the letter Microsoft HealthVault provided for me to send to my health care provider (Kaiser): Please send my medical information from your medical records system directly to my personal HealthVault record using my Direct address. I'm taking an active role in my health and wellness by keeping a personal health record in HealthVault. If you are using an electronic health record (EHR) system that is certified for Meaningful Use Stage 2, then your software may be able to generate a CCDA and send it to me using the Direct protocol. (As you may know, Direct is a security-enhanced health messaging protocol designed to help protect health information when it is sent from one computer system to another.) Your EHR software vendor should be able to provide instructions. [Kaiser uses Epic... Amazingly, it's not retrofitted for MU2! See below.] Please read How healthcare providers can benefit from HealthVault (fascinating!) for more information about HealthVault and how it supports Meaningful Use Stage 2 (MU2). I sent that letter to my Kaiser doctor. Here's what my doctor wrote back: Daniel S Keller From: [Nameless MD] Received: 8/27/2015 4:26 PM PDT Hi Dan - Sorry I am unable to do that directly. All our Epic secure messages must go through our system. You will always need to log into KP.org to retrieve them, though you will get a notice to your regular email saying you have a message. I have nothing to do with the system or contacting the vendor. You can get your medical record on a thumb drive. You can go to member services for that. The phone number for Member Services is 1-800-464-4000. They may be able to help with your questions about HealthVault, too. Hope that helps. Best, [Nameless MD] Turns out you can only get a CD, and it contains only PDFs of your medical record. In other words, Epic (with Kaiser's collusion?) is making sure you cannot do what HealthVault and I are trying to do. Discussions with Kaiser's medical records department member support people were pointless. They had never heard of CCD nor even MU. So Epic sucks again. I hope their customers (ahem, Kaiser?) find a vendor who actually delivers on MU2. Go HealthVault! top   Good vault? August, 2015 -- Here are some things I like about a PHR (personal health record) such as Microsoft HealthVault: It could free me from those sucky "patient portals" such as Kaiser's HealthConnect, one of Epic's "features" that primarily serves the institution and only secondarily the patient (as I've blogged here and here). It gives me a little more access to my data, and a little more control over it. I can actually enter and update my medical data myself and, to a limited degree, grant access to it to others. The Continuity of Care Document (CCD) protocol/format is a long-overdue advance from lame old HL7. It is a good thing and should be universal. Another good thing in Obamacare is MU2's requirement that health care providers exchange data including patient demographics, problems, test results, immunizations, allergies, care plans, and more. Here are some of its objectives: Use secure electronic messaging to communicate with patients on relevant health information. Automatically track medications from order to administration using assistive technologies in conjunction with an electronic medication administration record (eMAR) (for hospitals). Provide patients the ability to view online, download and transmit their health information within four business days of the information being available to the eligible provider (EP). Provide patients the ability to view online, download and transmit their health information within 36 hours after discharge from the hospital (for hospitals). Go HealthVault! top   How sick? August, 2015 -- An issue of perpetual contention in nursing is staffing. How many nurses do we need on staff right now, for the present patient load? Management wants fewer (to save money) and nurses want more (to get all the work done). Where's the science? One way to make staffing decisions is based on acuity -- how sick are your patients? Today, staffing decisions are based on crude estimates drawn from patient diagnoses. If they're very sick, hire more nurses. But there is a better way. Degree of sickness is not the best indicator of nursing workload. Instead, I propose a measure of acuity that is the number of minutes of nursing work remaining to be done for each patient. Nurse managers would, in real-time, use a tool that adds up all the durations of the outstanding tasks for each of the patients currently on the unit. A lot of minutes means you need more nurses. How many? Divide the minutes into the duration of a shift. Voila! Accurate nurse staffing! This measure was developed working with seasoned veteran emergency/charge RN Mark Wandro. We propose a study to confirm that this new measurement of acuity (and the tools that support it) can improve nursing outcomes. Is your hospital interested? Can you sponsor this study? Please get in touch! Let's make nursing better! top   Nurses more than ever August, 2015 -- In this videoed interview with Pam Cipriano entitled Why Nurses Matter More than Ever, Ms Cipriano -- an old guard union booster -- makes an important point. But it's based on nursing's traditional battle about staffing levels. This pits us directly against management that seeks to hold down costs. Recall, payroll is a hospital's single largest expense. Nurses are often its largest component. Ms Cipriano is right but for reasons other than what she states. Now reimbursements -- thanks to the ACA -- are partly based on quality measures and, most importantly, on outcomes. In its central role, the quality of nursing care has risen to what is perhaps the most essential factor in determining outcomes. Our union does an important job in enabling us to work well but we need to move beyond those tired formulae and focus on how we deliver the high quality health care that America demands. What we nurses need to enable us to deliver these ever-better results should be the goal for which our union contends. Ms Cipriano fights a good fight but could do better by enlarging her goals. Adequate staffing is necessary but not sufficient. We also need tools (especially mobile ones such as NurseMind), participation in decision-making, representation in the C-suite (every substantial health care organization should have a CNIO), evidence-based protocols, and much more. In Nursing: Essential to Healthcare Value in Nurse Leader, a model begins to emerge. Authors Pappas and Welton propose to "...define nursing value as the function of outcomes divided by costs." The model is rudimentary but it's a good start. What you can't measure you can't manage. The model begins to tell us what to measure. The point is that, with reimbursements tied more than ever to outcomes and perceptions of quality, nurses are essential to health care revenue. Hospitals, make sure your nurses have what they need to deliver the results you need. When we do our work well, you are reimbursed well and -- most importantly -- patients get good care. top   Numbers August, 2015 -- The numbers are in. The homeless have been counted. I was one of 400 volunteer counters on Jan. 30th as I recounted then. But first, how exactly is homelessness defined? The federal government's definition excludes many whom we in SF consider homeless. They exclude: ...individuals who are "doubled-up" in the homes of family or friends, staying in jails, hospitals, and rehabilitation facilities, families living in Single Room Occupancy (SRO) units, and in substandard or inadequate living conditions including overcrowded spaces. In accordance with the federal rules, we did not report the numbers of these people, but we hope that eventually they, too, will be included and eligible to receive the services they, too, need. Here is a summary of what we found in the 49 square miles that comprise San Francisco: 6686 homeless adults, 250 more than were counted in 2013 853 homeless youth, 61 fewer than in 2013. For the details, please see the full report. top   Yes, patients August 12, 2015 -- Fascinating meeting today with Dr. Howard Landa, CMIO of Alameda Health System. He is implementing EHRs in their five-hospital system. Though his job is technology, his thinking is all about the patient. In describing the systems his team builds, he regularly refers back to what patients need, what they experience, and the quality of what's delivered to them. When we do our jobs right, this is how we do them. Thank you, Howard. You are a great role model! top   Go Bernie! Go nurses! August 10, 2015 -- National Nurses United (NNU), our Washington advocacy group, has officially announced our endorsement of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for President. Here in Oakland, no less. (I have extolled his principled positions on prior occasions.) In this picture he is with Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro who says, "His issues align with nurses from top to bottom." Please read the press release for details. Once again, we nurses are on the right side of history! top   ACA for whom? August, 2015 -- The ACA has delivered substantial benefits for many Americans but the citizenry is not its primary beneficiary. In an excellent July, 2015 article entitled "Wrong Prescription? The failed promise of the Affordable Care Act", Trudy Lieberman in Harpers Magazine reviews what we've learned in the five years since its passage. "[It] was a canny restructuring of the American health-care marketplace, one that delivered millions of new customers to insurance companies, created new payment mechanisms for hospitals, steered more business to pharmaceutical companies, and dictated expensive, high-tech solutions for a wide range of problems." Though medical bankruptcies seem likely to diminish, 17 million more (woefully far from all) Americans have health care coverage, no one can now be excluded due to a pre-existing condition, the growth in health-care costs has slowed and, on balance, we seem to be a little better off than without ACA, it is clear that insurers and big pharma -- not health care "consumers" -- are the winners. All that lobbying paid off. "Because of a failure of nerve and the immense power of health-care stakeholders, the A.C.A. has reinforced and accelerated many of the system’s most toxic features." We still need single-payer. top   Cool clear Brooke July 31, 2015 -- My favorite podcast, On the Media, yesterday delivered an incisive and scathing look at the way health and diet news is reported in popular media, popping many bubbles of conventional wisdom. Its anchor Brooke Gladstone (this week without her equally brilliant and wry co-anchor Bob Garfield) subtitles this piece, "High colonics, vampire facials, and the magical thinking that fuels an industry." Ms Gladstone righteously and accurately excoriates, as an example of the irresponsible and sensationalist writing that passes for journalism, an article that proclaims that kale is actually bad for us, describing it as "stunningly unsubstantiated." This is just one article in an endless parade, she tells us, that trumpet the newest food "breakthrough" or "medical miracle" or "first of its kind" or "game changer" or "new standard of care" that will kill us or save us. Other examples are omega-3s, dark chocolate, red wine, cell phone radiation, yo-yo dieting, and don't get her started on gluten. She cites a genuine expert regarding gluten and the diet craze that now surrounds it. For people who don't have a diagnosed case of celiac disease (i.e. more than 99% of us), clinical trials have found no benefit in avoiding these foods. The popular frenzy that now surrounds supposed gluten-sensitivities is just the latest example of the effectiveness of the pop science press. She further reports that there is no such thing as a "simple screening test." If a story claims this, run for the hills! Screening test decisions should actually be among the most complex that we face in all of our health care decision-making. What will we do with the results? It is very difficult to ignore a positive, even when the treatment decision that seems inevitable does more harm than good. She warns us not to confuse -- as many such articles would have us do -- risk factors with actual diseases. The classic example is LDL cholesterol and heart disease. The public has fixated on their serum cholesterol numbers instead of on the numbers that really matter: the rates of death from heart disease. Beware, she further exhorts us, of the representation of normal conditions such as baldness by the "disease-mongerers" as pathologies. In all these cases, the objective is, of course, to drive spending with fear. Of the numerous myths she debunks, my favorite is the one about drinking eight glasses of water a day. It's just not true. There is no evidence that all this water, as Jennifer Anniston has claimed (in an example of what is termed marketing by celebrity culture) will make your skin glow. Drink water when you're thirsty. That's all you need. How do these stories come to be? Ms Gladstone interviewed John Bohannon of Science magazine who describes their typical trajectory: launch a study of some popular food or behavior, "...do a bad job with the statistics and the design of the experiment, get a bad paper published, and then build a global multimedia campaign around it... There are diet fads that come like tsunamis every few months. Why have journalists missed this?" Well, Ms Gladstone hasn't and I am grateful for her rare, honest voice. Here is her Skeptic's Guide to Health News and Diet Fads. top   Interopera- wha? June, 2015 -- My friend and former classmate, the highly accomplished Dr. George Krucik laments the ACA's failure to demand interoperability among healthcare data software vendors and systems. You got that right, George! Indeed, Meaningful Use fails to call for EHR interoperability -- a serious omission. However, it does call for specific types of data to be exchanged between specific types of providers. For example, deservedly-maligned patient portals (that I've blogged about) will be required to share certain data such as lab results with patients and with the ordering providers. Medication reconciliations will be required to be shared among providers. Hospital discharge information is to be reported to third parties (payers, mainly). And there are a few more dribs and drabs of data that must be captured and shared. These are baby steps but that's as fast as our industry can go. Keep pushing, George! top   Defending their turf June, 2015 -- So it's data silos not missile silos but both provide formidable defense. For the EHR vendors, one way to defend their turf is to not share their data. In other words, with data silos. Bad news for the FHIR folks. No EHR vendor will expose all their data fields to any public API (Application Programming Interface). This will make it hard for people like me to build useful medical apps. It's a deadly blow to any notion of medical data access and sharing, and ought to have been forbidden by the ACA... Oops, bad oversight! top   Dentist regent May 22, 2015 -- As a member of the committee that chose him, I am proud to announce the selection of Harvey Brody, DDS, our next alumni regent. He is the first dentist to serve as a regent of the University of California. The announcement is here. The last alumni regent from UCSF (2007-2009) was Dave Shewmake. Like me, Dave was a graduate of the Medical Information Science Section of UCSF's Graduate Division. Serving as a regent was one of Dave's peak experiences, as it will no doubt be for Harvey. Congratulations, Harvey! top   Woulda shoulda May 2015 -- In his brand new (May 2015) book, The Digital Doctor, Chair of UCSF's Department of Medicine Dr. Robert Wachter reports David Brailer's (G. W. Bush's healthcare technology czar) comments on the ambitious Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) program. I think Brailer nailed it. He told Wachter that "HITECH locked in an existing set of clunky products and led the computer vendors to focus on meeting federal requirements [Meaningful Use] rather than innovating" (p. 18). Existing vendor hegemonies (especially Epic) were thus strengthened by the financial pressure on provider organizations (especially hospitals) to hurry up and computerize, regardless of quality. Instead, Brailer says, HITECH should have spent its $30 billion (yes, with a B) on: standards, interoperability, a "Geek Squad" to help with training and implementation, and creating a cloud-based "medical Internet". Perhaps Wachter, Brailer, and other visionaries can guide us in a more productive direction. top   Nursing volunteer May 18, 2015 -- Considering volunteer nursing in a distant disaster zone? Fellow UCSF grad Joe Niemczura is doing this in earthquake-stricken Nepal and writes an excellent blog. Squat toilets, "water discipline", modest dress, and cultural sensitivity are just the beginning. Kudos to you, Joe, a volunteer nurse sharing "your gift to the world." top   Military nurses May 13, 2015 -- A new hero! This (unnamed) nurse at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, refused to force-feed detainees. As is plainly visible to everyone but the willfully blind, doing so would have violated the code of ethics we nurses swear to. Read about it in Military Times. This sheds new light on the world's most powerful military, regulated at least a little by ethics and humanity. If you are looking at nursing career options, consider What's Inside a Military Nurse's Toolkit? and take hope from our new nurse hero. top   Overkill May 11, 2015 -- In today's New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande hits yet another home run: "Overkill -- An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?" He writes: [We have] a new, unanticipated problem: ...the correct diagnosis of a disease that is never going to bother you in your lifetime. We’ve long assumed that if we screen a healthy population for diseases like cancer or coronary-artery disease, and catch those diseases early, we’ll be able to treat them before they get dangerously advanced, and save lives in large numbers. But it hasn’t turned out that way. For instance, cancer screening with mammography, ultrasound, and blood testing has dramatically increased the detection of breast, thyroid, and prostate cancer during the past quarter century. We’re treating hundreds of thousands more people each year for these diseases than we ever have. Yet only a tiny reduction in death, if any, has resulted... [emphasis mine] The medical system [does] what it so often does: tests, unnecessarily, to reveal problems that aren’t quite problems to then be fixed, unnecessarily, at great expense and no little risk. Meanwhile, we avoid taking adequate care of the biggest problems that people face -- problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, or any number of less technologically intensive conditions. An entire health-care system has been devoted to this game. Yet [with the ACA and new standards of practice] we’re finally seeing evidence that the system can change. He also follows up on a shocker he wrote five years ago, discussed here. He described the skewed incentives and thus excessive costs caused by our fee-for-service payment model, gradually being phased out thanks largely to an outcomes-and-quality-based model mandated by Obamacare. Thanks, Dr. Gawande, for giving us new hope! top   BANIA April, 2015 -- Here is the actual survey referenced by my earlier blog, HIMSS and HERSS. Entitled 2015 HIMSS Impact of the Informatics Nurse Survey, it concludes that informatics nurses are useful. We are also organized! Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are starting up the Bay Area Nursing Informatics Association (BANIA), our local chapter of the national American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA). Join us! top   World domination April, 2015 -- At HIMSS15 I saw world domination and this is what it looks like: the biggest trade show booth you ever saw! Seemed like acres! Why is that scary? top   HIMSS and HERSS April 15, 2015 -- My newest nurse hero: Patricia Sengstack DNP, RN-BC, CPHIMS. At HIMSS15 in a presentation (like me, Patty was in the audience) about Continuity of Care, we were shown a diagram of the organizational structure that implements it. The box labeled Management Team contained only CMO/CMIO. That’s code for "doctors run the show." Oh my! Patty leapt in: "Excuse me, please attend Informatics 101: you need CNO/CNIO in that box, too!" There is no excuse for omitting RNs from the IT implementation teams for EMRs and other tech that impacts our work. It is indeed Informatics 101... And so many have yet to learn it. There’s plenty of supporting evidence, for example regarding a hot topic today, population health: a survey showed that some people think that nurses are actually useful when implementing HIT. "60 percent of respondents feel that informatics nurses play a key role..." Nurses are useful? Who knew? But what about those other 40%? What are those folks thinking? Have they ever met a nurse? How about a nurse informaticist? We in this job role must be from Mars. Can we trust this report? After all, nobody uses EMRs more than do nurses... Not even close. Do you suppose heavy usage entitles us to claim some expertise? Might we possibly be what these C-level folks call stakeholders? Hello, world? Listen to Patty! top   HIMSS15 April 14, 2015 -- I spent a fascinating week in Chicago attending HIMSS15, a healthcare technology show. There were 38,000 of us; the scale was immense. And so are the dollars in this industry. Each day ended with a parade of black Escalades ferrying the assorted C-level types from the convention center to their hotel suites. Is this what -- in healthcare -- we have become? Is it what we want to be? Among the Armani suits were health insurance executives. Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana was one of the keynote speakers. He talked about "responding to consumers’ wants and needs." Evidently, insurance people must create the illusion that they add value. The first fallacy is that their relationship with patients is -- by definition -- anything but adversarial. They do their job "best" when they deny care, because the constituency they serve is not actually patients. Humana is a corporation; its primary purpose is to serve -- again, by definition -- its stockholders. There is nothing wrong with that; it’s how capitalism works. Why pretend otherwise? The second fallacy is that patients are the consumers. The definition of a consumer is one who makes a purchasing decision; one who is the target of advertising and sales. In health care, that’s mostly doctors. The doctor chooses the drugs, the treatments, the procedures. It’s mostly the doctors who are wooed by pharma and device manufacturers. A tiny portion of those advertisements are patient-directed (and some would argue that this shouldn’t be permitted) e.g. sleeping pill ads on TV. Let's not pretend that patients are more than pawns in a high-stakes game played between medical vendors, payers, and the real consumers. Broussard arrived by private jet. He describes Humana as "one of the nation’s largest health and well-being companies." He is a master of euphemism. Indeed, his entire industry is. Do they add value? Quite the opposite! But I guess this doublethink enables them to sleep at night. He showed us some slick, highly-produced videos of happy Humana customers, and recited drivel -- larded with folksy homilies -- about making consumers happy and healthy, some self-serving statistics about excess care delivery (we overspend on all our lucky customers), the ineptitude of Federal programs (only private companies like ours are capable of delivering decent care), and litanies -- now de rigeur -- about the need for change. All delivered with conviction and stage management, supremely polished. No mention of his bloated paycheck. Despite lots of brave talk about embracing change, that is surely the thing he wants least. More than ever, it’s clear to me that these parasites must go. They add no value. They are blood suckers, singing love songs while we bleed. Single payer is the only way forward. top   Patient-centric? April, 2015 -- We speak of being patient-centric and of patient engagement but still fail to give the patient control of their data. The provider institutions remain in control and responsible for stewardship of the data. Incentives for silo-ing remain in place. Meaningful use mandates some data sharing but vendors and providers do this only begrudgingly. The value to patients of "portals" could be much better but the incentives are not there for those in our community who create them. For example, as a patient I have not seen even a single provider portal that would tell me what some service would cost. Nor has any patient portal ever asked me whom I might want to withhold any of my data from or disclose it to. We are a long way from being patient-centric. To be fair, these shortcomings are not the fault of the system developers nor even of the health care providers. Rather, it is the financial incentives here in the USA that force them to be counterproductive. The Meaningful Use features of the Affordable Care Act will soon require providers and developers to share some small portions of their data with each other and with patients but we are a long way from giving patients control. All this talk of being patient-centric is hot air. Only Meaningful Use Stage 3 will cause that to change. Money is the driver in every system but few channel it as perversely as we do. Big pharma, insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, labs and other ancillary service providers make money by selling products and services -- the more and the more complex the better. Our health care system does not exist primarily to serve patients, and the new legislation does only slightly more than nothing to improve that. Too bad for America! top   We've come a long way... April, 2015 -- Check out the "Aristocrat of Uniforms" (what the well-dressed nurse wore in the 1920s) at UCSF's archive. Very elegant but I'll stick with my scrubs, thank you! top   Pepsi Apples April, 2015 -- "Dean Mozaffarian," writes pundit Jason Clark, "is a well known nutritionist and Dean of the Friedman School at Tufts. He proposes taxes on unhealthful foods and drink and subsidies on the healthful ones: Should we tax unhealthy foods?" Jason continues, Trouble is, I don't think he goes far enough in his analysis. I have no problem with 5 cent apples (though that would require planting a lot more apple trees, which would cut into grain production), but I think 25 cent salmon filets would be detrimental to the environment. Fish is not a sustainable major protein source for 7 billion people, and there are problems with farmed salmon (e.g. dioxin). While salmon is no doubt more healthful than red meat, there is probably contamination, and it is environmentally a non-starter. Why can't the 'big thinkers' truly consider the big picture? A world of 7 billion needs to subsist on unrefined grain, vegetables, and smaller amounts of fruit, beans, nuts, seeds, etc. Animal products should not be subsidized and should be eaten much less or not at all. Clearly, Mozaffarian feels he needs to appeal to the 'flesh lobby', even if it's fish. He doesn't answer the question of why apples often cost more than hamburgers in America. Clearly, meat is subsidized, while generating tremendous external costs borne by the environment and healthcare. We wholeheartedly agree. top   Counting January 30, 2015 -- Last night from 7 pm until almost midnight, with one of several dozen teams of three volunteers, I traveled every block in a prescribed area of the Mission District for San Francisco's annual point-in-time homeless count. We need a census of these folks not only to grasp the magnitude of that population but also for federal funding for programs that provide assistance allocated on a per-capita basis. Most major American cities conduct these studies but San Francisco is one of few that does so almost entirely by volunteer workers. I am proud of my City and how we care about and for all our residents, even those who sleep on streets and in parks. In the approximately 30-block area our team covered, we spotted fifteen people in sleeping bags or blankets on sidewalks, under staircases, or in makeshift shelters in parking lots. That's fifteen too many, but it's a start. top   New Guy January 15, 2015 -- In the 70s and 80s, UCSF was a leader in Medical Informatics. My department there, called Section on Medical Information Science, did groundbreaking work. For example, my master's thesis was an electronic medical record -- one of the first -- that I developed from the ground up, and deployed and tested in a live setting, UCSF's Dermatology Clinic. It worked fine! Perhaps the most important work being done in our Section at that time was the development of medical terminologies, lead by our Chairman, Dr. Marsden Scott Blois. With his passing in 1988, our Section lost its funding that had come primarily from the National Library of Medicine. Many of our faculty and graduates defected to Stanford where a growing bioinformatics department picked up the leadership ball. Today's news signals new hope for retaking our rightful leadership position. With the hiring of Dr. Butte (pronounced "beaut" as in "beautiful") and the reconstitution of our Section under the name "Institute for Computational Health Sciences," UCSF stands to resume its premier position in this area. My concern is that amid the flurry of buzzwords -- "big data", "bioinformatics", "genomics", "precision medicine" -- we not lose sight of the central part of our mandate, clinical care. An essential tool for clinical care is the electronic medical record. Though in the last few years (driven especially by the incentives of Obamacare's Meaningful Use) this technology has become widely deployed, we are still not very good it. It is not mature. There is much work that remains to be done, and it is my fervent hope that much of it will be done at UCSF. I mentioned this when I recently met with Dr. Butte. He agreed. This could be the "re-dawning" of an important era at UCSF. Welcome Dr. Butte! top   Project Homeless Connect 57 December 17, 2014 -- Our 57th Project Homeless Connect event. As always, we provided an amazing range of services. I was part of the nursing team, taking vital signs, triaging, interviewing and diagnosing. A lot of suffering. Some very, very sick people. Sometimes shocking, always sobering. My photo is of Gavin Newsom rallying the "troops". top   Supes vs soda December 10, 2014 -- Tonight we celebrated our near-victory in San Francisco over Big Soda. (I have blogged about the battle here, here, here, here and here.) Spending $3 for each yes vote, we actually got a majority -- 56% -- versus the $100 that Big Soda spent for each no vote. Alas, because it was to have been a targeted tax (a quirk in our City's electoral system) 66% was required. I do believe that it is an appropriate role for government to protect citizens from threats both external (national security) and internal (e.g. high-risk behaviors). Libertarians would likely agree with the former but not the latter... until it regards something they need, e.g. clean air and water, safe products, etc. Sweetened drinks are not a safe product. So how does government do this? Laws (e.g. seat belts -- thoroughly proven to save lives) Education (e.g. sex ed in schools -- thoroughly proven to reduce risky behaviors) Taxation (e.g. tobacco taxes reduce smoking thus saves lives) I do have some intelligent friends who nonetheless opposed Prop. E calling it an overreach of the nanny state. I disagree. Taxing sweetened drinks would function as do tobacco taxes and tobacco education in schools. It is the right thing to do! Present at our celebration and spearheading the effort to pass this innovative legislation were (L to R in my photo) Supervisors Malia Cohen, Eric Mar, and Scott Wiener. How often can we say we are truly proud of our leadership? top   23 and Anne December 9, 2014 -- I have lots of heroes. My newest is Anne Wojcicki, one of the panelists at the Technology Advisory Group meeting I attended today. She is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, the company that, for $99, will sequence your DNA from a saliva sample and would (if it were permitted) tell you a lot about your genetics, your ancestry, and predispositions for a variety of traits and conditions. Alas, the FDA shut them down citing the potential for inaccurate results. The main problem is a regulatory system that cannot keep pace with innovation. By definition, regulators are a step behind and in cases like this one it is to our detriment. We do need regulation to keep us safe from snake oil but the delicate balance between that and new technology sometimes eludes us. As Ms. Wojcicki explained it, each of the genes for which her company tests is considered by FDA rules to be a distinct diagnostic product. 23andMe would have had to apply for literally millions of product licenses. Instead they went belly-up. When it was still in business, 23andMe sold a commoditized version of the precision medicine Sam Hawgood (see below) talked about. Indeed, Ms. Wojcicki's vision was to liberate genetics from the research lab and create a consumer revolution. "Who owns the data?" she asked. This would have enabled us each to possess our own. Another obstacle was the all too familiar one of reimbursements. Though genetic information has the potential to make health care more effective, insurers will not reimburse for tests like these. Like the regulators, they are behind the times and the quality of our health outcomes suffers as a result. Ms. Wojcicki quoted an MD at a conference: "The biggest problem with 23andMe is you generate non-billable questions." How do we get regulation and reimbursement to catch up with technology and with the public good? Perhaps nobody knows the complete answer but some good people are working on it. Go Anne! top   Pride and precision December 9, 2014 -- Today I attended a UCSF event named Technology Advisory Group. It was chaired by Sam Hawgood, our new Chancellor. He touted precision medicine, an area of research (and eventually a strategy for delivering healthcare) that is genomics-based. UCSF is a leader in this research. What is precision medicine? My simplistic understanding is that the effectiveness of certain treatments -- especially in oncology -- is in large part determined by our genetics. Precision medicine would take a patient's genetic predispositions into account, for example, when planning a course of chemotherapy. I'm proud of the industry-leading research at my alma mater! top   Playing with FHIR November 2014 -- One of the things I learned at AMIA's 2014 conference is that a thing named FHIR will change the way we do computing in healthcare. Much of the communication that is done between the numerous and disparate software systems that run our hospitals, labs, clinics, payers, etc., etc. is via an antique and under-powered standard named Health Level 7 (HL7). Standardized communication protocols were a breakthrough in their day but that day was decades ago. FHIR is HL7's effort to remain relevant. It just may work. Today's massive, monolithic, and preposterously expensive EMRs and EHRs will, they claim, with time become relegated to commodity products serving as backend servers of medical and financial data, living in server farms in basements or even in the cloud. The front ends (the part users see) will be small, cheap, easily-deployed (and replaced) apps. Everybody is talking about apps. Modularity in healthcare software has been predicted for many years yet no one has been able to make it work. The contrarian view -- and it is thus far proven by practice -- is that the data and the workflows are just too complex, and that's why our only choice is the fabulously complex and expensive software monstrosities of today. Who is right? Only time will tell. By the way, one of HL7's inventors back in the 1970s and 1980s was my UCSF grad school professor Dr. Don Simborg. Go Don! Go FHIR! top   AMIA! November 19, 2014 -- Today was the last day of the American Medical Informatics Association's 2014 conference in Washington, DC. I learned a lot, grew professionally, enjoyed seeing what everybody else is working on and talking about what I'm working on, and shook a lot of hands. Among them were legends in the field of Nursing Informatics Drs. Virginia Saba and Kathleen McCormick. Here are their autographs.   top   Et tu, RNs? November 8, 2014 -- Usually the level-headed ones, now it seems even we nurses are infected by Ebola frenzy. Unlike the ignoramuses of fearmongering Fox News and its ilk, we should know better. Kaiser nurses are actually planning a strike! Nov. 12. Are Sutter nurses, too, planning anything like this? If we really want to do what's right for our patients we wouldn't waste nursing resources on a crisis that doesn't exist. We'd wash our hands more. Things like MRSA and C-diff are real and they kill lots of people. And tens of thousands die of the flu every year. Let's urge our patients to get their shots. Half of America can't be bothered. Yet they obsess about Ebola. Et tu, RNs? Say it isn't so! top   Wise Cutting October, 2014 -- I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Abraham Verghese's 2009 bestseller Cutting for Stone. "Cutting", of course, is the slang surgeons use to describe their work. Ethiopian-born and today practising at Stanford, Verghese shares much wisdom. For example, he recites surgery's Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not operate on the day of a patient's death. Much to think about. Much that's profound. top   Talking Sense October 23, 2014 -- A rare voice of reason on Ebola is that of Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician from Massachusetts, recently returned from Liberia. Here he's interviewed by Audie Cornish on NPR. And here is his diary in the London Review of Books. Both are highly recommended. The main takeaway is that Ebola needn't be nearly as deadly as it's been thus far; inadequate health systems are to blame. As with cholera and other hemorrhagic infectious diseases, many or even most deaths could be prevented by access to ORT (oral rehydration therapy). Of course, the story is not that simple, but it's an important one. Thank you, Dr. Farmer, for telling it, and for talking sense amidst the babble. top   Lava Mae October 23, 2014 -- Today I volunteered with the Lava Mae team and their shower bus. The name is a play on the Spanish words for "wash me". San Francisco donated an obsolete-but-serviceable city bus and Lava Mae fundraised the $75,000 it cost to convert it to a pair of showers on wheels. Three days a week, the bus is parked in places where homeless people congregate. For many, it provides a rare opportunity to get cleaned up and feel human again. During the course of a five-hour shift, 40 or 50 people shower -- privacy, lots of hot water, castille soap, fresh towels, and friendly folks. Sometimes the streets of San Francisco are not so harsh after all. top   Hey Obama October 10, 2014 -- President Obama came to San Francisco today on one of his fund-raising tours. We let him know what we want. In no uncertain terms! top   Schmebola October 3, 2014 -- Laurie Garrett is not the only one drumming up Ebola hysteria. Even less rational is the drumbeat from the right-wing fear-mongers. Stephen Colbert has collected clips of insane "reporting" by Fox. Fortunately, there are a few voices of sanity. Here is an article in which Liz Szabo sums up America’s overreaction to Ebola. top   New Vectors September 29, 2014 -- My friend Jason Clark observes that corporate profits continue to trump human health and wellbeing. He writes: Poor diet is now responsible for a greater burden of disease than smoking, at least in America. Food companies must be controlled much as tobacco companies have been. See Collaboration with the New Vectors of Disease that points out that the food industry "...may require tobacco industry-style regulation." Banks must be controlled as well, so that we don't get a repeat of 2008 -- but I think Obama missed his chance to regulate the banks in 2009, and another financial calamity is in the cards. The last five years have been a gigantic lesson in moral hazard, whether in the USA or in Europe Union, the UK, or Japan. Central banks covered up the mistakes and fraud. Energy use and extraction must be controlled if we are to prevent catastrophic global warming (+6℃) by the year 2100. Yet we have been moving in the wrong direction, and public skepticism in the US has actually been growing (probably due to the efforts of right wing think tanks and spending by Koch Bros. and their ilk). So while we won the war against the tobacco companies (mostly because we didn't need to smoke), the fight against Big Food, Big Banks, and Big Energy is harder because these are less discretionary. Tobacco may be addicting for its users, but food, money, and energy are primary to any civilization. Good luck with the soda tax. top   Teachers September, 2014 -- Dying, my friend Heather taught me so much. I am a nurse, trained, licensed, and full of technical knowledge. I have accompanied patients toward the next world, and supported their failing, disfigured bodies en route. I know something about the inevitable sequence of events, the takeaways, the suffering. About her cancer, Heather asked, "Is it serious?" What she wanted to hear was, "No, you'll get over it. You'll be fine." Being truthful, I said, "Yes." I wanted to add, "But there are things we can do to improve the situation." But she had already hung up the phone. What did she teach me? The power of denial. When it's you, I can talk about it all day long. But when it's me, change the subject. I'm not going there. You can't make me. No one can make me. The death spiral can be handled like so many others -- addiction, alcohol, violence -- spinning downward with eyes shut tight. I can be swallowed by it yet refuse to look at it. Of course, denial is one of Kubler-Ross's famous phases: "F* you, f* you all, f* the world, this isn't happening." My father's passing in 2006 taught me a lot, too. He made it to the anger phase, or perhaps it was bargaining... Kubler-Ross is helpful but not the whole story. On his last day he said, "But I have so many projects yet to do." He was good at so many things; so much skill, wisdom, and passion for art, politics and people. All that is gone now. My best buddy Mike on his own death bed got fully down the Kubler-Ross trajectory, all the way to the acceptance phase. He supported us around him who were falling apart, filled with grief at his impending departure. "It is what it is," he taught us. Each died in their own way. Each taught a lesson I'll never forget. top   Ebola Gates September 10, 2014 -- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today announced its commitment of $50 million to support the emergency response to Ebola. At last, we are starting to see the resources this crisis demands. Obama sought $88 million but yesterday House Republicans slashed Obama's requested Ebola funding by more than half. What is needed for an appropriate response? In an article today entitled Ebola Then and Now, Drs. Breman and Johnson in the NEJM say, ...the main priorities should be adequate staff for rigorous identification, surveillance, and care of patients and primary contacts; strict isolation of patients; good clinical care; and rapid, culturally sensitive disposal of infectious cadavers... We also await key virologic, clinical, epidemiologic, and anthropologic descriptions of the epidemic. We hope that this money from Gates and whatever slips past the Washington partisans will make these things happen. top   Ebola death September 3, 2014 -- We have seen another tragic death of a healthcare worker in Liberia, Dr. Sam Brisbane, the Emergency Department chief in the only Monrovia hospital that accepts Ebola patients. The doctors and nurses are paying the ultimate price. In another heart-wrenching NEJM article, A Good Death -- Ebola and Sacrifice the authors debate the limits of their "duty of care toward their patients." And here (Sept. 5) is another story, A Diplomat Infects A Doctor As Ebola Spreads In Nigeria. The diplomat violated a quarantine order and now "[authorities are] not optimistic about the Nigerians' ability to contain Ebola as it spreads beyond Lagos." You can track the spread of this and other diseases on Healthmap, a global disease-tracking service directed by epidemiologist John Brownstein of Harvard University. Here is their tracking of ebola. Press the Play button to see how the disease has progressed numerically and geographically over recent months. top   Corporate genetics August 29, 2014 -- If you're not already a vegetarian, you've probably at least considered it. One of many reasons is ethical, both for the animal treatment and for the industrial genetics, controlled by just a few corporate giants. Here's a way to eat eggs and chicken (and help propel a movement) that's more friendly to the environment, to the animals, and to our bodies. It's described in today's National Geographic: Open-Sourcing Chicken: Breaking Free from Corporate Genetics by Maryn McKenna. It's part of community-supported agriculture. My family has enjoyed Eatwell Farm's weekly food basket for years. Pictured above is Eatwell's proprietor, Nigel Walker. Consider his basket (delivered in San Francisco) for your own household, and the crowdfunding campaign for the planet. top   A nurse hero August 29, 2014 -- The Ebola crisis worsens. Hopes for at least one vaccine (from a San Diego company) are dwindling. The number of reported cases exceeds 3,500. More than 1,900 have died in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Senegal reported its first confirmed case today. "The current outbreak is in both the anglophone and francophone countries, with associated transmission risk implications," writes epidemiologist Pat Olson MD. "This is the only disease I'm aware of historically where the caregivers are specifically identified as those at highest risk." HuffPo: "Deaths Of Ebola Researchers Underscore Urgency Of Their Mission". One of the heroes is RN Anja Wolz, author of Face to Face with Ebola -- An Emergency Care Center in Sierra Leone in NEJM. She volunteers as a nurse and emergency coordinator for the Médecins sans Frontières (MSF -- Doctors Without Borders). She writes, Everyone working in the isolation area must follow the protocols and procedures to the letter... one mistake could be deadly. She continues, The new patients sometimes arrive eight to an ambulance... We've given the ambulance drivers basic PPE (personal protective equipment) to distribute to patients, but they're afraid to get close enough to hand it out... The global health community has taken a long time to react... We need to be one step ahead of this outbreak, but right now we are five steps behind. top   Talking soda tax August, 2014 -- Last weekend I helped staff a sidewalk table at a farmer's market. We harangued the passersby. Some brushed us off. Most were polite and surprisingly well-informed on nutrition. For those who weren't, here were our talking points. Health Issues Soda is the largest source of sugar in the American diet. Liquid sweeteners disrupt bodily metabolism. The liver processes them differently than it does solid sugars. Eventually this leads to diabetes. We have an epidemic of diabetes. Legislative Issues Purposes of the tax: 1. Reduce consumption, 2. Raise $31M (est.) Use of funds (earmarks): 25% public health 40% school district 25% parks and rec 10% special projects related to nutrition education, PE classes, etc. Only drinks with added sweeteners are taxed. Not fruit juices. The tax will be collected at distribution, not at retail sales, so grocery stores will be unaffected. Election Issues It's a "special" tax -- earmarked, not for the general fund. We know exactly how it will be spent. Special taxes require 66% of the vote, not just 50%+1 Our opponent, the Coalition for an Affordable City, is funded entirely by the American Beverage Association. Their canvassers and operatives are paid. Ours are volunteers. The argument that this is a regressive tax ignores the fact that diabetes is a regressive disease. Both soda advertising and sales and diabetes are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods. top   Ebola hysteria August 14, 2014 -- (an open letter) -- I'm disappointed, Laurie Garrett! As a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist and one I have heard and respected on NPR (and a fellow UCSC alumna, too) you appear now to resort to crass sensationalism. In an article entitled You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough About Ebola in Foreign Policy's online magazine, you write things like, "Wake up, fools." That is inflammatory language and does not befit serious journalism. Worse, you appear to conflate (surely on purpose; you are too smart not to know the difference) the severity with the communicability of a disease. Even Fox News takes a more reasoned approach to this topic (Gutfield: Stop the Ebola Hysteria). Here's what the experts say about Ebola: While it's true that the majority of those who catch Ebola die, it's also true that it's hard to catch. The period during which the disease is communicable is while the patient is actively symptomatic and postmortem (the big problem with funerary rites). These are not times during which the patient is likely to travel or even get out of bed. It doesn't have a long, silent incubation like, say, AIDS; recent evidence shows it to be three weeks. It's not airborne. It's communicated only by direct contact with body fluids. Reading your article carefully, I see that it doesn't actually contradict these facts. However, its tone is sensationalist or worse. Is your intent to frighten? I am surprised to see you stoop so, and the same for Foreign Policy, though evidently its mission is to "question commonplace views" (see Wikipedia) and, I guess, provoke debate. But this is irresponsible. Please cool the rhetoric. Stick to the facts. The crisis is real but creating panic does no one any good. top   A garden to tend August 2014 -- I recently read Dr. Victoria Sweet's 2012 recounting of her twenty years at San Francisco's venerable Laguna Honda rehabilitation center, recently transformed from almshouse (the last one in America) to hospital. Her book is entitled God's Hotel, and subtitled, "A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine". The New York Times entitled its review, A Hospital That Gave Its Patients Time to Heal. It's a fascinating concept, rare in today's healthcare system in which the body is an engine to repair... As quickly as possible, and at the lowest cost. Dr. Sweet suggests that -- just as an almshouse is an old and alas discredited model -- an old metaphor, similarly worthy of revival, is of the body as a garden to tend. She calls it slow medicine. Almshouses and gardens lovingly and patiently tended... Dr. Sweet gives us pause. top   Medicare for all July 2014 -- Another hero! Michigan's Congressman John Conyers has reintroduced House of Representatives Bill HR 676, known as Medicare for All. It would establish a long-overdue single-payer healthcare system in this country, along with several more much-needed reforms. Its chances of passage? Zero. But it is the right thing to do. We mustn't give up. Go Rep. Conyers! top   Back in the saddle July 2014 -- For three days in mid-July, I shadowed an RN in Kaiser's Richmond, CA Emergency Department (ED). Having done my RN preceptorship in another Kaiser ED (South San Francisco), it was good to be back in the saddle. Emergency Departments serve a variety of unique purposes in our complex healthcare system. Here are a couple of observations about that. The ED is an essential portal to the hospital, admitting more than half of its inpatients. Thus, its diagnostic and triage functions must be finely honed. It serves as a gatekeeper for services that are often hugely expensive. Decisions are made here that are both medically and economically impactful. It is the only place in our healthcare system that is obliged to deliver care without regard to a patient's ability to pay. This is mandated by the Federal 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA) Act. As a result, the ED often serves as the sole provider of primary care for the medically indigent. These are onerous demands yet at Richmond Kaiser they are skillfully performed day after day. Thank you, Kaiser, for another excellent experience! top   Astro Truth July 2014 -- We are grateful to our San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener for District 8, where I live. He is a staunch supporter of the proposed "soda tax" about which I have written here, here and here. Thanks to his support, this proposal will be on November's ballot in our enlightened City. Meanwhile, our opponent -- Big Soda -- is mounting a deceptive yet well-funded "astroturf" (pseudo-grassroots) campaign decrying the high cost of living here. Taxing sweetened drinks, they say, makes our City even more expensive. Their brochure's headline is about high housing costs, a real problem, but has nothing to do with the poisons they sell to our children. More than half of the metabolism-disrupting sugars ingested by children come from sweetened drinks. Regarding the high cost of the lifetimes of diabetes these products cause they are deathly silent. Thank you, Supervisor Wiener, for telling the truth despite the astroturf. top   Health news July 15, 2014 -- Today I attended a tour of the newsroom of our local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle. It was wonderful to see -- live and in person -- the celebrity columnists we've been reading for all these years. (If only we could resurrect Herb Caen.) We also saw the news team decide what would be in tomorrow's paper... and tomorrow there it will be! For the purposes of this blog, I'd like to point out the Chronicle's excellent, weekly Health section -- "exclusive, comprehensive coverage of health and medicine news, medical developments and studies, biotechnology, genetics, diet, fitness, and exercise trends." Go Chron! top   Meaningful Use Phase 2 July 2014 -- As the second phase of the Meaningful Use (MU) section of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) kicks in, we may at last be bringing under control one of the major culprits for the high cost of health care. MU Phase 2 is doing this by shifting from fee-for-service to pay-for-quality reimbursement models. Background: Meaningful Use is described here. The skewed incentives (and thus excessive costs) caused by fee-for-service are described here. The effect of these problems is described in a beautifully-written New Yorker story by Dr. Atul Gawande, The Cost Conundrum. One of ACA's promises is to control health care costs. That promise is starting to bear fruit now. We are watching! top   Save VistA July 2, 2014 -- I have written about VistA before, and it's time to revisit it, prompted by Paul Berlin's The VA Waitlist Fiasco: VistA should not be thrown out with the bathwater. See also Mr. Longman's testimony before Congress (linked in Mr. Berlin's article) that faults not the quality of the health care provided by the VA but rather the barriers to access to it. Similarly, the VA's VistA EHR deserves none of the blame game being played by opportunistic media and cynical politicians. On the contrary, the rest of the Health Information Technology (HIT) industry would do well -- indeed should be obliged by legislation and thoughtfully-crafted financial incentives -- to follow VistA's example. This would include respecting and implementing data-sharing standards (rather than the silos created and defended by self-serving vendors) and the software quality and longevity that can happen when computer code is open-sourced. VistA has done these things and should be held up as a model for the rest of the industry, not, as Mr. Berlin quips, "thrown out with the bathwater." This is an important message and I hope the buyers and decision-makers don't just blindly make the "safe" choices as, decades ago, it was said that, "You won't get fired for buying IBM." Where did that get us? top   Apple Health July 1, 2014 -- Last month Apple announced its inevitable foray into the healthcare arena. It's a market too big to ignore. The first product is Healthkit. The visible part of Apple's strategy is on the consumer side. This side is perplexing; a few years ago I thought that Google Health would be a winner but it fizzled. Will Apple succeed where Google, Microsoft, and others haven’t? Joseph Kvedar of Connected Health offers an interesting perspective, My Wish List for Apple’s HealthKit Initiative. He says that Apple's strength is design and its weakness is analytics. Both are necessary to thrive in this market; Apple's success is not guaranteed. Another question regards the provider side. Most of the doctors and nurses I know use iOS not Android (but this is anecdotal only -- no flames, please!) What I’d like to know is, what are Apple’s plans for this audience? I have worked on a product for the provider side, gambling on iOS as the platform of choice, and have built NurseMind, an iOS-based checklist app for nurses. It is a standalone but would benefit from integration with Epic, Cerner, GE, etc. Apple could become the user-friendly front-end for us all with a larger ecosystem that supports health data of all types. My prediction? They’re already working on it. top   Vocabulary 101: HIT and ACA June, 2014 -- The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has much to say about healthcare information technology (HIT). It has spawned a new vocabulary. Few would dispute the goals of the ACA: quality improvement, cost reduction, wider inclusion, data sharing, and more. The buzzwords are patient-centered and value-based. The ACA also mandates: Reduction of hospital readmissions Improved access to critical care Community and population health Patient education and engagement Chronic disease management Preventive care Payment reform Worthy goals! But how do we get there? Here is how: Meaningful Use -- incentive payments to healthcare organizations (HCOs) to acquire certified electronic health record (EHR) technology, and to implement it in three stages over a period of years with measurable goals including effective patient data capture and sharing Rural healthcare -- through loans and grants for facilities and technology especially telemedicine, ACA addresses some needs of a long-neglected population Behavioral health -- community mental health centers, psychiatric hospitals, clinical social workers, and others who treat substance and alcohol abuse, suicide and psychological distress, can benefit from EHRs and HIT Strategic planning -- especially coordination of public and private efforts to implement HIT Federal and state coordination -- focusing primarily on consistent implementation of privacy and security that at present vary widely among the states Clinical decision support (CDS) -- HIT can help clinicians be more effective (though it cannot replace them) through alerts, reminders, guidelines, condition-specific order sets and eventually evidence-based practice (that ACA calls contextually relevant reference information). Data sharing (Health Information Exchange, HIE) -- today's data silos -- clinicians, labs, hospitals, pharmacies, health plans, payers and patients -- must have standards, mechanisms and incentives to communicate, and governance to enable and regulate this across geographic and organizational boundaries so that information can safely follow patients to wherever it is needed Consumer eHealth -- provide access to data by patients themselves, empowerment to take action and gain control over their health Patient safety -- HIT has risks as well as benefits; mitigate them and prevent patient harm Long-term and post-acute care -- the care of patients in these settings, especially elders, is often complicated by co-morbidities and multiple caregivers; policy can support development and implementation of HIT to support such care. For any practitioner of HIT, this is essential vocabulary. top   End employer-provided May 1, 2014 -- Why is your health insurance provided by your job? Why not just buy it yourself? The usual claim is that it's a perk that employees appreciate. But the real reason is that companies can deduct it from pre-tax income and individuals cannot. Why do we have this crazy system? It is the outcome of some terrible compromises made 60 years ago, especially the 1954 decision to make employment-based health coverage tax deductible for businesses. (See e.g. this Health Policy Brief). Today's New York Times article, Envisioning the End of Employer-Provided Health Plans by Neil Irwin asks, "Why should quitting a job also mean you have to get a new health insurance plan? Why should your boss get to decide what options you have and negotiate the cost of them? Employers don't get to select our auto insurance or mortgage company, so why should health insurance be any different?" Indeed. Now that the ACA has given us health insurance exchanges from which no one can be turned away, and subsidies for those who could not otherwise afford it, there remains only one reason to continue the present system: that tax deduction. My opinion? Rescind this. Instead, make health insurance premiums deductible by individuals rather than by businesses. Make people buy their own insurance rather than tying it to their jobs. This would be popular. Paychecks could be increased by the amount of the employers' healthcare savings. So I offer a modest proposal: let companies pay their employees what they would have spent on health insurance (fatter paychecks!) and let every American deduct from their pre-tax income whatever they spend on health care. The net change in revenue to the government will be zero. The net change in costs to companies will be zero. Employee mobility and choice will be enhanced. Problem solved. top   ACA in real life April 16, 2014 -- This ACA thing is tricky. For many people, signing up is not so simple. Here is a fascinating account of the issues as experienced in real life: In Their Own Words: Consumers’ and Enrollment Counselors’ Experiences with Covered California, a survey released today by the California Healthcare Foundation. Here in San Francisco we are having an interesting time with the ACA in real life, too. My friend M. ran a couple of sign-up sessions. She says, [We] signed up J. [who] worked at [employer X] for 30+ years and was laid off. She had Cobra then her ex-husband insured her for awhile then she was a self pay. Once the ACA came into being, J. met with [us and we] signed her up! [We] also signed up our bartender L. and her husband. L.'s husband is a taxi driver and neither of them had insurance. And now they do! Of herself, M. writes, I have insurance through the ACA. I was not eligible for "regular" insurance because of a pre-existing condition and had to get my insurance through MRMIP (Major Risk Medical Insurance Plan) and paid almost $800 per month. When the ACA became available, I might have been the first in line! My insurance now has no limits and while I am paying $666 per month, it is less than $800 so I am happy! The successes speak for themselves. Let's hope the voters are listening! top   Go San Francisco April 16, 2014 -- Today I attended a hearing at the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco, my home town. The topic of the hearing was a proposed new tax of $0.02/oz of sweetened beverages. As one of several dozen who expressed their viewpoints on this proposal, I spoke as a nurse, parent, and San Franciscan. Regarding each of those roles, I said what you'd expect: that health care workers are seeing more diabetes and obesity than ever and sweetened foods are largely to blame; that we must protect the health of our children; and how proud I am to be from San Francisco where we lead the nation in forward-thinking public policy. What shocked me was the number of red-T-shirted proponents of the opposing side. Their T-shirts called for "fairness" and their wearers packed the room. Clearly they had been drilled by "Big Soda", the corporate interests that would be harmed by reduced junk food sales. I doubt that a single one of these well-indoctrinated flunkies would have been there without some incentive (to which not one would admit). The fairness claim speaks volumes to the fact that the science of nutrition is to them a cause that's already lost. Nonetheless, they have the big dollars to confuse the voters with a barrage of advertisements. Without that, our inspired legislation would sail through. But there's still hope. My fellow San Franciscans are a smart and principled bunch. I hope they are enough so to not be tricked when the November ballot rolls around. top   New Model March 25, 2014 -- A New Financial Model for Nursing I am a nurse and an informaticist. Combining these disciplines, my mission is to equip myself and my fellow nurses with the best tools available and also with some that are yet to be created. However, the existing financial model for nursing presents a large obstacle. That must change. The dearth of nurse-centric (my term) tools is discussed in a paper published today, mHealth's great untapped potential: Nurses. In the context of hospital finance, nurses are seen as a cost center. Compare this with doctors who "...are considered the revenue-generators and the face of the healthcare institution." Indeed, most of what nurses do -- administer medications, deliver hygiene, nutrition, education, progress assessments, and regular activities such as charting, health status and vital signs monitoring, ambulations and surveillance -- is not directly billed. Rather, these services are bundled into the hospital's room rate. From the point of view of accounting, nursing is a cost and rarely a revenue generator. Thus, there is little incentive to equip us with the tools that would make us more effective. Instead, workflow improvements focus on making us more efficient. In other words, the "successful" hospital gets nursing done for as little money as possible. Yet nursing is essential to health care and, done well, contributes immeasurably to the quality of outcomes. It's time for the model to change. Starving us while pushing us to get more done and to work faster can be detrimental to quality. Hence, I offer a modest proposal. To drive health care economics to perceive nursing as worthy of investment and redesign, we must become a revenue center. Here is one way we could do that. Much as outpatient doctor visits are billed according to a scale of simple, medium, or complex (with fees charged accordingly), the various services that nurses provide should be un-bundled and billed on a similar scale. For example, some patients require in-bed hygiene care. They (or their insurance companies) should be charged for it, on a scale of quick, medium, or lengthy. An obese patient who requires a second nurse or an assistant to position them for a bed bath would incur a higher fee for hygiene service; it is more expensive to deliver. Nursing activities are usually charted at least briefly in the medical record; this new approach would add a charge generation to an existing recorded item much like, say, a CT scan generates both medical and financial data. Like airlines that have been able to reduce ticket prices by unbundling (charging extra for) baggage handling, hospitals could reduce room rates by unbundling the nursing services that come with them. The article states that nurses are "underappreciated... [they] are looked upon as the single largest line item on the balance sheet... hospital IT departments are focused on those and other concerns and leaving nurses to their own devices. They don't have the time or resources to deal with nurses." In other words, we nurses often don't get the tools we need because the investment would not repay itself. It would just add to our cost that is already perceived as high. This could change. The quality of nursing -- given incentives to equip us well -- could make a huge leap forward. It's time for a new financial model for nursing. top   Too HIPAA March 24, 2014 -- Why should I care whether anyone knows my immunizations or can see the x-ray image of my broken foot? I don't care -- help yourself. The truth is that for me and most people, most health care data needn't be kept private. There's nothing secret or even interesting about it... Except to researchers and to my care givers. These people should have unfettered access. Well-intentioned HIPAA safeguards create obstacles that are not justified. In practice, HIPAA reinforces data silos -- provider institutions that keep my data to themselves -- that inhibit sharing. Also, HIPAA grows the mountains of paperwork that they and I must scale whenever care is given. Certain types of data -- psychological health and substance abuse history, for example, listed in detail here -- should indeed be protected, with access controlled solely by the patient, but this is a small fraction of health data. The benefits of sharing data are numerous. These include the ability to conduct population-wide and epidemiological research. Famously promoting such access to and uses of this data is Google co-founder Larry Page who in this TechCrunch piece proposes that we make all health data public. Go Larry! top   Big soda spending March 20, 2014 -- Big Soda is fighting back and spending big. It seeks to defeat San Francisco's pioneering effort to discourage consumption of sweetened drinks -- conclusively proven to have bad health effects -- with a tax. What is it about jobs and faceless corporations that encourages the suspension of morality? How do the people who work there feel about defending products that hurt people? There's something that just switches off in their brains. Remember Big Tobacco? And the lies they told and evidence they covered up? Big Soda is following them down the same path, and spending big to defeat us. They're buying direct mail, live calls, organizers, consultants, and even ads on Facebook (some "friends"!) They have the money; they can confuse voters. But this is just a skirmish. Ultimately the truth will be known. The war is ours to win. top   Who was first? March, 2014 -- I have touted Dr. Atul Gawande and his medical checklists in this blog. But he would be the first to point out that he wasn't the first to apply them to healthcare. That was Dr. Peter Pronovost at Johns Hopkins in 2001. The concept is summarized nicely in this 2009 New York Times article by Robin Henig, A Hospital How-To Guide that Mother Would Love. However, it was Gawande who applied this method on an international scale, and proved that it works. Henig writes, and quotes from Gawande's Checklist Manfesto: The study began in the spring of 2008, and the results were startling. Without adding a single piece of equipment or spending an extra dollar, all eight hospitals saw the rate of major postsurgical complications drop by 36 percent in the six months after the checklist was introduced; deaths fell by 47 percent. "In every site, introduction of the checklist had been accompanied by a substantial reduction in complications," he writes. "In seven out of eight, it was a double-digit percentage drop. This thing was real." The point is that anyone with a complex technical job -- including nurses -- can benefit from this simple intervention. Henig writes: ...the complexities of technology in the 21st century may be best handled by the simplest solution. "We may admit that errors and oversights occur -- even devastating ones," he writes, referring here primarily to his fellow surgeons, a group not known for modesty. "But we believe our jobs are too complicated to reduce to a checklist." We do so at our own peril or, rather, at the peril of our patients. She concludes: What a powerful insight this is: In an age of unremitting technological complexity, where the most basic steps are too easy to overlook and where overlooking even one step can have irremediable consequences, something as primitive as... a to-do list to "get the stupid stuff right" can make a profound difference. Are nurses victims of the same hubris? I am working to prove otherwise. top   How we die March 3, 2014 -- "What is the experience of going though a heart attack? What is that like?" asks Dr. Atul Gawande in this NPR interview about Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author of the ground-breaking How We Die that de-mythologized death. Nuland died today of prostate cancer at age 83. Gawande observes that, until recently, medical students weren't taught about death. "It was a revelation," he says. "You could be direct with people. You could tell them the truth about what happens while being humane... what it means to be a good doctor." Read the book. And applaud these doctors who are making a real difference in how we handle that final phase. top   Big soda February 1, 2014 -- Today I attended a rally organized by San Francisco District 10 Supervisor Cohen to urge a tax on sweetened drinks here in our enlightened City. Overcoming opposition from a huge and well-heeled industry (billions of dollars worldwide each year) we're working to pass a $0.02/oz city surcharge on sweetened drinks (sodas, juices, sports drinks, etc.) As usual, we're ahead of the curve! We have an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Sweetened foods are a direct cause. Especially for kids, increasing the prices of sweetened drinks would discourage their consumption. Part of the reason why these foods and drinks are cheap is the Federal subsidy of corn farming. The sweeteners in sodas and processed foods are made from corn. If we can't stop the subsidy, let's neutralize it with a tax. And if we can't do it nationally, let's do it locally. This can generate $30 million annually to fund physical education and nutrition programs for San Francisco children. Stop Big Soda! Go San Francisco! top   Politics or health? January 2014 -- It's hard to believe that some politicians could be so driven by partisan politics that they would deny health care to their citizens rather than collaborate with the opposing party. Yet it's true. In an unrelenting effort to undermine Obamacare, 25 states have refused expanded Medicaid funding -- funding that would have made health insurance affordable for literally millions more Americans (here's who's left behind) -- to spite Obama and his health care reform. All 25 have Republican governors. Where are the calls for impeachment? Where is the outrage? top   Disaster not January 2014 -- Stop calling the Obamacare technology rollout a disaster! Even Obama parrots that conventional wisdom. If you're a practitioner of technology, you know that it's never like the movies, where everything new and complex works perfectly from the moment it's switched on. The second meme, also unquestioningly accepted, is that government -- unlike private industry -- just can't seem to "do" technology (unless it's the NSA, I guess.) In fact, complex projects are complex no matter who does them, and buggy software happens in every big project, private or public. Compounding the technical complexity was a litany of political issues that made www.healthcare.gov's specification a moving target. A difficult project becomes near-impossible when: Politics dictates an unrealistic schedule, with not enough time for testing. The target was moving -- they didn't even know how many (or which) states their system had to support (34, as it turned out) until quite late in the timeline. The number and diversity of systems to be integrated was large -- insurance companies, state and federal databases, even the IRS -- and without standards for data exchange. There were deliberate sabotage attempts by deep-pocket special interest groups whose tactics included bogus web sites to confuse and frustrate people who sought to sign up. Amazingly, the project had no official budget. In an excellent article entitled How political fear was pitted against technical needs, The Washington Post says, the "...most basic reason was financial: Although the statute provided plenty of money to help states build their own insurance exchanges, it included no money for the development of a federal exchange -- and Republicans would block any funding attempts. According to one former administration official, Sebelius simply could not scrounge together enough money." It's remarkable that it worked at all. Now, with time for testing and debugging, system performance is improving. This is actually a pretty normal technology development and release lifecycle. This blame game is like somebody letting the air out of your tires and then calling you names because you're having trouble giving them a ride. Stop using technology as a political football, and -- ahem, Mr. Obama and everyone else -- stop calling it a disaster! top PS -- The cartoon is by my Dad. Click it to see it full-size.   Wing nuts December 18, 2013 -- The right-wing nut jobs at Fox just don't give up. The drumbeats about Obamacare seem endless. Yes, Obama's promise that if we like our health insurance policies we could keep them was ill-considered. He should have added, "...if they satisfy certain minimum requirements." The surprise was that many didn't. They were junk and should never have been allowed to be sold; canceling and replacing them with honest policies is actually one of the benefits of the Obamacare legislation. Yes, there are bad parts of this legislation, too, e.g. that it leaves in place the cash-sucking fee-for-service providers and the yet-more-cash-sucking insurance middlemen. These are discussed in other blog entries here. It's all in how you spin it, and Fox outspins the White House. The amazing part is that people fall for it. But then, they can't spell, either. top   Heroic senator December 2013 -- One Senator slogs on in the campaign for single-payer health care: Bernie Sanders (D, VT). It's inevitable because we cannot continue as we are. Under this bill we'd have health care for all, reduced costs, and more. Want the details? Read his American Health Security Act of 2013. And don't give up hope... Go Bernie! top   More homeless December 11, 2013 -- My fifth 8-hour volunteer nursing shift for Project Homeless Connect (see previous one.) PHC 52 Results Client visits: 1,950 Volunteers: 887 65 Acupuncture Treatments 115 Behavioral Health (Mental Health & Substance Abuse) 394 Benefits (CAAP, SSI, CalFresh, HealthySF/SF PATH) 124 California State IDs 109 Dental Procedures 252 Employment Visits 175 Eye Exams 16,622 Groceries from Food Bank (in lbs) 70 Flu Shots 115 Haircuts 32 Hearing Tests 15, 80 HIV & STI Testing, Safer Sex Education & Supplies 31 Homeward Bound 1593 Lunches Served 73 Massage Therapy 145 Medical Appointments (including us nurses) 130 Needle Exchange 127 Photo Portraits 131, 706 Prescription Glasses, Reading Glasses 373 Shelter & Housing Applications 220 Sprint Phone Calls 21 Wheelchair & Walker Repairs top   Nurses next December 7, 2013 -- Click on this tweet to see a fascinating interview with a brilliant man, Dr. Atul Gawande. He's one of my heroes, cited often on this page. With video: RT @EricTopol's interview with @Atul_Gawande http://t.co/ZN21pjMk8t @Medscape — December 7, 2013 His checklists have made huge improvements in surgical outcomes, and his writings have enlightened Americans about some of the most bedeviling issues in our crazed health care system. He describes the career he expected, centering on policy, and his subsequent unexpected fascination with surgery. My own trajectory bears small similarities, with my nursing degree and license obtained with the intention of bolstering my health IT credentials. For me the surprise was the astonishing satisfactions -- privilege! -- of working at the bedside, making differences in lives. That people are even more interesting than technology is, in retrospect, not so surprising. In my own vastly smaller way, I hope to emulate him on the nursing side of the hospital bed. Nurses, too, can benefit from checklists (though, surprisingly, it's a harder problem for nurses than it is for surgeons because our checklists describe entire shifts with many patients with widely varied problems, rather than single procedures) and offer a solution named NurseMind. And this blog -- in which I have a lot to say about nursing and health care -- is the writing side of my hoped-for Gawande-ness. Imitation, it's said, is the highest form of flattery. Dr. Gawande, please consider yourself flattered! top   Empire emerging December 4, 2013 -- I used to work at Mills-Peninsula Health Services (San Mateo and Burlingame) when they were independent hospitals. Alas, this is but a fond memory. I remember Alta Bates in Berkeley before it, too, was swallowed, and Children's and Saint Luke's in San Francisco likewise. The gobbling behemoth is Sutter Health, and the evidence is mounting that consolidation drives up costs. The article linked above mentions, for example, "$20 for a codeine pill, compared with 50 cents at a pharmacy" which is not entirely evil capitalism at work, as I have expounded recently. However, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones (discussed here) has fined Sutter an astonishing $46 million (Sutter Health hospitals agree to pay record payment in Department of Insurance lawsuit) for fraudulent anesthesia billing practices. Besides costing us more, the consolidation trend reduces transparency of pricing. (This, too, has been the topic of one of my rants.) What do things actually cost? You're going in for your colonoscopy, say, and want to know the price tag? Good luck! When I had mine a few years ago and phoned three different hospitals for price quotes, only one gave me a straight answer, and that was only after repeated calls, getting handed off from one person to the next, etc. With all this consolidation and emerging empires, it will only get worse. top   Obamacare and me October, 2013 -- I am in that much-discussed 10% of Americans who buy their own health care insurance. (The others get it from their employers (55%), from the government (31%), or don't have it at all (4%) [source: Wikipedia].) A letter last week from Kaiser informed me that my health care insurance policy premium would, starting January 1st, 2014, increase by 113%. That's not a typo. It will more than double from $261/mo to $556/mo. This raises some questions. Can I afford that? Also, I wonder whether my old policy was what Consumer Reports called junk health insurance and Mother Jones called lousy health plans. Kaiser didn't mention the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") but it's clear that my old plan didn't satisfy the new law's minimum standards. Kaiser had been selling me junk. Having always regarded Kaiser as ethical and high quality, frankly, I'm surprised. The good news is that at last they are required to be so. Nonetheless, I now find myself in a quandary. I have not yet decided how to proceed. Stick with Kaiser? Shop around? Perhaps even on the much-maligned www.healthcare.gov web site? Fortunately for us in California, we have www.coveredca.com. What to buy? How much to pay? I'm working on it. Stay tuned. top   Future now September 11, 2013 -- Today I shadowed the charge nurse at an eldercare clinic. I saw the future of eldercare and it is named On Lok. It is based on common sense. First, for both quality of life and for cost control, let's "age in place", that is, stay at home. Nobody wants grim institutional corridors, lousy processed food in dining halls full of strangers, and over-sedation by sullen, underpaid flunkies. Second, center the care around the patient. On Lok calls them participants. Nurses there nurse but they also coordinate care, much like case managers in traditional hospitals but with long-term relationships. Participants and staff get to know each other as they work together week after week, with vans bringing them to and from the clinic, home care nurses coordinating with families for medication administration and safety monitoring. A full staff of medical professionals -- a couple of doctors, three or four nurses, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and several more -- organize their schedules around the participants at the clinic rather than for their own convenience (the opposite of most health care). And third -- perhaps this is really first -- is humanity. Staff and participants build real relationships, getting to know each other's foibles and preferences. In nursing school we were taught not to display affection for patients. At On Lok they hug. When I'm old and near helpless, perhaps demented or otherwise reduced in function, I hope I'm fortunate enough to be cared for by such an organization. On Lok has it right. top   Get social September, 2013 -- Dr. Russ Cucina, who led the implementation of Apex (Epic) at UCSF says social media are here (in healthcare) to stay, and he's right! I've written about this before and here is his slide show about social networking for doctors... and why they need to get on board. Especially good is his taxonomy of levels of participation: Minimum: write, communicate, enforce a social policy Intermediate: engage reactively Advanced: engage proactively Master: promote health and your practice However, I have one peeve, expressed earlier: the patient portals I've seen -- and UCSF's is no exception -- have as their primary objective the goals of the institution; any benefit to the patient is almost a side effect. There is much they could do that would serve patients -- e.g. posting price lists -- but they don't, because it would not serve the institution. Nonetheless, I applaud Dr. Cucina's technology proselytizing -- go Russ! top   Bedside blogger August, 2013 -- My newest hero is Pennsylvania oncology nurse and New York Times blogger Theresa Brown, RN, PhD. Her blog is named Bedside and is in the Opinionator section of the NYT. In it she wisely opines: Nurse staffing ratios are clearly correlated with outcomes. "...people died... because they were in hospitals with overworked nurses." Mutual respect among the members of medical care teams is essential for the safety of patients. "...the silencing of nurses inevitably creates more opportunities for error." Like Dr. Atul Gawande, she decries -- in the final stages of terminal illness -- aggressive care that reduces the quality of life in the small amount of time that remains. "We need our caregivers to talk to us, ...to understand the treatment trade-offs ...about quality of life over quantity." Regardless of where you stand on the importance of Constitutional rights, do not overlook the very real suffering of patients -- victims, and their families -- due to gun violence. "The talk we hear from the gun lobby is about freedom and rights, not life and death... So I have a request for proponents of unlimited access to guns. Spend some time in a trauma center and see the victims of gun violence -- the lucky survivors -- as they come in bloody and terrified. Understand that our country's blind embrace of gun rights made this violent tableau possible, and that it's playing out each day in hospitals and morgues all over the country." When you see these things with your own eyes, theory and ideology fall away and humanity emerges. The best nurses practice a profound humanity, and Theresa Brown demonstrates this superbly. top   Homeless connect August 14, 2013 -- This was my fourth time nurse-volunteering for this worthy cause. We make a big difference for our 5,000 homeless here in San Francisco. The work is fascinating. It's a peek into a world much bigger than panhandlers and sleepers in doorways. Most of its denizens are invisible to us home-full (non-homeless?) folk. A surprising number of them have jobs. In their world, there is not as much misery as you might expect but of course lots of mental and physical illness. As volunteers and nurses we do what we can but the problems are deep. Interested? Some hashtags: #phcsf #phc50 And the official website: www.projecthomelessconnect.com top   Mere apps August, 2013 -- I recently did a demo of my NurseMind nursing checklist app for some technically-savvy people. They were not impressed. I think the disconnect was based on the assumption -- indeed most people appear to assume this: apps should always be simple and obvious. Certainly, there is no excuse for a poor user interface, but it is also true that serious professional tools are necessarily complex. For example, NurseMind has a "Remind Me" feature that adds a task to a checklist. It takes three screens to do this because it needs to know: 1. what task to remind about, 2. which patient it's for, and 3. what time it's due. Simple in concept, complex in implementation. The result? With all those screens, the app looks hairy, over-engineered. Yet there is no way to dumb it down without reducing its usefulness. A corollary of the simplicity assumption: smartphones are not suitable platforms for serious professional tools. That is the obstacle I'm encountering. People expect something trivial and are put off when it isn't. Could this be an effect of McLuhan's dictum, "the medium is the message"? You wouldn't publish the Constitution on fishwrap. And perhaps you wouldn't build serious professional tools on smartphones. My prediction? This conventional wisdom will evolve. It will become clear that smartphones are real computers and run full-powered professional application software. Today, we are still in the early stages of this technology. The low-hanging fruit (appealing yet simple applications) is being plucked. But people like me are working on bigger problems. The development cycle is longer and acceptance is delayed, but the trend is real. Watch as it unfolds. top   Roadmap to Single-Payer July, 2013 -- How do we get there? Pass a Law Obtain a Waiver from the Affordable Care Act Develop a Strategy to Integrate a State-Coordinated System with Medicare Integrate Medicaid and SCHIP with the State System Determine How to Deal with Workers' Compensation Health Benefits Address Other Federal Health Benefits Programs Avoid Being Struck Down on ERISA Grounds Determine How to Pay for the Unified Health Care Program The details are here in this valuable, easy-to-read document, subtitled How States Can Escape the Clutches of the Private Health Insurance System. In a related article entitled Single Payer movement in the era of Obamacare, Daily Kos offers this diagram of how this would look in California. Now that we have a roadmap, let's go! top   The Inpatient Nursing Care Iceberg July, 2013 -- I am a nurse. Nursing is a major cost at hospitals, yet it's invisible. Most nursing is not billed. Rather, nursing is in your hospital's room rate, as maid service is in your hotel's. Your hospital bill shows only the tip of the healthcare services iceberg. This is dramatically evident when you look at what you're charged for an aspirin. Drugstores charge pennies, but hospitals charge dollars. Crazy! Or is it? Much of that aspirin's cost is hidden: the pharmacy that stocks it, the cart that delivers it, the bar-code scanner that confirms the dosage and, especially, the nurse who gives it to you, but only after making sure that this med at this time makes sense in his or her highly-trained clinical judgment, with an explanation and maybe even a smile. Nursing is invisible but essential. On your bill, that overpriced aspirin looks crazy. But look again. You got a lot more than just an aspirin. And thank a nurse! top   Gimme Data June, 2013 -- The story is four years old but its lesson still rings true. "ePatient" Dave DeBronkart is one of those rare, self-empowered patients who took charge of his own data and saved his own life. Healthcare data silos serve the vendors not the patients. In this YouTube video he recounts the saga of managing his near-fatal cancer by claiming his own medical data, and in this one, he "sings" the epatient rap. The rap is funny and laughter is the best medicine, but patient empowerment through access and control of data remains elusive. We can all learn from Dave. top   Simple Dollar May, 2013 -- Rethinking your health insurance strategy? At The Simple Dollar, blogger Trent Hamm has created a resource called financial talk for the rest of us that includes cogent explanations of health insurance options. Especially in the rapidly-changing landscape of Obamacare, concise and timely information like this is valuable and worth a look. top   Data ownership, redux April, 2013 -- As I have discussed previously, patients do not own the medical data that is about them. The providers (the medical-industrial complex) do. I decried this state of affairs and exhorted industry to relinquish this ownership and the patient himself to take more control and involvement. However, the issue is more nuanced than that. I have investigated it further. Here is what I have learned. top   Doc-by-mail? March 26, 2013 -- Should we communicate with our doctors by email? Today iHealthBeat released the results of a recent Wall Street Journal survey of physicians. Results were mixed. Some said it saves time and is easier than calling on the phone. Others complained that it is inconvenient, a data security risk, and that, unlike in-person patient encounters, they are not paid for time they spend emailing. My opinion? I think it's great. I am a Kaiser patient and Kaiser's web portal offers a mechanism for secure, online communication. I would prefer email because then I could keep copies of what's said, but it's better than nothing. A related question: are those "patient portals" a good thing? Yes, in a limited way. It's useful to be able to look up those portions of my medical record that my provider deigns to share, and to schedule appointments without enduring phone tree misery. But they have many flaws. They do not share data with other providers e.g. from one hospital chain to another, or to my local pharmacy. They offer me no opportunity to add data of my own such as immunizations, lab results or procedures from outside their "network". In general, their objectives are less the patient's and more the vendor's. This could be resolved by regulatory legislation. It would require all healthcare vendors to share data. (To its credit, Obamacare does include some baby steps in that direction.) It would put the patient in control of access to that data. It would require storage and management by a neutral third party. And more... This wish list goes way beyond mere email... I can dream, can't I? top   Biggest carriers January 29, 2013 -- Who are the biggest health insurance carriers in California? According to today's Los Angeles Times, this $59-billion market is shared as follows: 40% Kaiser 23% Anthem Blue Cross 14% Blue Shield of California 9% Health Net 5% UnitedHealth Group Nationwide, WellPoint is on top with 14%, UnitedHealth is second with 12%, and Kaiser is third with 10%. How do we feel about this? As the market consolidates, we approach single-payer, which is devoutly to be wished. Also good is that some of these are non-profits; provision of health care must not be secondary to the demands of stockholders. However, without public oversight and transparency, their motivations and incentives remain murky. Concentration of power and whopping payouts to executives of corporations -- for-profit or not -- have no place in a fair and rational health care system. Only when the system is run by publicly-selected (elected?) officials, subject to the scrutiny of we the people, and driven by no motives other than what's best for us insured, will this crazed and bloated healthcare "system" acquire a semblance of sanity and justice. We have a long way to go! top   Not a moment too soon December 31, 2012 -- As part of its annual wrap-up of the year's events in medical care, the Medscape site offers this fascinating summary: 10 Medical Errors that Changed the Standard of Care. We all know that hospitals are dangerous places. As I have discussed elsewhere, one of the big reasons for this is nosocomial infections (bugs you catch in hospitals). Another is errors -- things like wrong-site amputation, pressure ulcers, and medication allergies. Fascinating... and horrifying. The good news is that the industry is paying attention and making the changes that are making these errors rare. And not a moment too soon! top   Partisans December 14, 2012 -- The New York Times reports that states with Republican governors are refusing to set up health insurance exchanges as mandated by Obama's Affordable Care Act. Why? Because they would rather see the Democratic President's Act fail than their citizens receive health care. It's partisan politics at its worst. California has been working on its own exchange for a couple of years and it will come to life soon. It will be good for me because at last I will be able to shop around for my health insurance, comparing prices and benefits. It will be good for millions of uninsured people because, in addition to showing what's available, it will reveal what subsidies and assistance programs there are. When people in those Republican-governor states see how their elected representatives are working against them, let's hope they vote differently -- in their own self-interest -- thenceforth. It's time to end the partisan self-destruction. top   Against the tide December, 2012 -- San Francisco's Doctor H. J. Kim says you're better off if you don't get sick in the first place. But here's the economic undertow: treatment is more lucrative than prevention. He's swimming against the tide... and the insurance companies. He has invested his savings in high-tech diagnostic imaging equipment (the Imatron) that detects coronary blood vessel occlusions before they are symptomatic. This is a proven technology that goes unused because the insurance companies won't reimburse. His gamble is that patients are wiser when it comes to looking out for their own health. A disease is easier to treat and the outcomes are better when it's caught sooner. The number one killer is heart disease. With this technology, its precursors can be detected. Millions of dollars could be saved. Most importantly, lives and suffering could be spared. Sometimes the right thing to do is to swim against the tide. top   Scan this! December 13, 2012 -- Today I got a Heartscan. No, there's nothing wrong with my heart (this was confirmed in the test results) but I wanted to see what this wonderful technology can do. The machine is an Imatron and it does Electron Beam Tomography (EBT), sort of like CAT scanning but with only a tiny fraction of the CAT scanner's radiation. The study that was done on me is called Cardiac Calcium Scoring. It reveals any build-up of calcium plaque in the vessels that supply the heart muscle. This is the precursor for atherosclerosis which, with time, can occlude those vessels, starve the muscle, and cause a heart attack. Indeed, this is the most common cause of heart attacks, and heart attacks are the deadliest disease in America today. Because the radiation is so little, you could get this test annually yet remain within FDA limits. That is a good idea for people with family history of heart disease or other risk factors. The disease could be caught before it turns deadly. Then it could be treated with radical lifestyle modification, statins, angioplasty, or whatever the cardiologist deems appropriate. The point is, prevention is always the preferable option. There's just one little problem: insurance companies don't reimburse for this procedure. That makes no sense; you'd think they'd understand that preventing a heart attack is cheaper than treating it. But insurance company "logic" doesn't work that way. I saw this when I was a smoking cessation counselor: the insurance companies wouldn't pay for smoking cessation but somehow they were ok with paying (a whole lot more!) for lung cancer, emphysema, etc. Similarly, they won't pay for an EBT scan but they will pay to treat a heart attack... assuming the patient survives it. Here's how that "logic" works: a dollar saved today is a dollar added to the bottom line in the current quarter. It makes them heroes because they hit their target even though it means they will pay out a hundred times as much a few years from now. Not to worry... they will deal with that when the time comes. What's best for the patient? Who cares? That's not a factor in insurers' calculations. But it is a factor for me, and for any consumer of health care. In other words, everybody. Perhaps when we finally achieve single-payer health care financing, the short-term "logic" will at last be abandoned. In the meantime, get your Heartscan! In the SF Bay Area: top   Being Present September 12, 2012 -- When she was my professor at USF in 2004, Dr. DorAnne Donesky was one of the best, a clear thinker, effective communicator, and inspiring teacher. In her pathophysiology class I learned how the kidneys and the lungs work together for an astonishingly complex metabolic and chemical balance -- they do much more than pee and breathe -- one of many breakthroughs in my understanding of what goes on in my patients' bodies. Today, Dr. Donesky articulated to me what is perhaps the central value proposition of NurseMind (I couldn't have said it better myself): it supports nurses in maintaining or even regaining their presence. The unwary nurse can be caught up in the swirl of myriad technical tasks she must do in the course of her duties. She could devolve into a mere technician, getting the details handled but losing sight of the patient. For the aviator, the pre-flight checklist is not a how-to-fly manual but it does make sure nothing important is overlooked, and he wouldn't take off without it. Nurses need checklists no less. As the checklist lets the flyer concentrate on the skilled part of flying by tracking those details -- nothing forgotten, everything on time -- NurseMind frees up the nurse's brain (there's that word again) to concentrate on the patient, to be truly present. Presence is to nurses what the stethoscope is to doctors: a tool without which they cannot be effective in their work. Indeed, it is perhaps more central than the stethoscope, which is used to evaluate only one aspect of a patient's health status; when she is present with her patient, the nurse's senses are freed to pay attention to everything about the patient. She attends to subtleties, and her clinical judgement is fully available to see everything that is going on -- responses to therapies, psychosocial needs, life condition. The task at hand may be cleaning a butt, but when she's present, the nurse is looking for much more: mobility, skin breakdown, level of consciousness, body systems status, disease processes, and so on. When the nurse is distracted by work that has grown so technical, or when the "lower-level" tasks such as hygiene are given to lower-skilled workers, opportunities for this all-important presence are diminished. Though unions are not effective in communicating the importance of this tool in nursing work and the gravity of its denial, it is a big part of why nurses strike: they are frustrated by obstacles to being present for patients. Unlike the unions, Dr. Donesky is articulate on the topic of nursing presence. As a teacher, she strives to instill it in her students and fellow nurses. It is, she says, what above all distinguishes nursing work. The surgeon performs the operation, the therapist conducts life-restoring procedures, the attending is heroic in delivering emergency care. But it is the nurse who sees the patient in between those brief doses of attention, and who is with them on the night shift and able -- when she can fulfill her presence -- to see the big picture. She recounts the story of three bricklayers: They labor in the hot sun, placing and cementing bricks with skill and sweat. Of his work, the first one says, "It's a job. Keeps me out of trouble!" The second one says, "It's more than a job, it feeds my family and secures my place in my community." But the third one says, "Look at the fabulous cathedral that's rising on this spot!" Not losing sight of the central purpose of the work is this all-important notion of presence. That's the nurse Dr. Donesky inspires me to be. top   UCSF's APeX Go-Live June 4-8, 2012 -- APeX = Advancing Patient-Centered Excellence = UCSF's implementation of the Epic electronic medical record. This go-live is like changing the engines on an airplane in flight. Its objectives are ambitious and important -- to at last free health workers and providers from paper charts. The information flows that underlie every step of every function are being changed. The impacts on workflows are ubiquitous and profound. In this vast complex of hospitals and clinics, everyone's job is changing. Yet through it all, the beds are occupied, lobbies and corridors are bustling as always, and labs, pharmacies, radiology and imaging units, and other ancillary services are as busy as ever. Dr. Russ Cucina has been leading the preparations for this week for a couple of years. His budget, he tells me, is $116 million -- small change compared to the $2 billion Kaiser spent to convert to Epic -- yet a massive project nonetheless. Each implementation of Epic is so unique that it is given its own name -- Kaiser's is HealthConnect, UCSF's is APeX. For a nursing/medical informaticist, this week is history in the making, not to be missed. The project is a remarkable success and I have the good fortune to see it up close. During this week, I am enrolled in UCSF's School of Nursing's Summer Academic Enrichment Program (SAEP), an upbeat introduction to its advanced practice and research offerings. For me, the best part is the clinical rotations, selected according to attendees' interest areas. Mine was not in a nursing unit but in the Nursing Ops area of the APeX go-live Command Center. The Command Center has the staffing, technology, and aura of ground control for a moon shot. Perhaps a military metaphor is even more accurate, as it possesses a spectrum of clearly-defined job roles and responsibilities in a complex hierarchy with logistics, processes and procedures precisely scheduled. Dr. Cucina's team -- a hundred people or more -- is focused and professional. In my rotations, I shadowed a couple of the Informatics Nurse Specialists (INS RNs) who performed a scout function, rounding from one hospital unit to the next, checking in with the local "super users" (nurses who had received special training in preparation for deployment of the new system) to detect and report software and process issues, and to confirm that fixes are "pushed out" and solve problems as promised. My INSs were Craig Johnson, RN, and Sandy Ng, RN (pictured here with me). Brilliant and hard-working, they taught me a lot. Many thanks to you both, and congratulations to UCSF on achieving a major milestone! top   Silent organs Jan. 2012 -- Having worked as a smoking cessation counselor, I can attest to the difficulty of achieving this particular behavior change. Those who work with alcoholics describe their work similarly. Both behaviors have dire health consequences yet are consummately difficult to extinguish. Part of the reason is that the organs that are damaged by these behaviors are "silent" -- without pain or sensation -- until they are in extremis. If lungs felt pain when their delicate alveoli were damaged by toxic smoke, it would be easier to get people to stop. Finding the sensations unpleasant, they'd be less likely to continue. Assaulted by alcohol, the liver, too, suffers damage silently. Alas, evolution did not anticipate tobacco or alcohol and hence provided no detection of the harm they do. This silence facilitates the denial that perpetuates the harmful behaviors. Compare this to, say, traumatic injury or heart attacks. These things hurt, so people avoid them. In my smoking cessation work, I would depict the processes occurring in lungs, circulatory system, and even the bladder when assaulted by the toxins from tobacco smoke, in an attempt to apply reason to decisions that are unreasonable. Alas, education is a less effective motivator than pain. Those silent organs make it a hard job. top   Lateral violence Dec. 2011 -- In an article entitled No Tolerance for Bullying, the Advance Web for Nurses reports that the ten common behaviors of lateral violence in nurses, as described by Martha Griffin, PhD, RN, CS, director of nursing education and research at Boston Medical Center, Boston, are: non-verbal innuendo, verbal affront, undermining actions, withholding information, sabotage, infighting, scapegoating, backstabbing, failure to respect privacy and broken confidences. Have you seen these in the workplace? Whom of us hasn't? Lateral violence is getting increasing attention in the media. Another recent article at the www.nursetogether.com web site entitled, Ending Incivility in the Nursing Profession posits that lateral violence is often considered normal by nurses and describes it as an "oppressed group behavior". As I have seen, it starts even before the workplace -- it starts in nursing school. I had several experiences of it there. Though I was careful about interpersonal politics, run-ins with the bizarre personalities of some people in positions of power proved unavoidable. For example, one of my teachers, a rather strange man who in his lectures delighted in showing to our class videos of himself dancing in a pink tutu and boasted about the low prices of prostitutes in Thailand, took a strong and personal dislike to me and on one occasion accosted me in the hallway and, unprovoked, threatened, "I could flunk you! I could get you kicked out!" When asked about it in a meeting with the director, he denied the hallway incident and accused me of "having an agenda" though what that agenda might have been he would not say. The director did nothing. The problem lies not only with individuals but with institutions. Lateral violence had occurred, yet no action was taken. As in some hospitals, some nursing schools do nothing to curb it. They ignore it rather than deal with it. From the director's perspective, in a few months I would be gone whereas the teacher would likely be there for years so her easiest action was to overlook his transgressions. The lesson to me was to expect no integrity from nursing institutions. Shame on them. Is it the culture of nursing or the culture of the school that creates the climate of impunity for these behaviors? Does it matter? Regardless of the source, an ethically-run institution should not tolerate such behaviors. I stuck it out, turned the other cheek, and collected my sheepskin. Had I known what to expect, I would have chosen a different school, though it's not clear that another would have handled such issues any better. Lateral violence should be recognized and dealt with. Instead, in nursing we are taught from the beginning to put up with it and that it's even ok to perpetuate it, as such behavior seems not to have consequences. Shame on us. top   Healthcare and advertising Practice Fusion conference, 11/11/11 -- With 1300 other healthcare workers, I sat in a convention hall in San Francisco and observed panelists debate the merits and issues of Practice Fusion and the electronic health record industry in which it appears to be thriving. PF is an advertising-funded, free-to-its-users, web-based electronic health record. The company was founded in 2005 by Ryan Howard, a youthful and energetic entrepreneur with big and timely ideas. Five years ago I had coffee with him, having just discovered word of his startup not far from the more conventional electronic medical record company where I was working at the time. I was interested to learn about the direction he was taking and the technology he was fielding. The marriage of healthcare and the web was, I believed and still believe, made in heaven. Instead, what I experienced was a blizzard of tech-talk buzzwords -- disruptive technology, web-enabling, silo-liberating, blah blah -- nothing about medical data standards, medical office workflow redesign, new paradigms for medical data ownership, and so on -- the meat of the issues that such a system would surely challenge. The tenor of the conference was much the same -- lots of fluff, a half hour of music by a gospel choir, feel-good cheerleading, not much content. Mr. Howard himself delivered one of the pep talks. In it, he claimed that PF's patient population was bigger than Kaiser and Sutter Health's (our two largest Northern California hospital chains) combined. While it may be true that portions of 22 million patients' medical charts do reside in PF, these patients are not PF customers, they are PF users' patients. Unlike Kaiser and Sutter, PF provides no medical care, nor does it employ thousands of doctors or possess thousands of hospital beds. The comparison is vacuous. Regardless of flaws in PF's product, is the underlying business model -- and its potential effects on healthcare data management -- sound? Is a database attached to a web server the right place for my medical history? Is the Internet the best way for my caregivers to share and access it? What effect does this model have on costs and especially on outcomes? The central feature of PF's business model is that it is funded by advertising, not by users. The doctors and clinics that entrust their patients' data to PF pay nothing for it. This surely has some effects on the nature and content of the service PF provides. This raises several questions. First, is it a strategy for long-term survival? Every Internet user knows that before long, banners and advertisements "disappear". Our eyes learn to ignore them, and we rarely click them. There are even software solutions as popup preventers and flash suppressors to expunge ads from the screen. If the ads don't work, can PF survive? If the business model is not viable over the long run, how will PF survive? As it is privately held, we cannot know for sure how it is faring financially, but my understanding is that today, after six years, it still runs not on revenue but on venture capital. The deeper issue, in a medical decision-making setting, is whether advertising is ethical and appropriate. Does it skew treatment decisions? A heatedly-discussed precedent is the advertising of pharmaceuticals. The businesses that advertise make calculations about advertising in any medium, be it television, radio, newspapers, billboards, or the Internet. In any medium, the concern is return on investment. If advertising fails to increase sales, it will not be done for long. Thus, the mechanism must be that well-placed advertisements do indeed skew clinical decision-making toward the advertised products. Is this how we want our treatments chosen? Any discussion of advertising must recognize the real product; what is being sold to whom. In this regard, the Internet is much like television. As is television to its audience, PF is "free" to its healthcare provider users. The payers are the companies that advertise. These are the real customers, and what is being sold to them is the attention of the users. So, in a sense, PF's product is not an electronic health record but the attention of its users, all those people in that convention hall. Consequently, PF's product design and support decisions are driven less by the needs of patients, providers, and the exigencies of medical care, and more by what yields the biggest bang for the advertiser's buck. Does PF mine the data? For example, when a diagnosis of diabetes is entered, might an ad for a related product such as Metformin be displayed? I don't know and I bet PF isn't telling. For strategies such as PF's, improvements in clinical outcomes and reductions in health care costs are at best a side effect. Is this how we want our health care data stored and managed? Despite my doubts about Mr. Howard and his company, I believe that the answer is yes. With HIPAA-compliant confidentiality safeguards, storage on Internet-connected servers enables wide access to patient data. It can spare us redundant tests, and eliminate the siloing of data in the file cabinets and computers of doctors' offices and hospitals. Dearest to my heart (as is well known to readers of this blog) is technology's potential to put the patients themselves in control of their medical data. The trend is toward patient empowerment in medical decision-making. If PF moves this industry toward those goals, I applaud its efforts. top   UC is in trouble September, 2011 -- In the California budget crisis, most of the University's State funding has been cut. On a personal level, I am saddened and dismayed by our State's repudiation of its noble 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. To it, I owe much of my own academic and professional career. In the bigger picture, to it our State owes much of its economic ascendancy to one of the world's largest economies, an achievement that is now threatened. Our renouncing of this proud promise to our own future began in the '70s with Jarvis-Gann and accelerates today with mean-spirited anti-tax movements of Grover Norquist and his demagogic Tea Party offspring. The stepwise gutting of the mighty UC system is both tragic, putting top-flight University and graduate education beyond reach of ever-growing numbers, and short-sighted, reducing the growth of technology and culture, diminishing our prospects for a prosperous future. This is a sad time indeed. top   Greedy nurses? September 23, 2011 -- (to the San Francisco Chronicle) Dear Editor -- I am a California nurse. Yesterday, 23,000 of us went on strike. Passers-by honked and waved and were almost universally sympathetic to our cause. If you are one of the few doubters, this letter is for you. The nurses' unions are among the few that have not yet been eviscerated. Unions should be strengthened, especially in the light of the growing chasm between rich and poor, ballooning corporate profits, and what's been called the "Bush Economy." Without unions there would be no middle class. In the Bush Economy, profits and tax giveaways go to banks that do not lend and corporations that do not hire. Gut the unions and the fate of the middle class is sealed. Yet some have called us "greedy nurses." There was even a full-page ad in yesterday's SF Chronicle claiming that nurses average salaries of $150K. In our dreams! No nurses I know earn six figures, and the one or two I've heard about do it by working overtime hours to exhaustion, a path to certain burnout. The most important thing to know about nursing work is how hard it is, and how many, many years it takes to acquire that level of expertise and instinct that does, truly, save lives. For more than any other reason, patients go to hospitals for nursing care. Yes, they have procedures like surgeries and therapies, but part of why I prefer nursing to doctoring is that while the doctor gets ten minutes with the patient, the nurse gets an entire shift. That's where real healthcare happens. The personal, emotional, and professional commitment nurses put in to make this happen is unlike any other job. You can't imagine this until you've been there. There is also a surprising amount of pure physical hardship. Here are a few quips from the culture of nursing: What nurse hasn't dealt (many times) with a "code brown"? And what do you call a nurse with a bad back? Unemployed. Seriously, the number of workplace injuries -- especially needle-sticks in the age of AIDS, and back injuries from lifting today's epidemic of obese patients -- is shocking. This work is not just emotionally draining, it's dangerous. And you would begrudge nurses their vacation days and health care benefits? So when I hear talk of "greedy nurses" -- especially from corporate executives like Sutter Health's CEO Pat Fry who awarded himself a $2M bonus this year -- my stomach turns. The real challenge -- while applauding the nurses for holding their ground -- is to unionize the other professions and redirect some of this nation's wealth back down from the top. And if ever you get sick and then well again, thank a nurse! Thanks for listening, Dan Keller top   Hear us roar! September 22, 2011 -- Today was the strike as planned. Only about 5% of the union nurses crossed the picket line. We are nurses, hear us roar! California Nurses On Strike Nurses at dozens of Calif. hospitals strike top   Strikes, yikes! September 18, 2011 -- In three days (on the 22nd) thousands of Sutter Health nurses will go on strike and in sympathy with them will go thousands more Kaiser nurses. These are two of the largest hospital chains in Northern California. The nurses are defending hard-won employment contract terms (some health care benefits, some sick and parental leave benefits, etc.) Especially pertinent in California, the only state with mandated nurse:patient staffing ratios (e.g. 1:5 in med-surg units) is participation in the staffing decisions, which, too, Sutter hopes to take away. This is important; it is one of the ways that nurses advocate for patients. Numerous studies have made clear the impact of staffing ratios on health care outcomes. Of course, there are two sides to every story. The business of hospitals is a tough one (though Sutter is having record profits this year). Medicare reimbursements are being reduced, making it harder to "make the numbers". My friends in hospital management are stressed out (though not top management whose pay has seen handsome raises). Particularly problematic from the hospitals' point of view is the EMTALA Act that requires hospitals to provide care to anyone needing emergency treatment regardless of ability to pay. This means that the hospitals provide care for the medically indigent for free -- a tough way to run a business. Nonetheless, I guess it's obvious where my sympathies lie. My CNA dues are paid up and I'll be out there on the picket line. top   Trimming the fat September 15, 2011 -- Does Livermore have the most slender people? Does nearby Los Banos have the fattest? Or does it have the most bariatric surgeons? When you're selling a hammer, does everything look like a nail? Are high-tech healthcare choices driven by doctors who are also businessmen? (I have written on this topic previously.) See the data for yourself at the California Healthcare Foundation's interactive map, released today. The hardest question: what should we do about it? top   New fraud September 1, 2011 -- Though retired now, my brilliant and inspiring grad school professor Dr. Donald W. Simborg continues to expound and illuminate. He writes with authority, having served as co-chair of the expert panel of a study group related to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) that looked at healthcare fraud. He says, "Healthcare fraud is the most lucrative thing you can do if you're a crook... We're talking about a $250 billion problem." In this month's J Am Med Inform Assoc (2011 Sep 1;18(5):675-7), he decries new techniques for fraud that have become enabled by modern electronic medical record (EMR) systems. These include: Identity theft of provider IDs and patient IDs. This enables the fabrication of fraudulent claims. Record cloning -- another way of producing fraudulent claims. Copy forward -- data that is entered ahead of its actual collection, e.g. vital signs entered the day before the patient visit. Single-click notes -- templated notes entered prior to the patient visit and subsequently left unaltered. "Make me an author" -- an EMR feature that enables a physician to substitute their signature attribution for that of the person who actually entered a note. Unaudited edits -- another "feature" that enables retroactive editing of a note without logging the amendment. Some vendors even enable the suspension of audit trail logging. Evaluation and Management (E&M) code optimization -- Some EMRs suggest "upcoding" (changing the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) service code from which billing is generated to a more expensive one) of E&M codes, and indeed with the increasing use of EMRs we have seen a rise in Medicare billings. I applaud my professor's call for better industry oversight. EMRs can do much to improve quality, continuity, and research in healthcare. They must not also serve as tools for fraud. top   National Health IT Week September 12, 2011 -- Today is the first day of the Sixth Annual National Health IT Week, September 12-16, 2011. Information technology is essential to healthcare, a fact our technology-worshipping country has been paradoxically slow to recognize. To see why, as always, follow the money. Our for-profit insurance company middlemen have a sole incentive: their bottom line. The long-term benefits of effective IT systems -- things like quality, continuity of care, population-wide and longitudinal data collection and analysis -- generate no profits. Hence, they aren't reimbursed. Hence, we don't have them. Most US hospitals still lack comprehensive electronic medical record-keeping. Those that do have them cannot -- indeed prefer not to -- share their data. Well-intentioned (mostly governmentally-funded) efforts at Regional Health Information Organizations have gained little traction and in some cases shut down. So the primary objective of this Health IT Week is "...to educate industry and policy stakeholders on the value of health IT for the US healthcare system." It's astonishing and disheartening that we still have such a long way to go. top   Doctors and nurses are not enough July 19, 2011 -- Today I shook the hand of yet another spirited and passionate public servant, Fiona Ma, California Assemblymember from my University's San Francisco district. Her work spans many issues but for me the one of most interest is, of course, health care. Ms Ma's cause celebre in this arena is advocacy for Hepatitis B -- education, screening, vaccination, treatment and San Francisco's Hep B Free program. This is yet another ground-breaking collaboration between government and health care providers. We do a lot of that here; we are leaders! Health care services are not enough. Public advocacy is another essential component and people like Ms Ma make it happen. top   A good guy at the top July 14, 2011 -- Today I shook the hand of another warrior for the people: Dave Jones, California's new Insurance Commissioner. He describes himself as an activist. What he doesn't say in this article but did say in his speech today at the Public Policy Institute of California is that he is a whole-hearted supporter of California's Senate Bill SB810, our best hope for a single payer healthcare system. (I've written lots about it in this blog.) Inaugurated in January of this year, Mr. Jones hit the ground running, doing what he can with the limited powers of his office to restrain the insurance companies. For example, he has enacted in California (modeled on the federal reforms) limitations on the "overhead" that insurers can incur, requiring them to spend $0.80 of every premium dollar on actual healthcare (hospitals, doctors, medical and ancillary services and providers.) To everyone but the employees and shareholders of Anthem Blue Cross, that's still 20% of pure waste but it's a step in the right direction. Go Dave! top   You'll be safe here July, 2011 -- Some nurses are miracle workers. With the Mom and the doctors all but resigned to getting the baby out by C-section, L&D RN Diane says, "Let me see what I can do." She talks to the baby (still inside the Mom) and lets it know that it's safe to come out. The three of them work together, developing a deep trust, and often this enables the baby to be born the natural way after all. Is this miracle work? Or the product of decades of experience, and the non-quantifiable but undeniable successes that can be attained with intuition and spirituality? Where are the randomized, double-blind, peer-reviewed, reproducible, gold-standard studies and clinical trials? Combining these two approaches -- science and intuition -- gives patients the best outcomes. It's eye-opening to see it in real life. top   Google Health is dead June 24, 2011 -- From an announcement on Google's official blog, we learn of the end of a wonderful experiment. Google Health was a great idea -- empowering patients with control over their own data -- that we applauded. Alas, the business model was weak; not enough users (and no insurance companies) saw enough value to get on board. Its primary virtue was the real life implementation of a Continuity of Care Record -- something that we sorely need. The value was there but it was subtle. In a fascinating analysis, Missy Krasner observes that the challenge (that proved insurmountable) was the dominance by "tethered" health care records, those operated by health care providers (hospitals, doctors' offices, and tertiary and ancillary providers such as outpatient services and labs). The drawbacks of these data silos is that data is not shared among providers, hindering patient mobility. Providers don't want to lose business by enabling patients to go elsewhere. Nonetheless, PHRs (personal health records) such as Google's must ultimately prevail. KevinMD agrees with me: Google gave up on electronic personal health records, but we shouldn't. This will happen only with guidance from regulators. Obama's health care reform does this... alas, too late for Google. top   Cancer cures? June 2011 -- My friend Dick Karpinski writes about "known but unused cancer cures" at his Cure Cancer Now Home web site. Though I'm not qualified to comment on the specific cures he discusses, I do not doubt that the unprofitable ones get little attention. Thanks, Dick, for raising our awareness. top   Woo Hoo! We're Winning! May 2011 -- Senator Leno's Single Payer Health Care Bill Passes Health Committee... California OneCare: Full Care, For All, For Less -- check it out! top   Record Profits for Health Insurers May 16, 2011 -- Want to know how things really work? Follow the money! Insurers Take In Record Profits as U.S. Residents Spend Less on Care -- translation: in these times of economic stress, we're living with less yet continuing to enrich these parasites. Some experts believe the companies are trying to raise premiums before stricter regulations are enacted under the federal health reform law, such as a requirement that companies cover individuals with pre-existing conditions. Translation: they, too, can read the handwriting on the wall. Big change is coming -- a vast bureaucracy to be dismantled! -- and not a moment too soon. top   Foreshadowing things to come? May, 2011 -- When a B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building at 9:49 a.m. on Saturday, July 28, 1945, killing 14 people, the injured were rushed to Bellevue's Emergency Room. A nursing student at Bellevue at that time, my mother writes: As students we always said, "If ever I'm in an accident, take me to Bellevue ER." The ER staff had an amazing ability to respond to the very serious situations that walked in or came by ambulance and to the bizarre, too. Bellevue had (don't know if it still does) a museum -- a glass cabinet -- of things removed from the bodies of patients who showed up in the Emergency Room. One was a fairly large steel nut removed from a guy who was working in a garage on the night shift. He had screwed it on to his penis which swelled with blood so he couldn't remove it. Fortunately, he wasn't circumcised, so the multi-talented ER doctors circumcised him and in the process were able to unscrew him. There were no private rooms at Bellevue, but each ward had a room for a V.I.P. or someone with a highly contagious serious disease. The less fortunate patients were housed in the enormous wards with dozens of others. There was one who repeatedly got out of his bed and peed in the corner. When asked by an angry staffer, "Where do you think you are?" he got himself a psych consult by answering, "Grand Central Station!" In retrospect, this doesn't seem like an unreasonable reply. It was an enormous ward with 60 to 80 patients. There were beds on both sides and down the middle. There were no call bells. To get a nurse's attention to get a bed pan (or to be on the schedule for when bed pans were passed out from a wheeled stretcher where they were lined up on top), a patient had to get out of bed and find her. Tough luck for the patients who were too sick to get up! If a Catholic patient died and was not on the "On Serious" list (a code meaning that he or she would need last rites) New York City could be sued. Patients got scared when they were put "On Serious" as a precautionary measure but we did it anyway to protect ourselves. On the night shift -- even if it was our first time in that ward, and even if we were working it alone -- if an "On Serious" patient died, it was our fault. If the patient was not breathing we would lift their eyelid and shine a light to check for a reaction. Living patients were not happy to be so rudely awakened. Then we rushed to the head nurse's desk to check the patient's card to see if he or she was "On Serious" and above all to see whether the patient was Catholic. If they weren't Catholic, we could breathe a sigh of relief and simply fill out an accident report. The duty of the student was first and foremost to protect the City. When the night nurse supervisor made rounds during our shift, everything better be in order. (Remember, this was WWII and there were few nurses available; most were in the war zones. Students' education was work-centered, not education-centered.) There was an intern who could be called to the floor if necessary, but he had been answering calls half the night and had conked out in his room. The students hesitated to call him unless the patient was really in trouble so we rarely did. No one thanked us for our heroics but we knew and so did our patients. That was an unforgettable time. top   Non-Profit in Name Only May 1, 2011 -- In a letter today to the San Francisco Chronicle, I wrote: Thank you for Stacy Finz's article in today's newspaper exposing abuses by for-profit professional schools. These practices are not limited to the for-profit schools. They also take place in the nominally non-profit schools. I am a recent graduate of Oakland's Samuel Merritt University's school of nursing, another that preys on people hungry for employment. SMU is a cash cow for its parent company, the Sutter Health hospital chain. According to its alumni literature, last year it earned $10 million profit on revenue of $40 million, a 25% margin. It is non-profit in name only. So where do profits go in non-profits? Much of that leftover cash is funneled into the pockets of exorbitantly-paid executive staff -- profit by another name. And where does all that cash come from? We ABSN (Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing) students pay $52,000 for a year of poor-quality instruction. For example, Diana Jennings, the instructor of the so-called Nursing Research class (included in the curriculum to satisfy the accreditation checklist; Jennings delivered only one lecture in the entire semester) brightly proclaims, "Everyone gets an A!" In addition to the high tuition, fees such as $420/semester are charged as "Lab Fees" for a lab that is almost always locked, and poorly stocked. In the few hands-on practice sessions that are offered, we must share and re-use supplies like bandages because the school doesn't buy them in adequate quantities. Thanks for helping to expose an exploitative industry. top   California Universal Health Care Act April, 2011 -- California Senate Bill 810 -- It's back! And coming up for a Senate Health Committee hearing on May 4th. (Thanks again, Mr. Leno!) Let's save money (yes, our state budget is deep in the red) and cover everybody at the same time. How? Eliminate the middle man! Let the State be the single payer. It works in Massachusetts. Why not here? Though I'm no longer a student, I continue to support the goals of the California Health Professional Student Alliance (CaHPSA) and participate in its calls to action. I have telephoned my State Senators and let them know how important it is for California -- along with the national health care reform -- to move forward. Our "system" is a disgrace... but we can fix it. We must fix it. Go SB810! top   Beware the 3 Ds April, 2011 -- "Beware the three Ds," my mother's nursing instructor intoned: "Drugs, drink, and doctors!" It was 1944 and America was at war. The experienced staff nurses were abroad, serving in the U.S. Nurse Corps, providing medical care for the troops. Judith -- my mother -- had just graduated from high school and, newly-admitted to nursing school, was pressed into service to fill the need here at home. She writes: In 1944, we were student nurses at Bellevue, a 3,000-bed hospital in New York City, on First Avenue. Described as a city within a city, its many buildings stretched from East 26th St. to East 30th along the East River. It had a prison, a mortuary, and even its own State Supreme Court. Bellevue could not refuse anyone. If you were a patient in a private hospital and couldn't pay your bill, you were shipped off to Bellevue, no matter how sick you were. That was sometimes referred to as your "last ride". It was a catchall for paupers, psychotics and criminals. Bowery bums loved to winter at Bellevue, finding some way to get admitted and, once admitted, would figure out how to make their thermometers spike a fever, assuring them of a warm bed for another night. Bellevue was one of the world's great teaching centers. It was a coveted learning ground for young, new M.D. interns (the third D!) and for student nurses, too. With the seasoned nurses gone, the student nurses filled in, taking classes during the day and covering on the wards at night. It was hard work. Students were assigned to medical and surgical wards, immense rooms with 60 to 80 patients, none of whom we had seen before. On a good night we had a nurse's aide, but often we were alone with all these very, very sick patients to care for. At Bellevue, we treated the worst cases of the worst diseases. Nurses who had trained at Bellevue proudly wore their organdy caps with the ruffle all around and were respected wherever they worked. top   Quantity or Quality? April, 2011 -- Though it's already more than a year old, this article (from August, 2010), is such a valuable explanation of a vexing issue that I'm linking it here. One of my favorite writers on health care, Atul Gawande in the New Yorker, observes that modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions — and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left. A good read on an important topic. top   Words! March, 2011 -- As a programmer and nurse, I can tell you that "coding" means something awfully different to each! top   Start Something February 24, 2011 -- At my alma mater UCSF, I attended a symposium on innovation in California. Innovation is our strength (Silicon Valley!) and it will create jobs and revive our economy. The symposium was a star-studded event. The speakers included one of my heroes, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. Sitting next to me was Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel prize winner. Another speaker was former California Governor Gray Davis (whose hand I shook). He said, "If you're born in the east, you grow up and you want to join something. If you're born in California, you grow up and you want to start something." Indeed I do... Here it is (Powerpoint, of course)... Wish me luck... top   Government = Inefficient? February, 2011 -- The conventional wisdom says that government-run = low quality and inefficiency... But is that true? Not so fast, says Mike Doyle of Medsphere, a promoter of the Veterans' Administration's electronic health record system, VistA. I had an opportunity to learn and use VistA on one of my clinical rotations and found it excellent. Furthermore, the VA itself is a success story. In his well-researched blog, Mike writes: By all rights, after all, the VA should offer the worst care anywhere: it's a gigantic, unionized bureaucracy, micromanaged by Congress and political appointees, and beset by an uncertain budget, an aging infrastructure, and a legacy of scandal. That it nonetheless outperforms the rest of the U.S. health-care system, on metrics ranging from patient satisfaction to cost-effectiveness and the use of evidence-based medicine, suggests that much of what we think we know about health care simply isn't true. The VA is not the only example. Medicare proceeds with 3.9% administrative overhead (acccording to the New England Journal of Medicine's "Cost of Health Care Administration..."), compared to private insurer's 15-35% overhead, depending on whose numbers you use. For example, the Physicians for a National Health Reform's peer-reviewed studies say 31% of our health care dollar is spent not on medical care but on the overhead and profit of the private insurers (Anthem, Blue Shield, Aetna, Humana, etc.) And while it's true that the plural of anecdote is not data, my family's experience with Medicare has been excellent. VistA works well and I found it easy to learn and use. Furthermore, the source code is in the public domain (open source) and stands a good chance of setting the standard for the industry. It makes electronic health record software affordable. Even Fox News has gotten behind it. Nonetheless, Doyle cites research that says: Astonishingly, 20 years after the digital revolution, only 1.5 percent of hospitals today have integrated IT systems like the VA uses, and those that do often find their commercial software programs to be buggy and inadequate. It's time for an end to the myth of quality and efficiency in private sector health care! top   Mind = Brain? February, 2011 -- Occidental cultures generally hold that the human identity resides somewhere behind the eyes -- in the brain. For example, the Mind-Brain Identity Theory says that, "...mental states are identical with brain states." Not so fast, say I. Damage to the brain is often associated with damaged thought processes. For example, Oliver Sacks "...throughout his career as a physician and neurologist, ...studied patients who exhibited 'a strange mixture of [mental] strengths and weaknesses.' His patients had autism, William's Syndrome, Tourette's Syndrome, amnesia and other conditions." When the brain malfunctions, thoughts malfunction. However, this does not preclude the involvement of other bodily organs in personal identity and thought. Our Western notion that identity, thoughts, and feelings reside exclusively within our skulls is at best dubious, more likely erroneous. Ask anyone who has undergone an amputation. As nurses we are taught that phantom pain is real pain but more than that the amputee will tell you that part of themselves -- not merely an extremity -- is gone. Another way in which our sense of self encompasses more than the contents of our heads becomes clear with the deaths of family and friends. In a real and profound way, with each such passing we lose part of ourselves. We exist not just in the context of our bodies but also in terms of the people who know (or knew) us, our accomplishments, personalities, and personal histories. As our isolation increases, our place in the world is diminished. There are vocabularies for discussing this, for example Carl Jung's collective unconscious in which we exist not only individually but also in community. Nearly every Latin love song refers to the coraçon -- the heart -- as the locus of emotion. Eastern religion and medicine recognize a dozen or so chakras -- pathways for flows of energies in the body -- located along the spine, in the ovaries or prostate, the throat, and so on. In our own western culture we speak of visceral emotions and gut feelings. Our skin crawls; we know things in our bones; and so on. The point is that all these organs participate in the formation of our consciousness and our emotional state. My hypothesis here is that the kidneys are especially central to emotional state. In nursing school, we learn that they regulate fluid and electrolyte balances. These in turn drive cognition and mood. When the kidneys do not sufficiently remove ammonia from the bloodstream, we become demented. When they imperfectly regulate our bodies' acid-base balance, we become acidotic or alkalotic and thus agitated or lethargic. We think with our brains and with our kidneys. The distinction between mind and body is a paradigm of our western culture, at times useful but at other times driving us to discussions of placebos (with which the mind bluffs the body), etc., that emerge as corollaries. We believe this dichotomy deeply. But what if it weren't entirely true? Another model might serve us better. What might it be called? The Thinking Body? Placebonics? Kidneys 'r us? We do think with our brains... Also our hearts, guts, skin, bones, kidneys -- the mind is the whole body! What a concept! top   Capped! February, 2011 -- California RN license #790869. At last. top   Planning for prevention February, 2011 -- Healthcare dollars are spent in two fundamentally different ways and should be collected and managed accordingly. These are: Preventive and predictable health care expenses: our children's immunizations, prenatal care, our routine diagnostics (PSA tests for older men, mammograms for older women, etc.), and our periodic checkups. These things are completely predictable from the moment we're born -- indeed, from the moment we're conceived -- through our entire lives. The costs should be budgeted and funded for every one of us without exception. We should all pay into a system that provides them, and there is no reason for anyone to earn a profit from it. It's a public service like law enforcement and fire departments and should be funded and provided similarly, by publicly-funded, local community clinics. There is no place in the preventive/routine care part of a rational health care system for for-profit insurers. The incentives in such a system are wrong and result in a system that's unfair and that delivers inadequate care. Costs of casualties and illnesses (unpredictable): should be managed as insurance in which risk is shared across an entire population. The services are best delivered (as they are today) by for-profit, centralized, high-capital-cost, acute-care facilities (hospitals and specialized service units such as dialysis centers, imaging centers, clinical labs, psychiatric offices, and hospices). Anyone to whom a casualty or illness happens would be covered, and everyone would pay in to the fund equally (the "triple mandate"). The fund would reimburse the service providers with preference and incentives for those that provide the best care and the lowest prices. This is just common sense. None of this would prevent anyone from buying any other health care service, or from using the provider of their choice who might be "outside the network". Anyone can buy whatever they want if they have the money. The Canadians have forbidden this, saying that it would create a two-tier system and perhaps they're right. Alas, we already have a two-tier system in the USA, and it's ugly: those with and those without. Obama has taken some baby steps toward an overhaul... A good start. We need that and a whole lot more! top   Penny-wise... January, 2011 -- ...And pound-foolish. Health insurance (mine is Blue Cross) will not pay for medicines if they are over-the-counter. They pay only for prescription medications, those that are ...licensed medicine that is regulated by legislation to require a prescription before it can be obtained. The term is used to distinguish it from over-the-counter drugs which can be obtained without a prescription. For example, my eye doctor prescribed Ocuvite, shown by controlled, randomized studies to delay onset of age-related macular degeneration. My Dad had that; if I live as long as he did, I will probably get it, too. There are some treatments (not cheap) but of course it would be better to delay or not to get the disease at all. But Blue Cross won't pay for Ocuvite because it's not a prescription drug. Why is that foolish? Because health insurers save a nickel today and spend ten dollars later; their business model requires that they be stingy regarding prevention but generous regarding cure. I also saw this when I worked as a tobacco cessation counselor. My patients could not get reimbursed for the few hundreds of dollars cessation classes cost, but when they cost tens of thousands later for their lung and other cancers, heart disease, and COPD... no problem! Why is it so? These short-sighted policies are demanded by how corporations work: they must show continually-rising short-term profits. This is done by minimizing expenditures in the present quarter. Higher costs in the future? They'll deal with that when the time comes. This is the behavior that's good for Wall Street, but it's bad for our health. The incentives are wrong. This is why -- by definition -- for-profit companies should not be in the business of making health care decisions. What would be a suitable alternative? Single-payer, of course! top   Pinned! December 19, 2010 -- Today was nursing school pinning (that's what nurses call graduation.) Now I have the "N" in "RN"... To get the "R", I will soon take the NCLEX, the State Board exam that gets me my license to actually do nursing work. What's remarkable is how little we new grad nurses know about how to do the work nurses do... Especially given the $52K/yr we've spent to get here. Hospitals are reluctant to hire us because we are nearly useless. Hiring us is a big commitment because hospitals must make such a big investment in us (lots of mentoring and initially low productivity) to get us up to speed. It doesn't need to be this way; nursing education could be effective. My school was mediocre but (and I have evidence for this) they all are. But that's a topic for a different discussion... For now, I am just celebrating. Hurray for pinning! top   Men at work December 12, 2010 -- In one week I will graduate from nursing school. At long last! The ceremony is called "pinning" and is a throwback to the old days when nurses wore little white hats and making tight hospital corners mattered more than patient care. I am a new nurse, entering this as a second (well, third, but who's counting?) profession. I bring the perspective of experience in other work realms, and I have less tolerance for mediocrity than my fellow nursing school students who are half my age. More to the point, I have little tolerance for mediocrity in my nursing school faculty whom, to their chagrin, I perceive as peers (indeed, most are younger than me.) Evidently there are many like me: older men entering nursing as a second profession. "Nearly 40 percent of students studying to become registered nurses are over age 30... candidates who already have four-year degrees," [from the New York Times, Nov. 7, 2010: 45, Male and Now a Nurse]. I'm not 45 but 56, and have both a four-year degree and a Master's, but the idea is the same. My nursing class exactly matches that in the NYT article: 15% male. What the article doesn't mention is the darker side of this trend: education to produce degrees like mine (the school sells BSNs) is now a big business. My school (which I'd better leave nameless for now, since I'm still in its clutches) is -- let's be magnanimous here -- lackluster in the quality of its teaching though expensive ($52,000/year not including books and supplies) and very profitable ($10M profit on $40M gross revenue). Fortunately, the quality of the education is largely irrelevant to the quality of the nurses entering the profession. Most of what we new nurses need we will learn on the job, not in the classroom. In other words, we emerge from this expensive and unnecessarily fractious process knowing almost nothing of what we'll need to know to be good at our work. New nurses need lots of nurture from the institutions that accept them before they become useful. This raises several important questions: how can nursing education be made effective? How can new nurses ("nurses eat their young") come up to speed without getting beaten up along the way? Why does this matter? Because we want good health care. Given that the 3.2 million RNs now in practice form the vast majority of the health care work force, we need them to be good at their jobs and to get there quickly. The present dysfunctional system of producing new nurses is ripe for an overhaul. That will be good for us all. top   Dear diary (excerpts from my clinical journal) In nursing school, the most valuable part of the process we undergo is the clinical rotations. The clinicals are where the rubber meets the road. Here, we work with live patients in local hospitals. Each semester, we are assigned to a different type of nursing unit so that by the end of the program we have had a taste of med-surg (the most important), peds, SNF, ICU, oncology, emergency, psych, telemetry, a community clinic, and perhaps others. These are fascinating, difficult, and stressful. Some of us kept journals. I did. Here are my writings. Feb. 18, 2010, Kaiser, med-surg, Santa Clara: At the same time exhilarating and challenging is the access granted by nursing work. In ordinary human interactions, there isn't permission to poke and pry... More Feb. 23, 2010, Kaiser, med-surg, Santa Clara: Infection transmission precautions are driving me nuts. Those bacteria have us whipped... More March 3, 2010, Kaiser, med-surg, Santa Clara: I remember distinctly a comment made by one of my clinical instructors from the first time I went to nursing school about four years ago. She observed that I was having difficulty finding my "rhythm"... More March 17, 2010, Kaiser, med-surg, Santa Clara: Nursing education is focused on the hospital setting with its enormous resources and fine-tuned protocols. What about nursing in other environments? ... More July 8, 2010, O'Conner Hospital, monitored (telemetry) med-surg unit, San Jose: Listening is a challenge. I could not hear 9121's heart!... More July 17, 2010, O'Conner Hospital, monitored (telemetry) med-surg unit, San Jose: Still have occasional moments of, "OMG what (of the hunded possible tasks) should I do next?" but they last only five seconds... More Aug. 23, 2010, Veteran's Administration Hospitals, Palo Alto and Menlo Park: After all the flack in the press about the sorry state of affairs at Walter Reed hospital and the right-wing excoriations of our government's purported neglect of our brave men and women formerly in uniform (i.e. veterans) it was eye-opening to see how well, in fact, they are cared for... More Aug. 30, 2010, Veteran's Administration Hospital, Menlo Park: I'll be blunt: the time doesn't feel very productive... More Sept. 13, 2010, Veteran's Administration Hospital, Menlo Park: A couple of brief but illuminating patient interactions have given me pause. In the first, Mr. F., one of the more belligerent and combative patients... More Sept. 29, 2010, Veteran's Administration Hospital, Menlo Park: On a personal note, at the risk of appearing unprofessional, I'd like to add that I felt at least a twinge of disappointment at my inability to "connect" with this patient... More Nov. 25, 2010, Emergency Dep't, Kaiser, South San Francisco: Nursing is, of course, about people. As a student on this rotation I had the luxury of being able to take time to listen... More top   Brainy nurses December, 2010 -- Nurses carry information in their heads -- a lot of it! How do they remember everything they need to remember? They use their brains! This sounds silly but what nurses mean by the term "brain" is the piece of paper they carry in their pocket on which they keep track of the zillion patient and task details their job demands. (Sharon McLane, MS, MBA, RN-BC, and now PhD of the University of Texas at Houston documented this in her 2009 PhD dissertation, Understanding Nurse Created Cognitive Artifacts. "Cognitive artifact" is a fancy term for that piece of paper.) I collect brains and you can see my collection in my brain museum. Each brain is in its own way clever and meets its nurse-creator's memory needs. Fascinating... and brainy! top   Emergency! December, 2010 -- This month I am completing my clinical rotations with a stint in the emergency room of a major local hospital. I have seen some awfully sick people walk in that automatic door or, worse, roll in on gurneys and wheelchairs. It is sobering to see suffering, and gratifying to occasionally be able to do something about it. Health care is like no other work in the world! My friend and fellow UCSF alumnus Mark Wandro blogs about his lengthy and impressive experience as an emergency nurse. Also fascinating is the Emergency Nurses Association web site. Good reading -- give them both a visit! top   Public option, public sector November 19, 2010 -- Today I shook the hand of another of my heroes, California State Senator Mark Leno. He is a man of principle! Part of my University (UCSF, where he spoke) is in his district. Contrary to the loathsome and self-serving declarations of such right-wing demagogues as Grover ("shrink government to the size we can drown in a bathtub") Norquist, the public sector, says Mr. Leno, is critically important. Not only because it is the best mechanism for delivering such services as public safety and justice, but because without it there can be no revival of the private sector. It creates the foundation upon which growth can occur. Around the world, the countries where growth is limited are those with little infrastructure. And (dear to our UC hearts) public education is a big part of any robust infrastructure. An educated middle class has been an essential part of what has made California the world's eighth economy. Mr. Leno has been instrumental in the revival of Sheila Kuehl's Senate Bill 840 (which, placating his monied friends, Governator Schwarzenegger twice vetoed) as SB 810. Don't be fooled by the misinformation, Mr. Leno tells us -- no one is asking for "socialized medicine". Rather, what we need is health care that continues to be privately provided but publicly funded. Eliminate those middlemen, the health insurance companies, whose profit was $12B last year yet added no value. Like me and a lot of people, he is convinced of the need for a single payer. This is the only way to contain costs. With Jerry Brown in the Governor's seat, Mr. Leno will reintroduce this bill. Will Mr. Brown sign it? When he campaigned with Bill Clinton, Mr. Brown was a knowledgeable advocate for a single payer system. As Governor he will no doubt feel pressure from the right and how he will respond is anyone's guess. Expect, said Mr. Leno, a huge disinformation campaign from the insurance companies. We must innoculate the public with education about single payer -- "Medicare for all" -- an idea whose time has come and yet another opportunity for California to lead the nation. Guided by visionaries like Mark Leno, we have hope once again. top   Change the world October, 2010 -- Calling all angels! Well, not all angels, just the right angel... an angel with vision, insight into the challenges of health care, and that burning fervor to change the world. Well, not the whole world but an important part (nursing) of an important part (health care) of the world. What needs to change about nursing? It's a hard job (no surprise) with lots of details to keep track of (ditto) and a zillion tasks nurses must remember to do (ditto ditto) yet they get no help (whoops!) No one teaches (or has even thought much about) how nurses can/should do time management and no one has provided tools to help with this... until now! What do angels have to do with it? Our development time and marketing efforts could benefit from angel funding. Are you the angel we seek? Get in touch... Let's do well while we do good. Join the team and together let's change the world! top   Want a hero? Or a checklist? October, 2010 -- What do you want from your doctor, heroism or checklists? Say you're going in for surgery. Do you want your surgeon to exhibit "expert audacity"? Here's how Atul Gawande describes it in The New Yorker, Dec. 10, 2007, in The Checklist: We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do -- in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine -- more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity... Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that's what rankles many people. Or would you prefer that your surgeon follow a checklist as did the pilot Sullenberger who brought down his failing passenger jet in the Hudson River without losing a single passenger? He said he was no hero but was well-trained and following the procedures. We Americans love to say of our advanced medical care that we had the best doctor... That our doctor is a genius... That a good outcome is thanks to that skill, that extraordinary person... But this is not a model that scales well nor is it conducive to widespread good outcomes. Only a few people get to be worked on by that genius. And if evidence-based medicine is truly at work, then the "genius" is simply following the best evidence, which every well-trained practitioner should do. (Here is Gawande in 1/29/2009 NEJM, A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population.) Dr. Gawande says that medicine should be more like aviation -- no pilot would fly without first running through his pre-flight checklist, and then using yet another checklist for each situation and task that arises. Checklists are so valuable that he has even made a checklist of steps for making checklists. Of Sullenberger he says: ...it wasn't flight ability, but instead adherence to discipline, and teamwork... Because there were checklists, and because everybody used them... The heroic part of that flight was not the flight ability of Capt. Sullenberger, it was the willingness of the entire team including the flight attendants, who... acted through their protocols. For my doctor I don't want a hero. It's time to end the culture of expert audacity. I want a well-trained expert, equipped with the best evidence... and the best checklists! top   Environursing October, 2010 -- Environmentalism and nursing? What's the connection? Turns out it's a strong one, and we learned about it at the Children First: Promoting Ecological Health for the Whole Child conference at UCSF this month. The intersection of environmentalism and nursing includes: ...nutrition, education, socio-economic status, exposures to toxic chemicals, and access to preventive health care. If you're a nurse -- you care for people -- how can you not be an environmentalist? Join us at www.enviRN.org. top   Don't call it compliance September, 2010 -- As nurses, how do we perceive the work we do? This semester, my clinical rotation is in mental health ("psych") nursing. One of the terms of art is patient compliance -- are they taking all their pills? But we don't call it that any more. Now the preferred term is, in the spirit of patient empowerment, adherence. In other words, we prefer to think they take their pills by choice. In her heart of hearts, though, the psych nurse will admit misgivings about mental health care being little more than polypharmacy. Oh yes, and we don't call them patients anymore, either. Now they're clients. Perception is everything. top   Shoppin' spree? August, 2010 -- The irony in this pair of billboards speaks for itself. Thank you, Friends of Irony. top   Double mandate? Make it triple! August, 2010 -- When we were arguing about health care reform, much was made of the proposed double mandate. This is the idea that the obligation is on both sides -- insurance companies could no longer turn anyone away, and every health care consumer (you and me) is obliged to buy in. For example, the Huffington Post says, in A Double Mandate for Health Works for Europe: "Most European countries mandate that every citizen must buy insurance coverage. They also mandate that every local insurance company who wants to do business in the country must sell coverage to any citizen who applies for that coverage. Health screens are not allowed." This is eminently fair and reasonable. The system works best when everyone participates. But I propose we take it one more step. I propose an even higher degree of fairness -- a triple mandate: everyone must be covered, everyone must participate, and everyone should pay the same. Being young and healthy should not entitle you to a special price. Most people are or were once young and healthy. If you're sick you shouldn't have to pay more. Sooner or later most of us get sick, at least somewhat. Sure, some people won't be able to afford it. So subsidize them with a government program. We already have government programs to help people who cannot afford health care; the cost of these programs would stay the same or perhaps even decrease due to the larger coverage pool. But this is a detail. Here's the point: We are a nation of realists; I help my neighbor knowing that someday I may need the favor returned. I do not deserve punishment for my health misfortunes and neither do you. Sharing the risk makes us all stronger. Sharing it equally is fairest. And a system that is truly fair would be something for us all to be proud of. Push for a triple mandate! top   Control your own medical data? Try it! May, 2010 -- I am one of those "empowered" patients. I labor under the illusion that I retain some control of my medical data. Try it yourself -- run this little experiment: Next time you get an order from your doctor for a routine lab test, have him or her write the following instruction on the order: "Send results directly and only to patient." Make sure your mailing address and fax number are included. Then find a lab that will perform as ordered. Good luck! Here in San Francisco I went to three different retail clinical labs before I found one that was willing. And even so it took some arm-twisting and remonstrating to convince them that yes, they should do exactly as the order said... no, they should not send the results to the doctor... yes, they should send them (only) to me... yes, it's legal... yes, my insurance (Blue Cross) would reimburse as usual... no, it's not a violation of anything, and... it shouldn't even be unusual. Yet it is. Get with it, people! Take possession of your own data! Insist on it! Of course you should share it with your doctor. But it should be yours to share, in your control. Our being empowered patients shouldn't be unusual. It's time for the labs (and everyone else) to get used to us! Postscript (two weeks later): Surprise. The lab completely ignored the instructions and sent the test results to the MD. I have filed a HIPAA violation complaint. Here are the instructions and forms on the web site of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services in case you, too, need to do this. Stay tuned... I'll record any progress right here on this page. Post-postscript (two months later): The Dep't of Health and Human Services replied to my complaint. They pointed out that the law says that clinical lab test results must be provided only to the licensed health care provider who ordered them. So the lab, in defying my instructions was "right"... it's the law that's wrong! Not only does the patient not own the data, he/she doesn't even have the right to see it unless the MD assents. Disempowerment gets no worse than that. Broken laws? Let's fix them! top   Conformity and stethoscopes May, 2010 -- Who is reluctant to try something new? It's not whom you'd think. Is it the oldsters, set in their ways? Guess again! I recently called ThinkLabs with a technical question about my new digital stethoscope. The phone was answered by Clive Smith, the inventor of the device and CEO of the company. We proceeded to have an animated discussion about his product and its users. They're not whom you might have guessed: younger, more experimentative healthcare practitioners. On the contrary, said Mr. Smith, it's the older ones who are willing to try something new. Stethoscopes are a powerful cultural icon. Wearing one around your neck is a kind of badge of honor. Its appearance is determined more by tradition than by function. Like Leo Fender's cutaway electric guitar body from whose shape few have dared deviate in 50 years, stethoscopes must appear just so. I can confirm Mr. Smith's statement. My nursing school classmates all wear Littmanns. They wouldn't dare try something slightly non-conformist even if it worked much, much better. Indeed, none of my classmates have even asked to try mine. Yet the ThinkLabs is much, much better. Imagine this: a volume control! You have an obese patient and you can hardly hear anything through that flesh? Turn it up! What a concept! By the way, Nurse Jackie wears a ThinkLabs. This sounds like a commercial but really what I'm describing is the freedom of being an old-timer. The youngsters don't feel free to experiment. They are afraid to look different. Mr. Smith faces a challenging obstacle. top   Do nurses compute? April, 2010 -- The California Healthcare Foundation reports in its Survey: Nurses Divided on Whether EHRs Have Improved Patient Care that half of nurses say that electronic health records have had "a positive effect on the overall quality of care." And then there's the other half. My own experience -- now that I've worked with yet another EHR (Kaiser's HealthConnect by Epic) on a few clinical rotations -- is that nurses do spend an awful lot of time in front of the computer. This could easily lead to the perception that it takes away from time with patients. But is that true? Didn't they also spend a lot of time charting on paper before there were electronic charts? And isn't it also true that record-keeping and access is far better than it ever used to be? Especially with bar code readers and the electronic Medications Administration Record (MAR) the chances for errors are substantially reduced. So in this writer's humble opinion, computerization has helped make nursing care a lot better. Or at least half of it. top   Addiction phobia April, 2010 -- Working my clinical rotations this semester I saw first-hand in the suffering of a patient our medical system's dysfunctional approach to pain management. This young man suffers from a gastrointestinal condition that is painful and cannot be cured. Yet his doctors will not give him ongoing opiate analgesics, the only thing that enables him to get through a day relatively pain-free. They do prescribe these drugs for his acute episodes but then they send him home with non-opiates that, he says, "...do not touch the pain." Evidently, the concern is that he might become addicted. But I wonder, so what? He has the disease for life, why not the treatment for it, too, for life? I cannot second-guess the doctors but I can commiserate with his frustration. top   Krugman nails it again March, 2010 -- In another New York Times op ed entitled Health Reform Myths, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman points out three myths that bedevil proponents of health care finance reform. Lots of people believe: President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of G.D.P. currently spent on health. The proposed reform does nothing to control costs. Health reform is fiscally irresponsible. Go read the article if you've fallen for any of these. top   Recognizing diabetes March, 2010 -- We fledgling nurses spend a lot of our time dealing with diabetes. It's grown to be an epidemic. I'm studying for an exam. There will be questions about how to recognize it in our patients. When you read the symptoms of a disease, sometimes it seems like every disease has every symptom. But anyway, here goes... Hypoglycemia Hyperglycemia Fasting Blood Glucose <60 >100 Onset rapid gradual Skin cool, pale, diaphoretic warm, dry, flushed Mental status disoriented, comatose awake, lethargic Disposition shaky, dizzy, agitated hungry, blurred vision Respiration normal deep, rapid, fruity odor Pulse normal or fast fast, weak BP normal or high normal or low Seizure common uncommon Urine   polyuria Thirst   polydypsia Treatment PO or IV glucose SQ or IV insulin, K+ Recovery rapid (minutes) gradual (days) top   A new stethoscope... and a sermon March, 2010 -- I have decided to buy a fancy new stethoscope, one of the digital ones with ambient noise rejection and other cool stuff... hurray! Maybe now those elusive murmurs will be a little less elusive. Clive Smith, the CEO of the company (Thinklabs) that manufactures it has a spirited blog. He writes: ...let me make a prediction on healthcare reform. A bill will be passed, one way or another. Due to the special interests that have written this bill and influenced both parties, no "cost cutting measures" will be truly effective. Congress will mandate coverage of pre-existing conditions and many more people will have insurance coverage, which is a good thing. However, with no real cost cutting, insurance companies will skyrocket premiums, arguing that Congress forced them to provide all that new coverage. That the insurance companies wrote the laws will be forgotten. Opponents of reform will argue that it was an abject failure due to skyrocketing costs. That these opponents of reform prevented cost-cutting measures to pass will be forgotten. The people will complain that they wanted healthcare reform and cost cutting and instead, they got increased premiums and healthcare costs even more. That they, too, were supposedly opposed to healthcare reform and wanted no government intervention to contain costs will, too, be forgotten. What will not be forgotten, by those who have tried to promote true healthcare reform, will be that they were painted as the enemy, they were maligned, and they were blamed for the outcome when the mob, influenced by special interests, attacked them for their efforts. What will not be forgotten is that trying to reform healthcare is a losing political position and it's not worth risking one's neck... the politicization of this discussion, the hysteria, the lobbying money, and the abject ignorance of The People... resulted in the destruction of all rational thinking and analysis. We will all be the worse off for that sad outcome. I like this guy. And I'm buying his product. Health care financing may be a mess but at least I'll be hearing my patients' insides better. top   Blame the Lawyers Feb., 2010 -- My friends on the Right love to blame the lawyers. Who doesn't? In an Oct. 1, 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times entitled Tort reform is the healthcare debate's frivolous sideshow, Michael Hiltzik writes: You know the argument: Disgruntled patients, goaded on by unscrupulous lawyers, file frivolous malpractice lawsuits and walk off with millions of dollars in undeserved awards granted by teary-eyed jurors. Doctors respond by practicing "defensive medicine," ordering lots of unnecessary tests to cover their behinds. Bingo! Medical costs hit the stratosphere. But then he goes on to dispel this myth. The truth is that medical liability isn't a big driver of health costs... the cost of malpractice litigation, in court and through defensive medicine, [is] roughly 2% to 3% of all U.S. healthcare spending. So the tort reform "talking point" is indeed a "frivolous sideshow." Instead, let's focus on where we can make real change. top   Turkeys voting for Christmas Jan., 2010 -- (Cross-cultural note for us Americans: in the UK, the traditional Christmas dinner is turkey.) A fascinating article by BBC contributor David Runciman entitled Why do people often vote against their own interests? reviews writings by Drew Westen and Thomas Frank about the psychology of many American voters: ...it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help. In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%. ...Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford? Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies? The answer does not increase my respect for the decision-making processes of American voters. Westen's explanation is paraphrased: ...stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious. "Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him." Paraphrasing Frank, the article observes: ...voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests. The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking. Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest. The article is part of a series entitled Turkeys voting for Christmas... How apt. top   The Incentive that Works Dec., 2009 -- The benefits of prescribing electronically ("e-prescribing") are numerous: Fewer errors Fewer avoidable adverse drug events Decision support Detection of drug-drug interactions Improved record-keeping Faster communication with pharmacies And so on... Indeed, e-prescribing is low-hanging fruit; many MDs have adopted this practice and prescribe this way... But not for the above reasons. The true incentive? Money, of course. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has implemented a program named MIPPA (Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act of 2008) giving eligible e-prescribers an incentive payment of 2% of their Medicare Part B charges in 2009 and 2010. All that quality-of-care stuff? Do-no-harm stuff? Nah! It's the green stuff that gets it done! top   Doctors? Businessmen? Or Both? Nov., 2009 -- Reform of how we pay for healthcare is the hot topic of the day. I myself have expounded on this with excoriations of the health insurance industry. Blue Shield, Anthem, Aetna, Humana and their ilk are now everybody's favorite whipping boys and it's not undeserved. The relationship of these companies with their customers is by definition adversarial. They do their job "best" (in terms of profit-making) when they succeed in denying health care. But there is another, less obvious villain driving our costs up and our outcomes down: doctors who are also businessmen. I am not the first to recognize doctors' conflict of interest. It has been documented in widely-circulated articles such as NPR's October 8, 2009 story, "The Telltale Wombs of Lewiston, Maine". Another article on the same theme in June's New Yorker has also gotten a lot of attention. Named The Cost Conundrum, it observes that when MDs are businessmen, health care gets expensive. Indeed, there is an entire science devoted to the analysis of patterns of consumption of medical care and their effectiveness in terms of cost and and outcomes. It's termed utilization review and is naturally a topic of great interest to health care payers. Why has it failed to bring to light these maldistributions of service? Why is this issue not part of today's debate? The NPR story describes how "...in Lewiston, 70 percent of its women would have a hysterectomy by age 70." The reason is not an unusually high rate of uterine disease; a now-famous longitudinal study revealed that numerous communities around the country have anomalous rates of certain medical procedures. The study showed "...how bizarre the distribution of care was. People in one town would get their hemorrhoids removed five times more often than people in another town only 30 miles away. Ditto with mastectomies, prostate operations, back surgery." How are these anomalies explained? It is doctors, not patients, who drive consumption of medical services. Doctors who are paid for each service they render ("fee-for-service") tend to recommend those services to their patients. In other words, money. This is not to say that doctors are intentionally exploiting their patients but it is clear that their objectivity and judgement is colored by their own financial interest. "The U.S. health care payment system rewards doctors for taking action and doing procedures. This reality is so powerful that it hasn't just changed the individual behavior of doctors... the specialties themselves have changed, bending like flowers to the sun, moving toward the source of heat." How should we solve this problem? Neither article goes so far as to propose a solution but I will. I propose that our healthcare payment reform legislation include language to do away with medical fee-for-service. A primary care doctor who also offers (and orders) ancillary services or tertiary care has, by definition, a conflict of interest. Why is this a revelation? Why hasn't it always been prohibited? What should we do about it? Here's what: put all doctors on salary instead. They should be paid the same no matter how many (or how few) hysterectomies they perform. Of course this is politically impossible. The AMA and others would rebel and not mildly. But I have seen other countries (e.g. Italy where I just came back from living for a year and was most impressed by the quality and equity of the healthcare system) where it works just fine. For me personally, this conundrum has an additional dimension. Among my closest friends are several doctors. Some of them are quite entrepreneurial and thriving. They work hard and well, and their ethics are impeccable. They would not appreciate the sentiments I express here. In conclusion, it can be said only that the healthcare debate is convoluted indeed. top   Gullibles, Libertarians, Partisans, Shills Sept. 3, 2009 -- In a letter today to the San Francisco Chronicle, I wrote: Dear Editor, In raucous town halls around the country, opponents to proposed health care reforms seem mostly to fall into four categories that I label as follows: The Gullibles -- listeners to right-wing talk radio screeds and outright fabrications such as Palin's death panels The Libertarians -- those who oppose government in any form or role and view its actions (except perhaps military and law enforcement) as intrusion and theft-by-taxation The Shills -- militant loudmouths delivered by buses paid for by Big Pharma and Big Insurance The Partisans -- those who hope to see Obama fail at any cost (to these people, expense, outcomes, and quality of life are irrelevant... all that matters is Republicans "winning") Every opinion deserves to be heard but now let's recognize the uninformed ones for what they are, move on, and get the job done! Thanks for listening, Dan Keller PS -- They didn't publish it. Maybe next time. top   Jackie Speier Gets It! Sept. 1, 2009 -- This evening, at a UCSF event to welcome our new Chancellor, we were privileged to hear a brief talk by Congresswoman Jackie Speier. Her congressional district includes UCSF (where I am Pres. of the Graduate Division Alumni Association). She welcomed Chancellor-elect Susan Desmond-Hellmann and talked about the hot-button issue of the day: health care reform. Of course, the issue is not so much health care as health insurance. The insurance company practices of rescission (canceling your policy when you get sick) and pre-existing conditions (if they suspect you might eventually need health care, they deny your application for coverage) must, Speier said, be forbidden. She also supports the "public option" -- the watered-down compromise (a proposed government-created non-profit health insurance provider, a distant second to genuine single-payer health care) but perhaps the best we can get -- on which President Obama is backing down, under pressure from the richly-funded Big Pharma/Big Insurance lobbyists and from the partisan, conservative talk show-driven agitators. Rescission: no; pre-existing conditions: no; public option: yes. Speier gets it! top   How Do Italians Pay for It? In 2008-2009 I am living in Italy and learning a lot. Italy has much to be proud of, including a health care system that in recent years has improved in quality to match that of nearly any western country. In addition to its quality of care, the Italian system is commendable for its equality of distribution; for all Italians (and often foreigners, too) most procedures are covered. Tests and prescription drugs demand copayments but primary care and inpatient care are free. The Italian National Health Service was established in 1978 by law number 833 (the Riforma Sanitaria) whose preamble states that health care is a human right and is to be delivered equally to all citizens. However, the way public health care in Italy is paid for is less fair. Most of its funding comes from a payroll tax that is regressive; regular employees bear a disproportionate burden. The other sources of funding are the income taxes and value-added (VAT) sales taxes collected by the federal and regional (regioni) governments. Equity of taxation is one of the most contentious issues in Italian public life and is, in my judgment, the one most responsible for the resurgence of power of the right wing and Berlusconi. From the provider standpoint, too, the medical system is far from generous. Compensation received by physicians and other providers is based on capitation and is low relative to that of providers in most western countries and also relative to workloads. Doctors here work hard! Neither is the economics of Italian health care kind to hospitals. Public funding of health care is doled out by the regioni. The Lazio regione (which includes Rome, where I live) has for the past decade run an annual health care budget deficit of 1 billion Euros. Hospitals are paid according to diagnosis-related group (DRG) formulae, as is done by Medicare in the USA. Today, hospital budgets are shrinking and several of Rome's most prominent are closing for lack of funding. For example, Forlanini hospital, one of Europe's most technologically-advanced and, in recent years, the recipient of substantial infusions of capital for equipment, is slated to close in March of 2009 for lack of operating funds. My friend Maura who is a nurse on a respiratory rehab unit there says she no longer has most of the drugs in the usual formulary to dispense to their patients; patients are receiving inferior care due to the cutbacks. Another is San Giacomo hospital (including its reknowned orthopedics unit) in the center of Rome, which just last year had a 15 million Euro upgrade. (In the photo: Sept. 25, 2008, police presence at a sit-in to save San Giacomo. Note the protest banners.) There is considerable outcry in the Italian press but recent changes in governmental priorities make these and other closures appear inevitable. This is a great detriment to the healthcare options available to Romans and Italians nationwide. For an even less sympathetic view than mine, see Tanner (Cato Institute), The Grass Is Not Always Greener: A Look at National Health Care Systems Around the World (but see below for my opinion on those Cato whack jobs.) For overviews of the economics of health care in other countries, see Healthcare Economist. For Italy in particular, see Health Care Around the World: Italy. top   Google Health knows when you're sick November, 2008 -- Google has discovered that it can detect influenza outbreaks and other "...snapshots of what's on the public's collective mind" by mining aggregated search data. Using this data, they are several days ahead of the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) in detecting disease trends. In other words, when people get sick, they search for terms like "flu symptoms" and many more. And Google is paying attention. You, too, can stay atop these trends via Google trends. Watch flu trends and more... As Google says, "Google search isn't just about looking up football scores from last weekend or finding a great hotel for your next vacation. It can also be used for the public good." Do you agree? Draw your own conclusions. top   How Do Americans Pay for It? March, 2008 -- In America, most health care insurance premiums are paid by employers. Workers receive them as a job benefit. There are several problems with the American scheme. The first problem is that the cost to employers rises with each new employee they hire. (Increasingly, this cost is also born by the employee who today is often asked to share it, but that is a topic for another discussion.) Thus, it is a kind of employment tax. Enlightened tax policy is driven by decisions about activities that, for the good of society, we want to discourage. For example, we have sin taxes to discourage consumption of tobacco and alcohol. Employment is not one of those! We want to encourage employers to do it! Thus, if we could find another way to fund health care in America, we could have more jobs. Who would argue against that? Another problem is that in this system only employed people (and the relatives thereof) are covered. When the economy is strong and provides full employment, coverage almost suffices but in leaner times, even more are left out. Indeed, no one must be left out, in lean times or good. top   When is health care reform not health care reform? June, 2009 -- When it's a snow job. (Thanks to Ron Knox, Sun, 07 Jun 2009, for this item.) See: How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do. Note the new term of art... we no longer talk about a "single payer". Now it's "the public option." Senator Olivia Snowe, "...well-respected and considered non-partisan, and [who] therefore offers some cover to Democrats who may need it" has proposed a Byzantine set of conditions under which "the public option" can take place and probably won't. In other words, she and her cronies can look like they're fixing our desperately broken system while in reality defending Big Insurance/Big Pharma's hegemony. Robert Reich has it right: "Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill." It's time for Ms. Snowe to get out of the way and for government to step in and make sure we all get the health care we need, at prices we can afford, paid for fairly and equitably. No Snowe jobs! top   Unfair Advantages? Now We're Getting Somewhere! In a Jan. 16, 2009 Herald Tribune article entitled Bipartisan Reform Vowed on Healthcare Daschle Calls the System Unsustainable some partisan hack named James Gelfand is quoted as saying, in regard to Obama's plan to reform health care: "The public plan option is a terrible idea - one of our top concerns in the health reform debate..." Well, ok, he's not just a hack, he's senior manager of health policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce. And he's a shill for the insurance industry, giving a thinly-disguised defense of entrenched interests. If he'd finished the sentence, it would have been, "It might put some of my clients out of business!" The article goes on, ...the proposal is anathema to many insurers, employers and Republicans. They say the government plan would have unfair advantages, [emphasis mine] like the ability to impose lower fees, and could eventually attract so many customers that private insurers would be driven from the market. Um, lower fees? Isn't that the point? Not for Mr. Gelfand. top   Surprised! ...Again February, 2008 -- Many healthcare procedures are routine, e.g. immunizations for kids and the every-5-years-after-age-50-colonoscopy. If your doctor is doing her job, these are ordered for you at entirely predictable times in your life. Every American should be getting them. Budgeting and resource allocation for these things can (and should) be rational and planned. Why aren't they? In our present system, they seem to be surprises every time. We must submit lengthy paperwork for insurance claims, argue about what's covered, etc. Ridiculous. Furthermore, there should be routine tracks for the various chronic illnesses (with variations planned for differing degrees of severity, complicating factors, and responses to treatment) according to plans derived from medical evidence (best practices based on outcomes). It's silly that the predictable, plan-able procedures should be regarded (from a financial standpoint) the same as the unpredictable ones. Why are the paperwork and eligibility issues the same for a vaccination as for a broken bone? Money to pay for routine medical procedures should be budgeted for each of us from birth. These procedures should be paid for by a fund that's managed conservatively and whose inputs are known precisely because its outputs are. A second fund would cover non-routine healthcare, i.e. accidents and acute diseases. The outputs of this fund are known less precisely yet can be predicted by actuarial techniques. Both funds should be fed from a progressive taxation mechanism. "To each according to need, from each according to ability." Yet we do none of this. It's hard to believe that we continue to be so financially naive about healthcare! top   A Medical System to be Proud Of? No, One to be Ashamed Of! December, 2007 -- How is it we Americans are so brainwashed about our medical care? Why do the candidates for public office tout our system as the world's finest... with straight faces? "What is particularly shameful is how poorly this country compares with other industrialized countries. In 1960, the United States ranked 12th lowest in the world in infant mortality. By 2004, the last year for which comparative data are available, it had dropped to 29th, tied with Poland and Slovakia." [The New York Times Op Ed piece, Oct. 18, 2008.] Traditionally, the quality of a country's health care is measured by three criteria: Life expectancy Morbidity Infant mortality It has been argued that, "...life expectancy and infant mortality are both poor measures of the efficacy of a health care system because they are influenced by many factors that are unrelated to the quality and accessibility of medical care." Nonetheless, health care outcomes in America remain unacceptable. The NYT concludes, "The chief lesson we draw is that the American health care system, despite the highest expenditures in the world, is badly in need of an overhaul." top   Medicine in the Post-Oil World Strategies for Delivering Medical Care In a World without Cheap Energy ("Powerdown Medicine") January, 2007 -- I'm just getting started thinking about this... And I'm not the only one. Johnston et al, in Modern Medicine And Fossil Fuel Resources observe that the story of oil in the 21st century is like that of the boy who cried wolf, the point being that finally the wolf did come. Walter Youngquist writes in The post-petroleum paradigm -- and population: Reaching and passing the peak of world oil production will be the most important happening in human history to date, affecting more people in more ways than any other event. It will happen, and during the lives of most people now living. Johnston continues this theme: Increasing scarcity and expense of fossil fuels will present medicine with great challenges, especially at its high-tech end... Petroleum-based products are used all throughout the medical sector. Following these lines of thought, various corollaries suggest themselves... High-tech interventions will be available only to a shrinking elite. Community and locality will grow in importance. In medical care, labor will overtake capital (the way it does in the third world). There will be fewer disposables and more reuse. When oil is scarce, plastic is expensive. Let's learn from the Cubans. I intend to travel there. This will be a reverse foreign aid mission -- the evidence says these folks are the experts. (Ahem, I thought of this before Michael Moore did.) It won't be all bad -- if we're smart about it, we'll use it as an opportunity to emphasize lifestyle and prevention. When healthcare technology gets scarce, it will be better not to get sick in the first place. Lots of work to be done! top   Chronic Disease Management Systems Technology is not just an expensive frill. Used well, it can make a genuine difference not only in the high-tech hospital but in the daily lives of people with chronic diseases: asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and others. Such tools can help to: Automate recall processes Incorporate risk factors and lab test results in decision-making Enable quality improvement based on data analysis that far exceeds what could until now be achieved only through traditional chart audits. Here is an excellent article on how these are done at four community clinics. top   Do You Read Me? I've been blogging lately... Wanted: A Business Model (how electronic health records will be paid for) Our Fingers are Crossed in California (can we really eliminate the healthcare middle man?) Medicare Efficiency? (proof of the single-payer pudding) And I agree with what Russell Mokhiber says about "...the war between the American people and the health insurance industry." [SleptOn Magazine, Sept. 19, 2007] top   Eliminating the middle man does not mean "socialized medicine"! Health insurance is not to be confused with health care. It is a distinct industry. And it is a parasitic one. It is expensive yet it creates no value. We need to shut it down. Defenders of the status quo use scare tactics (see Krugman, above) to defend their hegemony. But common sense dictates otherwise. "[This] bureaucracy consumes 31 percent of health spending, versus 17 percent in Canada. The difference translates into $350 billion frittered away annually here, where a million healthcare workers, as well as hundreds of thousands in the insurance industry, spend their days on useless paperwork. "This waste is a natural byproduct of private insurance. Private plan overhead is eleven times that of Canada's NHI program. Each dollar spent on private premiums buys only 78 cents of care; the rest pays for insurer's marketing, underwriting, utilization review and profits -- and for the billions paid to their CEOs. Fragmented coverage also means duplication of claims-processing facilities and mountains of paperwork for doctors and hospitals, which must deal with multiple insurance products each with its own eligibility rules, co-payments, referral networks, etc. -- tasks that are absent in Canada. Our multiplicity of insurers also precludes the payment to hospitals of a global, lump-sum budget. In Canada, global budgets obviate the need for most hospital billing and much of the internal accounting needed to attribute costs to individual patients and payers." The Nation, April 14, 2008. Cartoon by my Dad, Charles Keller. (Yes, that's Jimmy Carter... Our health care dysfunction is not a new problem.) top   Yes on California Senate Bill 840! September, 2008 -- Leading the nation (ahem, ahem) California is poised to make healthcare history. If our Governator doesn't get in the way. Again. Up for a vote soon in our state legislature will be Senate Bill 840, crafted by State Senator Sheila Kuehl. It proposes to replace the existing expensive and dysfunctional private health insurance scheme -- what you have if you're well-off in America -- with a State-administered one. No doubt the powerful insurance lobby and media machine will trot out the tired nostrums about socialism, government inefficiency, and the boogeyman of state-run healthcare. The truth is that around 25 cents of every dollar we spend on healthcare goes to the insurance company bureaucracy, not for medicines, hospitals or doctors. If we're concerned about rising costs (and who isn't?) then eliminating this overhead is an obvious strategy for cost control. Furthermore, the federal Medicare program -- one of the most popular public programs of all time -- has proven that in overseeing the delivery of healthcare, government can be both effective and efficient. Medicare recipients (my parents, for example) are pleased with their care, and the overhead is less than 2%. Of course, if you're not well-off in America, then what you have for healthcare is zilch. Yes, emergency rooms are required by law to serve everyone who walks in the door. But it is undeniable that there are two tiers of patients -- I have worked in several hospitals and I've seen it with my own eyes. Patients without coverage really do get inferior care. The incentive to the hospital to push those patients back out the door is irresistible. If the hospital is lucky, some county money will help cover the cost. More likely, the hospital will eat it itself. In the end, we all pay because the hospital must charge its paying customers enough to stay in business. And this is the second breakthrough offered by SB 840: universal coverage. Similar bills have twice before been passed. And twice our Governor has vetoed them. Why would populist Governor Schwarzenegger oppose such an obviously smart move for the people of the State of California? To save the jobs of his insurance company friends and their powerful lobbies in Sacramento (our state capital). Let's hope that this time the legislature will override him. And let California lead the country with a healthcare system that is affordable yet leaves no one out. Postscript: With little fanfare and barely a mention in the press, on Sept. 30, 2008, Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 840. He defended this action saying that he could not support "...a bill that places an annual shortfall of over $40 billion on our state's economy." Chalk up another one for the lobbyists of Anthem (Blue Cross), Blue Shield, Aetna, Humana, Kaiser, Unicare... top >    That Is Sick! Jan. 11, 2006 -- In our sick healthcare system: Amputating a diabetic's foot is profitable. Delivering the preventive care that could have saved the foot loses money. See the January 11, 2006 New York Times: In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay: In "...the byzantine world of American health care, ...the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications. Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000." top   No Butts In my work as a smoking cessation counselor (please see my web site, www.tobaccoteacher.com) I see this short-sighted policy in insurance companies that pay tens of thousands of dollars for radiation and chemotherapy but not mere hundreds of dollars for smoking cessation classes and nicotine replacements (patches and gum). Our own Governor Schwarzenegger in 2005 vetoed (despite my letter) legislation that would have required them to pay for these sensible preventive measures, bowing to their powerful lobbies and their "logic": "By the time a situation is acute... the insurer, which has been gambling on never being asked to cover procedures that far down the road, has little choice but to cover them, if only to avoid lawsuits, analysts said." [NYT] In other words, the thinking goes: "We won't pay for prevention because by the time you get sick you'll be somebody else's customer or dead." This is why healthcare does not belong in the domain of private business. The short-term thinking demanded by performance for stockholders leads to poor decisions like these. Only public institutions have the capacity to make decisions driven by long-term considerations. Thus, though it's enlightened public policy, spending on preventive care will always be shunned by corporate (private) decision-makers. Conclusion: Single-payer healthcare is better for our health! top     The Medical-Industrial Complex One of my heroes, Paul Krugman (winner of the 2008 Nobel prize in economics) writes in the New York Times on 7/9/7 regarding Michael Moore's Sicko and the Canadian healthcare system: For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all citizens... Yes, Canadians wait longer than insured Americans for elective surgery. But overall, the average Canadian's access to health care is as good as that of the average insured American -- and much better than that of uninsured Americans, many of whom never receive needed care at all. The only things standing in the way of universal health care are the fear-mongering and influence-buying of interest groups. If we can't overcome those forces here, there's not much hope for America's future. top   Homework-O-Matic Here's my Arterial Blood Gas (ABG) Analysis homework-o-matic. Hey all you fellow-nursing-classmates, have at it! top   Nosocomial Infections Hospitals are dangerous places. Here are some of the things you can catch there. You probably wouldn't catch them anywhere else... and the probability there is surprisingly high. Only recently have a very few hospitals begun to report the rates of these infections. Such reporting should be required! Ventilator-associated pneumonia Bloodstream infections caused by catheters Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) -- Causes an "alarming number of infections and a very significant number of deaths." This bug kills more Americans each year than does HIV. The primary vector? The unwashed hands of healthcare workers. Surgical site infections Clostridium difficile ("C-diff"), a bacterium that causes severe colon infection and stomach pain And infections are only part of the story. Here are more preventable bad things that happened to hospital patients (in California during the period July 2007 to May 2008 as reported by the Los Angeles Times on 6/30/08): Severe bedsores (466 patients) Foreign objects such as surgical equipment left inside (145 patients) Died under anesthesia (34 patients) Wrong procedure or operated on the wrong body part or patient (41 patients) This is not to blame the caregivers or the organizations in all cases; it's to point out that the delivery of healthcare is complex and near-impossible to do with total reliability. There are no easy solutions. top   Paradigm shifts are happening and quality is rising. Here, excerpted from Reflections on Nursing Leadership (Fourth Quarter 2005) is the most succinct statement I've seen of... Healthcare's shifting paradigms From process orientation (what professional is doing) To outcomes orientation (value of what professional is doing) From focus on provider-patient relationship To focus on work setting as a learning organization From do no harm as an individual responsibility To safety as a system concern From caregiving that is time and place bound To caregiving with time and place limitations removed From focus of care that emphasizes patient compliance To focus of care that emphasizes best practices From workarounds being the norm To crucial conversations being the norm From decision making based on training and experience To evidence-based decision making From organizations that encourage professional silos To organizations that encourage interdisciplinary collaboration From seeking cost reductions To continuously decreasing waste From emphasis on discharge planning To emphasis on lifestyle change top   Neurosurgery Mission to Vietnam I've been helping Dr. Gary Heit to run his nonprofit, Americare Neurosurgery International. In March, 2008, we ran our third medical mission, this time to Hue, Vietnam. Quite literally, we saved lives. Gary is an amazing neurosurgeon! top   Obama Gets It! In a January 8, 2009 article, Health Data Management reports: In a major speech on Jan. 8 to push his forthcoming economic stimulus package, President-elect Barack Obama pledged to have all medical records electronic within five years. "To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its costs, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America's medical records are computerized," Obama said. We applaud! The image on the left was not associated with the Health Data Management article; it is included here for your amusement. It is an example of the disinformation and fear-mongering -- much like the entrenched interests did to Hillarycare -- that is being ramped up once again by the forces that continue to oppose (for narrow self-interest only) these moves toward progress. The unspoken sub-text is beware (so-called) socialized medicine. top   Kucinich Gets It! "Health care for all," he says. "Insurance companies make money not providing health care. As the co-author of HR 676, a universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care system, Medicare for All, I understand millions of Americans want health care that is accessible and affordable." Medicare for All -- what a concept! "Medicare for All will help businesses large and small, create jobs as well as save the jobs of thousands of people including those of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers who are currently leaving medicine because it is run by the insurance companies. 1 in every 3 dollars of the $2.4 trillion spent annually in America for health care goes to the insurance companies. If we take that money ($800 billion in unproductive wasteful spending) and put it directly into care, we will have enough money to cover everyone. We are already paying for Medicare for all, but not receiving it. HR 676 changes that!" He also proposes to end the Medicare Part D boondoggle and go to the heart of the problem: getting drugs to the people who need them: "[I have proposed a] Prescription Drug Benefit for Seniors, HR 6800, the MEDS Act, which provides a fully paid prescription drug benefit, under Medicare, for all seniors. I wrote this bill to help alleviate the economic pressure that comes from the high cost of prescription drugs. We can pay for it by letting the government negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies as well as by permitting re-importation." Hard to believe that this is considered radical... It's common sense to me. top   Gore Gets It! And not just about the environment. Here he is, speaking in favor of universal health care coverage. Go Al! top   Gavin Gets It! Mayor Gavin Newsom has launched a program that makes me proud to be a San Franciscan. In his words: We are still the first and only city in America on its way to universal health care. Our Healthy San Francisco program has already enrolled nearly 30,000 previously uninsured San Franciscans into a comprehensive health access program. While the state and nation falter on health care - San Francisco is showing the way. But there's more. In my opinion, the most radical aspect of this program is that it provides health care, not health insurance. In other words, our public health service in San Francisco funds the providers directly. No middlemen! Brilliant! top   What Do You Mean I Don't Own My Own Medical Data? That's right. You don't. Who does? Usually, the hospital, clinic, or doctor who created the data. In other words, not you. Here is an excerpt from Physician's News Digest, March 1999: Underlying the entire health care informatics industry is the basic issue of who owns data and how data may be used by others. There is limited public law on this question and parties almost invariably address the issue as a matter of private agreement. Generally, the law in most states gives ownership of the medical and business records to the provider who creates the records, subject to a general duty of confidentiality and in some states a right of access for patients to their own records. These issues are partly addressed by the Federal law known as HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. It says that you have these five rights regarding your medical records: An unconditional right to be informed of the data-handling practices of medical practitioners and providers; The right to request, but not necessarily to always obtain completely, the privacy protection of your healthcare information; The right to review and copy your medical record; The right to request that inaccuracies in your record be corrected; and The right to know who has accessed your medical records in the past. The text of the HIPAA law can be found at the US Department of Health and Human Services. It does not actually discuss ownership of medical data, only access to it and control of it. Decisions about ownership are left to the states. Kate Jackson writes in Whose Medical Record Is It, Anyway? in For the Record magazine: It may vary somewhat by state law, but the healthcare record is owned by the healthcare provider that created it... [You] generally have the right to see and request a copy of [your] entire medical record. The exceptions to that rule are records pertaining to psychiatric conditions, HIV status, and mental health care... [complete list] most states consider psychiatric records to be "hyperconfidential". And they can charge you for making the photocopy... of their data. top   Go Aussies! Imagine having the peace of mind that comes from knowing that you can always afford health care, that your insurer can never cut you off (or deny you coverage in the first place) if you get sick (and expensive) or they suddenly "discover" a "pre-existing condition." This is insane! Life itself is a "pre-existing condition"! Imagine that, no matter what, you could always have the healthcare you need. They get it in Australia. Go Aussies! top   Beat It Some heart sounds for our nursing class to learn. top   Higher Education: Revolution Needed Sept. 2005 -- The teaching that's done in colleges and universities stinks! I offer some solutions. top   USHealthCrisis.com: Another One for Francine In yet another brilliant move, Francine Hardaway has created USHealthCrisis.com, a web site whose purpose, in her words, is to: ...bring about health care reform. If you have a story [about a failure of the US healthcare or health insurance system] please post it to the site, and tag it patient, provider, or payer. We are aggregating this information and will take it to the Obama administration. Right now, reprepresentative stories will be a big help. top   Getting Clear about Single Payer Francine Hardaway writes a fascinating and often brilliant blog in which the topics are sometimes medical: The industrialization of medical care The misuse of emergency rooms Electronic health records (EHRs) in doctors' offices Rarely do I disagree with her, but I did when, in 2007, she wrote: I don't think we will accept a single payer system, because that's just another way to say "rationing health care." Here's my reply. What does "single payer" really mean? The significance of the number of payers is that when there is more than one, the incentive structure changes. The rewards no longer go to those who provide prevention and care. They go to those who stick the other guy with the bill. We already do have rationing, Francine. Every country and every system has rationing; it has to. There's always a gatekeeper (as it's called in the UK, where health care is provided primarily by public funding.) Why ration? Because resources are finite. Many people are frightened by the idea of gatekeeping by governmental agencies. Consider, though, that the activities of government are subject to the scrutiny of we who elect them; they don't have the impunity of corporations that operate behind closed doors. Corporations are beholden primarily to stockholders. To them, doing a good job means increasing the dividend each quarter. Over corporate officers and management the public has even less control than they do over governmental officials. As long as we have a democracy, I prefer that gatekeeping be done by government, thank you. The problem with our system is that with multiple payers, we have an additional, unproductive layer of bureaucracy -- all those insurance company claims adjusters who do their jobs "best" when they deny treatments, drugs, and care. They're not evil people but what they do is evil because the incentives are wrong. Insurance companies add 15-25% (depending on whose numbers you use) to the cost of our healthcare. Yes, there must be rationing. But the rationing process needn't be so expensive. Eliminating these middlemen is unlikely, alas. They command huge resources and their lobbies are powerful. To protect their bottom line, they run vast disinformation campaigns and promote myths such as the one Francine has voiced. And their job is to ration. But don't take my word for it... Here is an op-ed piece from the New York Times on March 28th, 2006: U.S. Should Implement Government-Sponsored, Single-Payer System. top   The Electronic Medical Record (EMR): Still Waiting Rates of adoption of EMRs in the United States continue to be abysmal. Here are some recent numbers (per the California Healthcare Foundation's Snapshot: The State of Health Information Technology in California, 2008): Just 12% of California physicians use alerts to warn them about potential adverse drug events, receive electronic warnings about abnormal lab results, and send reminder notices to patients about regular or preventive follow-up care. Only 25% of hospitals are using bar-coding technology fully for tracking lab specimens and only 13% have implemented EMRs. Many patients do not communicate with their physicians online because they are concerned that on the Internet their privacy might be compromised. Nearly three-quarters of medical groups in California continue to rely on paper records. Healthcare information Technology (HIT) offers substantial, well-documented benefits both to reduce costs and to increase quality. Why aren't we using it? The EMR has always been a focal point of my career. When I graduated from UCSF in 1983 with an MS degree in this area (having built a rudimentary EMR for my master's thesis) there were no jobs where I could put these skills to work. But that has changed. Today medical informatics is an industry. For example, both of my recent hospital employers -- Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente -- have huge EMR implementation projects underway. Several doctors I know are investigating EMRs for their offices. However, industry-wide standards remain largely absent and paper charts remain the norm. We're still waiting for the revolution. top   Doesn't Compute One of the places where I have worked as a volunteer was a post-op and orthopedic floor high up in a tall tower in a hospital that shall remain nameless. In this hospital (and, I suspect, in most) the manual, paper-based procedure for reviewing and renewing medication orders is stunningly labor-intensive and error-prone. This is a task for which computer implementation would be ideally suited. It is astonishing to me that this hasn't been done. Here's how it works today: In the MAR (Medication Administration Record) portion of a patient's chart there are two sheets: PRN (drugs administered on an as-needed basis) and One Time Medication Record Routine Medication Record. Each has seven rows (one row for each medication that has been ordered) and five columns (one for each of five days, e.g. Oct. 5-10). In each cell, the nurse records the administration of a med on a date. (For meds that are administered several times per day, the cells can accommodate several entries.) On each fifth day of each patient's hospital stay, the nursing station secretary must see that the form is full and must complete a new form, copying from the old one all the following information: Patient allergies and contra-indications All the drugs, their routes, dosages, schedules, and formulations. The probability of error is high, so the work must be checked by a nurse. The only possible reason I can see for lack of automation of this procedure is to guarantee that it periodically gets a pair of eyes to review the medication orders. But are the secretary's eyes qualified to perform this review? Is five days the right review period or just the number of columns that fit on the page? Is the labor cost justified? Have errors ever been caught this way? If indeed there does appear to be something dubious about a drug order, is there a mechanism for having it reviewed (and perhaps modified) by a doctor, especially the doc who made the order in the first place? I suspect the answers to these questions are mostly no. top   Providing Emotional Support Another place where I volunteered is San Francisco's HIV / AIDS/ HepC Nightline, a department of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. It is a telephone-based emotional support service. Training to become qualified to deliver this service is a couple of months of weekly evening classes. The work itself is surprisingly challenging but uniquely rewarding and I learned a lot. An essential skill is listening without attempting to problem-solve. Your job is simply to listen. Often that's the best therapy in the moment. People who are struggling need an ear that hears them. It's something that's in surprisingly short supply. And there was lots more. Here are my notes and observations. top   Don't Just Protect Me, Put Me in Charge! Privacy will always be a major concern regarding medical data. One of the ways in which patients will be empowered by EMRs/PHRs is by having explicit control over access. While HIPAA goes a long way toward protecting privacy, it leaves the actual enforcement in the hands of the caregivers and their institutions. Under today's system, the patient is protected but not in control. This must change. Here are the aspects of personal health records generally considered most sensitive: Alcohol and substance abuse Biometric information Child or adult abuse or neglect, including sexual assault Communicable diseases Genetic information HIV/AIDS Mental health Minors' information Prescriptions Reproductive health including pregnancy Sexually transmitted diseases With the electronic medical record system we need, the patient will be the owner of the data (see What Do You Mean I Don't Own My Own Medical Data? above) and will have complete control over who sees it and which parts are withheld from whom. In other words, don't just protect me. HIPAA does that and that's good but it's not enough. Put me in charge! Let me decide where that data goes... and doesn't go. top   Health Sites In a January 7, 2009 article, the Wall Street Journal reports on a crop of new and increasingly useful web sites for people seeking (and collecting and sharing) information about health care, especially their own. These include: WebMD.com (personal health management) Google Health (discussed below) Microsoft's HealthVault VisualDxHealth.com (skin diseases) QualityHealth.com (health assessments, on-line communities) Healthline.com (pill finders, etc.) ConsumerMedSafety.org (prevents medication errors) WellSphere.com (consumer-oriented health info.) The former RealAge.com (health status assessment -- web site died) WhyNotTheBest.org (ratings of health care institutions, mainly for professionals) HazMap (federal database of chemical and biological exposure risks) EverydayHealth.com (merged with RevolutionHealth, resources for consumers) HealthCentral.com (portal to sites that focus on specific medical conditions) The article offers a good collection of links and brief site reviews for the informed patient. top   Google Gets It Google says (and I do not doubt it) that the most commonly-sought information on the Web regards health. So it's a no-brainer that their business should do a good job of helping their users find what they seek. Though medical data searching is huge, what's at stake is even bigger. The data to be managed is not just generic -- diseases, treatments, research, institutions, services, etc. It's also each of our personal medical histories, status, progress, and plans. She who controls the data controls the process. Empower the patient. And be the supplier of that power. Thus, Google Health. Great strategy! top   Help for Nurses On the Job April, 2006 -- In my two years of nursing training I learned many things. One was that it's a hard job, sometimes unnecessarily so. Here's one of my ideas about how to fix that. top   The Art of Volunteering In the years leading up to my nursing school stint, I volunteered in lots of San Francisco hospitals, clinics, and healthcare services. You don't just walk in the door and magically transform lives... There's an art to it. Most important are the things that -- even with the best of intentions -- you must never do. A volunteer must never: Do anything invasive Give medical advice or information to a patient or family Give food or water without authorization Tell a family that a patient has died Make judgements about lifestyle, esp. domestic violence Handle controlled substances Help break up a fight or restrain a patient Do schoolwork in the ER Read medical records Here are more thoughts on my experiences as a volunteer... top   Pritikin's Still Got It! June, 2006 -- Concerned about health, fitness, longevity, weight loss? Pritikin is the diet that works. Here it is in a nutshell. Choose foods that are big in size but small in calories. Avoid calorie density. Choose unrefined carbohydrates that are naturally rich in fiber and water: fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains. Avoid high-fat foods, especially those with saturated fats like meat and cheese and those with refined sugars. "Eat" your water, that is, fruits and vegetables. Protein should not exceed 10-15% of diet (3 oz, size of deck of cards). Use meat for flavor, not as the main bulk of a meal. Sugars, added and natural, should not exceed 10% of diet. Salt: less than 2000 mg daily. One hour/day of moderate exercise, e.g. walking. These practices and principles are borne out by experience and research. Here is some perspective. The World Health Organization of the United Nations (WHO) recommendations are very similar to Pritikin's. Compare it to, for example, the Atkins diet (high fat, high protein). Atkins (and most others) are discredited by research, but popular because it gets initial results quickly and people like to be told to eat meat and cheese. The global epidemic of obesity, heart disease, and chronic disease is due to: Western-style staples like red meat and dairy, vegetable oils, sugar-rich drinks and sweets, and salty snacks replacing traditional, closer-to-nature staples like beans, potatoes, corn, and fresh vegetables Sedentary lifestyles The Pritikin program has 30+ years of experience. Their track record is unmatched -- this is the real deal. Check it out... and get healthy! top   Heart Attack Grill November, 2008 -- Are we getting the message about health and personal responsibility? Here is a gem I found on the web... people really do eat at the Heart Attack Grill. They even have cigarettes on the menu! top   Cato Schmato September, 2007 -- Want to set your teeth on edge? Read the "scholarly" writings of the whack-jobs over at Cato. These are no more than industry-sponsored puff-pieces: Exxon-Mobil, Shell Oil, Tenneco Gas, Amoco Foundation, Atlantic Richfield Foundation, Chevron Companies, and the American Petroleum Institute re: global warming "myth" Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds re: "smokers' rights" Other sources of funding include Bell Atlantic Network Services, BellSouth Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, GTE, Microsoft, NYNEX, Sun Microsystems, Viacom International, American Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Citicorp/Citibank, Commonwealth Fund, Prudential Securities and Salomon Brothers. Writings on the medical system are sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry (Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer). The intent is to influence policy under the guise of researched wisdom. Don't vote for any politician who can't see through this sham! For example, an article on healthcare funding, Socialized Medicine is Already Here, reveals its bias in the title; "socialized medicine" is derogatory and no one would choose anything with that name. It's like Bush saying about Iraq, "We want victory, not defeat!" Well, duh. In high school, we learned to call such statements tautologies, vacuous statements that set my teeth on edge. Now let's get to work on the real issues. top   Getting It Explained? July, 2006 -- Do you know what your insurance covers? Do you understand the invoices you get from your hospital or your provider? Do you understand the EOB (Explanation of Benefits) your insurance company provides when you make a claim? Have you actually read your policy? If you have, did you understand what you read? Did it give you confidence that your medical needs would be met? When you go for medical care, do you know what you'll be charged out of your own pocket? Or do you cross your fingers and hope for the best? Can your doctor (or your doctor's receptionist) provide clarity on any of this? Do you even bother to ask? Have you ever tried not to pay an insane medical bill? Have you seen what that does to your credit rating?... And then tried to buy a car or a house or get a credit card? Why is any of this OK? top   Vaccinate! January, 2009 -- Ever seen a list of all the vaccinations in one place? Useful! Here they are... Among medicine's greatest achievements. Diphtheria Tetanus Pertussis Poliomyelitis Haemophilus influenzae type b - Hib Measles Mumps Rubella Varicella Hepatitis A Hepatitis B Influenza Pneumococcal Disease Meningococcal Disease Human Papillomavirus Rotavirus The details about these and lots more excellent information for practitioners about vaccinations (is it possible they aren't taught this stuff in med school?!?) can be found at docsimmunize.org. This valuable web site is run by Terri Olson, RN (wife of Pat). top   Pat Rants May, 2005 -- My lifelong pal Pat Olson has had a distinguished career as a US Navy flight surgeon. He learned much about "...a practice of socialistic medicine called the US Navy." He goes on: Does it promote itself as socialistic? Obviously not. Is it a perfect system? Obviously not. But even its critics admit that with access to care for servicemembers and their families regardless of rank or ability to pay, in terms of objectively verifiable outcome measures it betters the US private sector. This leads me to something I see as the Dark Side of medical informatics. As long as we have a 'pro-competition' insurance industry, rewards will go to those who cherry-pick. Beyond HIPAA, you've got the specter of cyber sleuthing medical records for the familial trait here, the genetic deletion there, that incurs increased risk. It terrifies me to think of a child being denied care because of something in a record somewhere and broadcast unknowingly to the wolves of the insurance industry. Okay, I'm outta control... But we agree, Pat, we agree. top   Here is all about me personally.   Updated Friday, 08-Nov-2024 17:26:39 MST