We will emphasize many topics relevant to Health Care Renewal. These will include:
- physician level factors that affect decision making, emphasizing the influence of extraneous values (values that should not be taken into account by physicians when making decisions as an agent for patients), such as perverse incentives, particularly conflicts of interest;
- problems with the evidence on which evidence-based decisions ostensibly ought to be based, including manipulation and suppression of clinical research studies, which may happen when research is sponsored by organizations with vested interests in having the research show particular results; and
- problems with ostensibly evidence-based clinical practice guidelines which are often taken to be the "gold-standard" for rational evidence-based decision making, especially the role of vested interests in constructing these guidelines.
We hope to see some of our Health Care Renewal readers there.
We do not write about health insurance and managed care as much as we used to. Dysfunction in this area now gets much media attention. US Physicians frequently complain that bureaucratic impediments imposed on them by health insurance and the government are major causes of health care dysfunction.
However, managed care was at the sharp edge of the movement to change the focus of health care from individual patients cared for by individual professionals and at local hospitals, to an (unregulated) business dominated by huge corporate entities. The wedge with that sharp edge has now driven very deep. So it may be instructive to look at what is going on now.
The Proposed Aetna-Humana Merger
In 2015, the big news in the US health insurance sphere were big mergers. One example was the proposed merger between Aetna and Humana. An Aetna press release trumpeted that the
Combined Entity ... [would] Drive Consumer-Focused, High-Value Health Care
That it would have the
Ability to Lead Effort to Transform Health Care Delivery to a More Consumer-Focused Marketplace
And that it will
Improve Affordability, Quality and Convenience for Consumers
What could possibly go wrong?
Up to now, mergers that created ever bigger drug/ device/ biotechnology companies, hospital systems, and health insurance companies got little US government opposition. After all, the fashion among health care managers and health policy experts as been to extoll all the efficiences and advantages large organizations could provide, usually absent much evidence in support of this contention. (See, for example, the press release above, and see what we have written about concentration of power.)
The Government Wakes Up to the Anti-Trust Issue
But this time, the government eventually indicated it might push back. In July, 2016, as reported by the NY Times,
United States Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced that the government had filed lawsuits to block the deals, between Aetna and Humana and Anthem and Cigna.
The proposed mergers, she said, 'would leave much of the multitrillion-dollar health insurance industry in the hands of three mammoth insurance companies.'
'If these mergers were to take place, the competition among insurers that has pushed them to provide lower premiums, higher-quality care and better benefits would be eliminated,' she said.
The companies responded by vowing, in varying degrees, to fight the government’s challenge. Aetna, which had hoped to gain an advantage by being the first to reach a deal, aggressively defended its proposed merger, which it contended was different from the larger Anthem-Cigna deal that followed.
'I like my chances in front of a judge,' Mark T. Bertolini, chief executive of Aetna, said in an interview.
Parenthetically, I wonder what evidence she had that previous competition had led to "lower premiums, higher-quality care and better benefits" up to now, but I digress.
Aetna Suddenly Abandons ACA Exchanges
Soon after that, Aetna announced it was pulling out of the "markets" created by Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act (ACA), e.g., per CNBC.
Aetna is sharply cutting its participation in Obamacare exchanges for 2017.
The health insurer said it will offer individual Affordable Care Act exchange plans in just four states, down from 15 this year, in an effort to reduce its losses.
'As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision,; Chairman and CEO Marc Bertolini said in a statement.
This despite the fact that
as recently as April, Aetna's Bertolini had expressed strong support for the exchanges, telling analysts that it would have cost the company more than a $1 billion to acquire the million new customers it had signed up on Obamacare exchanges.
Aetna’s announcement this week that it was pulling out of most of the states where it was serving the Obamacare individual exchanges was a head-scratcher; after all, just three months earlier, Chief Executive Mark Bertolini was calling its participation in the market 'a good investment,' despite near-term losses.
Bertolini also had tried to tamp down speculation that its withdrawal was anything like a payback for the government’s move to block its $37-billion merger with Humana. That was 'a separate conversation' from its evaluation of the exchange business, he said during an Aug. 2 conference call with Wall Street analysts.
'Our analysis to date makes clear that if the deal were challenged and/or blocked we would need to take immediate actions to mitigate public exchange and ACA small group losses,' Bertolini wrote. 'Specifically, if the DOJ sues to enjoin the transaction, we will immediately take action to reduce our 2017 exchange footprint. We currently plan, as part of our strategy following the acquisition, to expand from 15 states in 2016 to 20 states in 2017. However, if we are in the midst of litigation over the Humana transaction, given the risks described above, we will not be able to expand to the five additional states.'
So to review, Aetna and Humana, already large for-profit managed care organizations/ health care insurance companies announced a merger, proclaiming it was all about better, higher value care for patients . The government begged to differ. Aetna suddenly announced its retreat from government backed insurance markets. Its CEO denied that move was retaliation, but was allegedly "lying."
Why am I not surprised by Aetna's apparent untrustworthiness?
The History of US Healthcare Inc
As we just discussed, many large health care organizations are the products of mergers, acquisitions, and other kinds of financial engineering. This makes their corporate history and culture much harder to comprehend.
In particular, let us not forget that the current Aetna is a product of the merger of US Healthcare Inc and Aetna in 1996. Many readers may not remember much about this merger, and it may have occurred before others' time.
Promises of Wonders to Come
In short, US Healthcare Inc was one of the earliest for-proft managed care companies. A 1996 Philadelphia Inquirer story described its origin. It was started by Leonard Abramson, based on work done in the early 1970s.
By the early 1970s, Abramson had shifted gears and gone to work for R.H. Medical Inc., a small but innovative hospital-management company then headquartered in Cheltenham.
Abramson held the title of vice president for corporate development. But even colleagues didn't know what that meant. `Nobody knew him,' one former R.H. Medical executive says. 'He was running some project nobody knew anything about.'
The project Abramson was running turned out to be a prototype of the health maintenance organization a prototype of the health maintenance organization: a new form of health plan that turned a la carte medicine on its head by paying doctors and hospitals set, all-inclusive fees for their services, instead of paying each and every time they treated a patient.
The idea was to change the incentives from doing more to doing only what was appropriate and kept the patient healthy, Abramson once said. In short, it was a lower-cost alternative to the inflationary fee-for-service medicine then in vogue.
Managed care has been promising lower costs for patients and society, better access, and higher quality for a long time. Yet, there was never any good evidence that it ever really was "a low-cost alternative" for patients, and while it helped enable the decline of fee-for-service medicine, its alternative was not obviously less "inflationary."
Making the Insiders Rich
On the other hand, US Healthcare Inc was good at extracting a large amount of money from the health care system to benefit its founder and CEO, and his family tremendously wealthy. Again per the Inquirer in 1996,
Abramson's 1993 salary of $3.52 million, based on a 40-hour week, worked out to $1,692.30 an hour. That's not including his $6.3 million in stock options. [That would be total compensation of at least $9.82 million in 1993.]
A 1995 proxy listed Abramson's 1994 base salary at $1.8 million, plus a bonus of $1.6 million.
Forbes magazine estimated his 1994 worth at $780 million, making him No. 110 among the 400 richest people in America. He was ranked that year as the Philadelphia area's highest paid CEO of a publicly traded company.
In addition,
He's made sure his children haven't had to struggle. A proxy report showed U.S. Healthcare paid daughter Nancy Wolfson $239,999 in salary and bonuses in 1993, and her husband, Richard, who directs the pharmacy and dental operations, $270,000. Another daughter, Marcy A. Shoemaker, made $280,000.
Company shares also are held in trust for Abramson's grandchildren.
Angry Doctors and Allegations of Worse Care
While the company provided monetary advantages to its insiders, but not clearly to patients or society, I remember US Healthcare Inc from my days as a fellow and then junior faculty member in the Philadelphia area as rather a nasty player. At the time of the 1996 merger, a Philadelphia Inquirer story about the CEO of US Healthcare Inc stated
U.S. Healthcare is considered one of the nation's toughest HMOs....
And retold
a joke making the rounds in Philadelphia-area doctors' lounges:
[US Healthcare CEO Leonard] Abramson dies and goes to heaven, where he compliments God on what a great place he has. 'Don't get too comfortable,' God advises. 'You're only approved for a three-day stay.'
The Philadelphia Inquirer separately described Mr Abramson thus:
to his detractors in the health-care industry, Abramson is anything but charitable. They view him as a ruthless, bottom-line-oriented executive who has made himself and his Blue Bell company fabulously wealthy while ratcheting down payments to hospitals and skimping on patient care.
For years, some of the most prestigious hospitals in Philadelphia refused to sign contracts with U.S. Healthcare. Those that did often complained bitterly about the hard-line negotiating style of Abramson and his colleagues, which resulted in lower reimbursement rates for the hospitals.
The story concluded,
Abramson continues to receive heavy criticism from some in the health-care industry. These critics say his HMOs have stressed profits and shareholder value over quality patient care.
So US Healthcare Inc was one of the first important US for-profit managed care organization. It promised lower costs for patients and society, and better health care. While there is no evidence these promises were fulfilled, it made its top insiders very wealthy, while alienating health care professionals, many who thought it led to worse health care for their patients.
This pattern repeated when Aetna merged with US Healthcare.
The deal would put the new company in a position 'to redefine the way in which medical care is delivered in the country,' said Aetna chairman Ronald E. Compton, who would serve as the combined firm's chief executive. 'U.S. Healthcare was the best possible partner for Aetna. . . . This is, no kidding, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a model for exceptional' health care.
Yet in retrospect there is no evidence that the merger produced "exceptional health care," at least not exceptional in terms of being exceptionally good for patients.
Making the Insiders Rich
But like the old US Healthcare Inc, Aetna did succeed in making its CEOs very wealthy. In 2012, we noted that the first new CEO of the combined entity, Dr John Rowe, was to get an initial salary of $1 million and bonuses of $1 to $3 million to start in 2000. And by 2010, as we posted here, according to its 2010 proxy statement, Aetna CEO Ronald A Williams' total compensation in 2009 was a mere $18,058,162. Other top executives made proportionate amounts, from more than $1 million to more than $12 million.
Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini received $27.9 million in compensation last year, according to a filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
About $24.8 million of the package was due to gains in value on restricted stock that vested in 2015 and on stock options he was awarded 10 years ago and exercised in 2015.
The total was up from $15 million in 2014.
His compensation also included $1,034,483 in salary, $1.84 million in cash bonus, and $271,908 in perks, mostly from the cost of his using the corporate aircraft for personal use.
Huber talked out of one side of his mouth about his company's obsessive quest for 'quality' health care -- while out of the other he was screaming at doctors, hospitals and drug firms about controlling costs. Yet Aetna's medical costs were still creeping up. As Richard Huber learned, you can't talk the talk if you don't walk the walk.
So once again, after US Healthcare merged with Aetna, the combined, larger company did not deliver on promises of lower-cost, higher-quality care, while it made its insiders very wealth, angered health care professionals, and allegedly led to poor health care.
Conclusion
So the story of US Healthcare Inc, and its merger with Aetna showed a repeating pattern: unfulfilled promises of wonders to come, angry health professionals complaining of bad health care, while the corporate insiders become rich. So do we really think that the proposed Aetna Humana merger would "Drive Consumer-Focused, High-Value Health Care?" If so, could I sell you a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan?
This case shows how we have turned health insurance over to large for-profit corporations, in an era of laissez faire capitalism and light touch regulation, and in an era in which managerialism enables the leadership of health care organizations by business trained people with little understanding of or sympathy for the health care calling, but who can get rich by pursuing short-term revenue, and can deploy armies of marketers and public relations specialists to obfuscate what is going on.
Why on earth should we expect by continuing in the same direction we will now actually produce lower-cost, higher-quality care?
One big problem is that many people in the US now think of commercialized health care as the norm, and cannot conceive of any alternatives. Even our recent attempt at health care reform, the Affordable Care act, depended on the continued dominance of health insurance by for-profit corporations.
True health care reform would consider alternatives. At least we could start with much tougher regulation of commercial health care. For example, in his article noted above, Michael Hiltzik suggested
We’ve mentioned before that the government isn’t entirely powerless to goad big insurers like Aetna into greater participation in the ACA exchanges. Among other things, the companies make money hand over fist by serving Medicaid expansions in many states and in Medicare managed-care plans. Why not tie their access to those lucrative markets to sticking with the exchanges until they’re finally stabilized?
Bertolini implicitly tied Aetna’s participation in Obamacare to a green light from the government on the Humana merger. But two can play that game.
That would not go over well with neoliberals who believe all corporate regulation is bad.
Furthermore, mabye we should reconsider whether most, or any health insurance should be provided by for-profit corporations. The "government option" is no longer a taboo topic in conversations about "Obamacare." There are other options. Other countries rely on tightly regulated, accountable non-profit organizations to provide health insurance. Such organizations may not enrich insiders as well as big for-profit health insurance companies, but maybe for once we should think of putting patients' and the public's health ahead of these insiders' enrichment.
In our brave new neoliberal world of commercialized health care, many US health care organizations are products of numerous mergers, acquisitions, and other excercises in financial engineering. This makes it easier to obscure these organizations' history, especially their past sins. Yet these past sins may continue to haunt them.
The MedPartners Settlement
For example, a recent story only recounted in detail in one Alabama newspaper, the Birmingham News, focused on the settlement of a lawsuit originally filed against a company called MedPartners.
A Jefferson County judge on Monday gave final approval to a $310 million settlement of a lawsuit that claims MedPartners, a health care company once led by former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, lied to more than 20,000 stockholders about how much the company could pay them under the settlement of a 1990s lawsuit.
The new settlement is one of the largest fraud recoveries in Alabama legal history, according to a statement from Hare, Wynn, Newell & Newton, LLP, one of the law firms that represented investors.
The opening of the story harkened back to one of the more notorious cases of health care corruption, that of HealthSouth and Richard Scrushy:
The original fraud allegations from the 1990s stemmed from a proposed deal by former MedPartners CEO Larry House for competitor PhyCor Inc. to pay $7 billion to buyout MedPartners. The deal, billed at the time as the biggest deal in Alabama history, fell through after PhyCor found questions about MedPartner's practices and bookkeeping.
House had been chief operating officer of HealthSouth at one point before taking over as CEO of MedPartners.
Scrushy, who had also been involved in MedPartner's founding while leading HealthSouth, for a time served on the MedPartner's board and later as its interim CEO.
HealthSouth is a chain of rehabilitation hospitals. Its former CEO, Mr Scrushy, was acquited of federal fraud charges, but was eventually convicted in a state court of bribery, conspiracy, and mail fraud in 2006 (look here). HealthSouth settled allegations of fraud and violating securities laws in 2006, and is still in operation, claiming to be the largest chain of US rehabilitation hospitals (look here).
Yet while HealthSouth has been haunted by its prior settlement and Mr Scrushy's conviction, this new story should primarily haunt another huge health care corporation, CVS Caremark.
MedPartners Became Caremark, Merged Into CVS Caremark
Back to the Birmingham News 2016 article,
The lawsuit against CVS Caremark Corp., the company that ended up owning the former MedPartners, is a class-action litigation in which investors claim they lost $3.2 billion in a 1990s securities fraud.
Twenty one lawsuits were filed by investors in 1998 against MedPartners. Those lawsuits claimed MedPartners made false and misleading statements to the public about its financial condition and prospects at the time.
The lawsuits were combined and settled for $56 million after MedPartners claimed it was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and that $50 million was all its insurance would cover.
However, five years later investor John Lauriello, one of the original plaintiffs, filed a new lawsuit claiming MedPartners lied about having limited insurance coverage during the settlement negotiations. The lawsuit claims that in October 1998, prior to the original settlement being finalized, MedPartners paid for unlimited insurance coverage.
If the unlimited insurance coverage had been known at the time, Lauriello's suit claims, investors could have negotiated a higher settlement amount. Sam Johnson and the City of Birmingham Retirement and Relief System later became the named plaintiffs.
MedPartners changed its name in 2000 to Caremark and in 2007 merged with CVS.
CVS will be on the hook for good part of the current settlement's financial liability.
Under the terms of the settlement insurance company AIG will pay $230 million and CVS will pay $80 million.
CVS Health Denies the Meaning of its History
As is typical of most legal actions against big health care organizations, no individual who presided over, authorized, directed or implemented the bad behavior will apparently suffer any negative consequences. And current CVS management said in effect, "it's not me."
In the settlement CVS denies it has any liability for the claims asserted against them and believes it has good defenses to those claims. But the company agreed to enter into the agreement 'to eliminate the burdens, distractions, expense, and uncertainty of further litigation and thereby to put this controversy to rest fully and finally by obtaining complete dismissal with prejudice of the Class Action,' according to the settlement.
In particular,
CVS issued a statement when the preliminary settlement was approved by Ballard.
'This relates to a 1999 settlement of a securities class action by MedPartners, the former parent company of Caremark and is not related in any way to the business practices of CVS Health, which was formed from the merger between CVS and Caremark in 2007,' according to the statement from Mike DeAngelis , Senior Director, Corporate Communications CVS Health.
'The company denies that its predecessor entity engaged in any wrongdoing and denies any liability in the action,' DeAngelis wrote. 'A settlement was reached in order to eliminate the burdens, expenses and uncertainty of continued litigation. We are pleased that the settlement agreement has been preliminarily approved by the court and we look forward to putting this matter behind us.'
Let us briefly regard the logic, or lack thereof, in this public relations pronouncement.
In fact, in 1996, MedPartners, which was a small for-profit corporation that owned physician practices, and was hence on the cutting edge of the movement to bring the corporate physicians to main street, bought Caremark (per the Wall Street Journal). In 1999, after divesting itself of the physician practices, MedPartners changed its name to CareMark Rx (see this news release.) The merger of CVS and Caremark was announced in 2006 (per the NY Times).
Yet Mr DeAngelis asserted first that MedPartners was merely "the former parent company of Caremark" [italics added]. The use of the word "former" in that sentence seems to be pure obfuscation. MedPartners became Caremark. Then, Caremark and CVS merged to become CVS Caremark.
So Mr DeAngelis' assertion that the modern CVS Health business practices are "not related in any way" to MedPartners cannot even can be dignified as a logical fallacy. It seems just flat out untrue, somewhat ironic given that the original charges against MedPartners, now a renamed piece of CVS Health, is that it "lied" about its insurance coverage.
Furthermore, I see no suggestion that the current CVS Caremark has specifically changed so as to provide assurance that the events that led to the current settlement could not occur again. No manager at MedPartners (became Caremark, merged into CVS Caremark) who enabled, authorized, or directed the alleged deception of the shareholders was identified, or suffered any negative consequences. There has been no obvious change in management processes that would prevent something similar from happening again. So how did the company put "this matter behind" it?
Despite current management's attempts to deny that the settlement they just made has anything to do with their current company, I suspect the case may continue to haunt them, just like many other cases are haunting them.
The Haunting of CVS Caremark
Just this week, according to the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail, CVS Caremark was one of three companies that settled allegations by the state that it shortchanged the state's Medicaid program.
And Caremark, CVS Caremark, and CVS Health have had a truly extensive record of other settlements since 2005. Those that we have discussed on this blog, or that were in my files, are below.
Caremark
2005 - Caremark settled allegations that its AdvancePCS subsidiary took kickbacks from drug companies to give the companies favorable treatment in federal employee health programs (per the Philadelphia Inquirer, here.)
CVS, CVS Caremark, CVS Health
2005 - Rhode Island state legislator John A Celona pleaded guilty of fraud and sale of his honest services for taking money from CVS to advocate for legislation on the company's behalf (see post here). (Note that two CVS executives were indicted for the bribery of Celona, but acquited by a jury, per USAToday.)
2007 - Rhode Island state legislator and former House Majority leader Gerard M Martineau pleaded guilty of sale of his honest services for taking money from CVS again to advocate for legislation on the company's behalf (see post here).
2008 - CVS Caremark settled charged by the state of Illinois of deceptive business practices (per the Chicago Tribune, here.)
2009 - CVS Caremark settled charges by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for false advertising (per the FTC, here.)
2010 - CVS settled allegations made by the state of Massachusetts that it overcharged public entitites for drugs (see post here). - CVS settles allegations for violating the US Controlled Substances Acts in its stores in California, and Nevada (see post here).
2011 - CVS Caremark settled allegations made in three whistleblower lawsuits that it defrauded three state pension plans, including that of California (see post here).
2012 - CVS Caremark settled allegations made by the US Federal Trade Comission (FTC) that it deceived elderly patients about drug prices (see post here).
2013 - CVS Caremark settled allegations made by the US Department of Justice that it violated the US Controlled Substances Act in Oklahoma (per the Wall Street Journal, here). - CVS Caremark division settled allegations in multiple states that it failed to properly reimburse Medicaid programs (per the WSJ, here.)
2015 - CVS Health settled charged by Massachusetts public pension funds that it concealed its revenue loss (per Reuters, here.)
Discussion
So CVS Health is another example of a huge modern health care company, formed out of mergers, acquisitions, and other examples of financial engineering, that should truly be regarded as haunted by the ghosts of its past sins. Yet this history remains ghostly, and its clammy touch on present events is barely perceived. None of the earlier settlements seemed to influence how the later settlements were made. No judge refused a given settlement because of the company's history of past alleged misbehavior. No company manager ever suffered any negative consequences of these settlements. Thus they enjoyed impunity.
Hardly anyone remembers that what was once called MedPartners is now an integral part of CVS Caremark, much less that MedPartners was once a partial creature of HealthSouth and Richard Scrushy.
So once more, with feeling....
Nearly every big US health care corporation now seems to now have a long history of bad behavior, sometimes criminal behavior, that has not stopped the revenues from flowing, and the top managers from becoming millionaires, or billionaires. Is it any wonder that a few years ago, nearly a majority of US respondents to a Transparency International poll declared our health care system to tbe corrupt (look here)?
Their dark musings may be partially due to their awareness that health care corruption is a taboo topic. As we wrote about it in 2016 (look here)...
However, strong control over key processes combined with huge resources and big profits to be made make the pharmaceutical industry particularly vulnerable to corruption. Pharmaceutical companies have the opportunity to use their influence and resources to exploit weak governance structures and divert policy and institutions away from public health objectives and towards their own profit maximising interests.
Keep in mind that the money made from corruption does not just go to innocent peoples' retirement funds that are invested in pharmaceutical stocks. It predominantly goes to top corporate executives and managers, and their cronies who preside over the corrupt practices.
I might as well repeat myself once again. As I wrote in 2015,
If we are not willing to even talk about health care corruption, how will we ever challenge it?
So to repeat an ending to one of my previous posts on health care corruption.... if we really want to reform health care, in the little time we may have before our health care bubble bursts, we will need to take strong action against health care corruption. Such action will really disturb the insiders within large health care organizations who have gotten rich from their organizations' misbehavior, and thus taking such action will require some courage. Yet such action cannot begin until we acknowledge and freely discuss the problem. The first step against health care corruption is to be able to say or write the words, health care corruption.
Donna M. Zulman, MD, MS1,2; Nigam H. Shah, MBBS, PhD3; Abraham Verghese, MD4
I note the passage:
... Deimplementing the EHR could actively enhance care in many clinical scenarios. Simply listening to the history and carefully examining the patient who presents with a focused concern is an important means of avoiding diagnostic error.7 Many phenotypic observations (the outline of a cigarette packet in a shirt pocket, or spotting neurofibroma, fasciculation, or rash) change the diagnostic algorithm and are easy to miss when work revolves around the computer and not the patient.
I predict pushback against such a bold and contrarian "de-implementation" assertion (contrarian to the hyper-enthusiast and industry narratives, that is).
The authors continue:
There is building resentment against the shackles of the present EHR; every additional click inflicts a nick on physicians’ morale. Current records miss opportunities to harness available data and predictive analytics to individualize treatment. Meanwhile, sophisticated advances in technology are going untapped. Better medical record systems are needed that are dissociated from billing, intuitive and helpful, and allow physicians to be fully present with their patients.
I also wrote the primary author with a link to an alternate solution to de-implementation that can "allow physicians to be fully present with their patients", namely, my Aug. 9, 2016 post "More on uncoupling clinicians from EHR clerical oppression" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2016/08/more-on-uncoupling-clinicians-from-ehr_91.html
This is a case of education - I hope - by fire on electronic information security, and why "going electronic" can be a risky business. This is a lesson deeply needed by our government leadership who have been pushing an unfettered national rollout of electronic medical records systems, despite known and exploited security concerns of EHRs, among other concerns discussed at this blog.
I've written dozens of posts, just based on casual searches of news, illustrating breaches of healthcare information technology security and privacy of information, as have others focusing primarily on these issues such as Patient Privacy Rights DOT org (https://patientprivacyrights.org/).
Examples of my own occasional posts in this domain are at query links such as:
Our wise political leaders, however, have been pushing this technology, despite its numerous drawbacks - full steam ahead - on clinicians and patients, now under the gun of Medicare payment cuts for "refuseniks."
Now, the political leadership has just gotten a bitter taste of the dish they've been serving up:
The hacker who goes by "Guccifer 2.0" is claiming credit for the release of personal cell phone numbers and private email addresses of Democratic House members.
The data -- posted to their WordPress blog on Friday night -- also contains the contact information for staff members and campaign aides.
In the trove of information released on Friday "Guccifer 2.0" also uploaded files to the blog post that contains login information to subscription services used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, including Lexis-Nexis and Washington newspapers ... In addition to lawmakers' personal information, the hacker uploaded documents analyzing candidates for Florida's 18th congressional district, and a fundraiser memo to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about Morgan Carroll's congressional campaign in Colorado.
In a statement, DCCC Press Secretary Meredith Kelly said: "As previously noted, the DCCC has been the target of a cybersecurity incident, and we are cooperating with federal law enforcement in their ongoing investigation. We are aware of reports that documents claimed to be from our network have been released and are investigating their authenticity."
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democratic on the House Intelligence committee, suggested a law enforcement probe is necessary.
Perhaps a probe of the competence of those responsible for electronic security hired by our wise government officials should come first.
"The unauthorized disclosure of people's personally identifiable information is never acceptable, and we can fully expect the authorities will be investigating the posting of this information," Schiff said.
But it's just fine to keep rolling out insecure electronic records systems.
... The hacker wrote in the blog post, "It's time for new revelations now. All of you may have heard about the DCCC hack. As you see I wasn't wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the DNC breach."
Remarkable incompetence on the part of the politicians.
... The hack of the DNC was originally discovered as being two separate breaches, both by hacking groups identified by cybersecurity experts as working for the Russian military and intelligence complex. One hack was said to have lasted a year and targeted internal communications, the other was for a few months and targeted opposition research on Donald Trump.
Federal investigators had tried to warn the DNC months before, sources told CNN, but by the time the suspected Russian hackers were kicked out of the systems damage had been done: Nearly 20,000 emails between a handful of DNC officials were dumped on the web by WikiLeaks as the Democratic National Convention was kicking off. The emails showing opposition to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during the primary led to the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the eve of the convention and departure of more party officials later.
The politicians of both parties behind the EHR mandate, in effect at least since the HITECH Act of 2009, should have heeded those questioning EHR security before mandating a national rollout. My only comment is that I hope the politicians unabashedly pushing EHR's on the public may have learned a valuable, needed, and well-deserved lesson about electronic information security from these events.
There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.
In other words, in the all-too-common insufficiently powered studies, and even seemingly robust studies in domains with small effect sizes, financial interests, prejudices and other factors more often than not produce false results.
Ioannidis and co-authors recently took their sword to "underperforming Big Ideas in research" (including the "miracles" touted by hyper-enthusiasts such as in genomics and in cybernetics), via a new JAMA viewpoint piece:
What Happens When Underperforming Big Ideas in Research Become Entrenched? Michael J. Joyner, MD1; Nigel Paneth, MD, MPH2; John P. A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc3 JAMA. Published online July 28, 2016. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.11076 http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2541515
For several decades now the biomedical research community has pursued a narrative positing that a combination of ever-deeper knowledge of subcellular biology, especially genetics, coupled with information technology will lead to transformative improvements in health care and human health. In this Viewpoint, we provide evidence for the extraordinary dominance of this narrative in biomedical funding and journal publications; discuss several prominent themes embedded in the narrative to show that this approach has largely failed; and propose a wholesale reevaluation of the way forward in biomedical research.
The key word is "narrative." As per Hayek, those with little real-world operational experience, i.e., intellectuals and academics, often the uncritical cheerleaders for electronic records despite considerable downsides, have only the "narrative" upon which they base their beliefs in healthcare IT exceptionalism:
It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. . . . As he knows little about particular issues, his criterion must be consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world. . . . It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.
(I can add that blogs have to some small degree ameloriated "whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker", but only to a small degree.)
The "general conception" in cybernetics is that computers are a silver bullet in any domain, and can only result in massive improvements.
My experience for the past twenty+ years in the Electronic Medical Records/clinical information technology domain, where quality, safety, usability, confidentiality, and other critical real-world issues have been ignored in favor of EHR hyper-enthusiasm, supports Hayek's observations regarding prevalent unfettered beliefs in healthcare IT exceptionalism.
Ioannidis et al. state the factual situation with EHR technology unapologetically, clearly and succinctly:
... The financial and clinical benefits predicted from shifting to EHRs have also largely failed to materialize because of difficulties in interoperability, poor quality, and accuracy of the collected information; cost overruns associated with installation and operation of EHRs at many institutions; and ongoing privacy and security concerns that further increase operational costs.
I would change "interoperability" to "operability." Otherwise, they're quite correct. For example, the "Big Data" hyper-enthusiasts quite irrationally believe data from these systems - as they are today - will somehow "revolutionize" medicine, while at the very same time the IT industry itself and its pundits ignore fundamental precepts of computer science, information science, biomedical informatics, biomedicine and biomedical research itself.
Some of the hyper-enthusiasts have made predictions that are astonishingly naive, delusionally grandiose and just plain perverse, e.g., see for instance my Jan. 2014 post "Computers + a few docs can manage 'an entire city', and other cybernetic miracles" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2014/01/computers-few-docs-can-manage-entire.html .
The new JAMA paper continues:
... These features make the use of EHRs for research into the origins of disease, as proposed in the Precision Medicine Initiative, highly problematic.No clearly specified targets for either improved outcomes or reduced costs have been developed to assess the performance efficiency of EHRs.
Those targets were never specified, but The Market seems to have corrected for that, e.g., via this Jan. 2015 letter from ~40 different medical societies:
... Although it is difficult to argue for a return to paper records, any claim of future transformation of the medical record should include well-defined accountability and review mechanisms. Otherwise, the health care system may become hostage, wasting increasing resources to continuously upgrade electronic technology without really helping patients.
Finally, I disagree with the authors that "it is difficult to argue for a return to paper records."
Paper has its proper place, and "paperless" is a utopian dream of the hyper-enthusiasts that causes significant damage to the primary role of clinicians - to take care of patients. I make this argument (with a real-world, highly successful example of my own creation) at my Aug. 9, 2016 post "More on uncoupling clinicians from EHR clerical oppression" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2016/08/more-on-uncoupling-clinicians-from-ehr_91.html.
In summary, the authors of this JAMA piece clearly and succinctly break through the "narrative" about hyper-enthusiast dominated fields, including clinical information technology and the belief in healthcare IT exceptionalism.
Sadly, theirs is almost a single voice in a wilderness dominated by the hyper-enthusiasts - and the profiteers.
Transparency International, the global NGO that studies and fights corruption, seeks information from health care professionals about health care corruption. The details are in the official announcement below. If you are a health care professional, please consider responding to this survey.
Invitation to participate in a corruption in healthcare survey Transparency International’s health programme has commenced a new research project to identify the major types of corruption in the health sector. We feel that this research piece will contribute to understanding the corruption vulnerabilities in the health sector and ultimately improve the availability and use of health information to hold governments accountable.
This will feed into the World Health Summit in October, where Transparency International has been invited to run the opening session. We'll also be displaying results from the research on our website and will feature interviews with people about their experiences.
As part of our research, we're keen to hear from as many healthcare professionals as possible. This is to enable us to hear about your experiences of corruption and what you consider corruption to be.
At this stage, we do not want to influence your thoughts - more capture them. A survey has gone online and we would be grateful if you could fill it in and distribute to your peers.
The survey contains ten questions and can be completed in ten minutes. The survey will run until the end of September.
Given the sensitivity of the subject, the survey is anonymous unless you would like to talk to someone about your experience. At the end of the survey there is an option to leave your contact details.
We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Best wishes,
Michael
Michael Petkov Programme Officer Pharmaceuticals & Healthcare Programme Transparency International UK michael dot petkov at transparency dot org dot uk
At my August 6, 2016 post (link) I wrote of my belief that "best practices" for EHR evolution call for:
... a return to paper (specialized forms depending on the setting) for clinical data capture by busy doctors and nurses, and data entry into a computer via clerical personnel.
I presented a late 1990's real-world experiment in creating such a system for invasive cardiology in the Delaware hospital system, Christiana Care Health System, where I was CMIO at that time.
Enthusiasts seem to ignore the downsides and emphasize a (seemingly) sensible strong belief about efficiency, one of whose principles is that paper must be abolished in medicine. Is work towards that end beneficial, or deleterious, to the clinical mission?
In fact, an attempt to implement such a paperless system, "Apollo" as the commercial system was known, in a cath lab performing 6,000 procedures/year proved impossible. The busy clinicians, doctors, nurses and technicians simply did not have enough time to enter data directly into a computer. Maneuvering around a computer application, dealing with its designber-centric menus, drop-downs, icons, widgets, annoying messages, input limitations, outright crashes with data loss, etc. was both inappropriate, and in fact impossible, in such a setting.
In 2016, one of the largest complaints of hundreds of thousands of U.S. physicians and nurses is that they spend more time interacting with the computer than with patients. Patients complain they cannot get eye contact from clinicians - who are tethered to a computer screen entering data - during "live" encounters.
It is my belief there is no solution to this problem other than, where appropriate and advantageous, decoupling clinicians from data input and returning to paper for data entry, that is, specialized forms as in the aforementioned post. Data input needs to be returned to clerical personnel as in the aforementioned invasive cardiology system.
The output side (with, of course, significant user-centered redesign) can remain computerized; as long as the paper forms are also made available via document imaging.
The forms for invasive cardiology looked like this, and were subject to revisions as needed.
Physician's data collection form, side 1. Click to enlarge.
Physician's data collection form, side 2
Cath technician/nurse's data collection form, side 1
Cath technician/nurse's data collection form, side 2
The EHR itself was freed from "legacy" limitations regarding rapid customization, essential in medicine. It was designed with the ability to rapidly incorporate changes and modifications to the dataset as needed, matching the changes to the forms.
Below I am showing some of the reports that this system produced regularly, as designed by the team of programmers, executives and cardiologists, under my medical informatics leadership. I used to do "real" informatics, e.g., leading the data modeling of entire clinical subspecialty domains and developing advanced IT based on those models, until seeing that the commercial sector was damaging the field of HIT, and medicine itself, with horribly bad health IT leading to letters such as the January 21, 2015 letter to HHS at http://mb.cision.com/Public/373/9710840/9053557230dbb768.pdf. It was then, in the early 2000s, that I turned my attention to writing about the industry's deficits.
The major advantage of the cardiology reports shown below concerned accuracy, including the case report itself whose language and organization was also developed for optimal clinical organization and readability -- unlike the reams of "legible gibberish" that emanates from commercial EHRs then and today. See my post "Two weeks, two reams" at lhttp://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/02/electronic-medical-records-two-weeks.html for more on that issue.
Quality data input into the system, being freed from the accuracy-impairing aspects of busy clinicians as clerical employees, and the resultant reports saved the organization close to $1 million in the first year and led to a better understanding of what worked and what didn't in treating blocked coronary arteries.
Click to enlarge:
Some statistical reports, and sample computer-generated case report front page
An evaluation of the project by the national organization, the Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions, was that the accomplishments were "exceptional."
All this was achieved without direct clinician data entry - and deliberately so due to the distractions of that process having failed in the same setting in prior organizational attempts, without medical informatics expertise. Perhaps, more accurately, I should say "medical informatics expertise in someone who also thinks critically about all issues involved, including adverse effects, of IT." Clinicians could supplement each section of the forms data if needed via dictation, which was directly transcribed by humans into the cardiology server.
"Clerical work for clerical employees, clinical work for clinicians" was the theme of the project.
Breaking from the belief that paper is to be abolished at all costs was the key to creating really useful and well-accepted health IT, even in this exceptionally busy critical care setting. It was still being used over a decade later, ca. 2008 and may still be now. I have not been back for a visit since then.
One argument might be made that hospitals cannot afford enough clerical employees to do all the data input. I maintain that, with hospitals spending upwards of $100 million for EHRs, and with the data being used and sold profitably by a wide variety of stakeholders who contribute nothing for the medical data they obtain (EHR makers, insurers, regulators to name just a few), transcriptionists could be afforded.
Of course: Physicians with simply too much free time on their hands - the majority, it might seem, based on the behavior of some of the EHR enthusiasts and government pundits - and who enjoy giving away the fruits of their labor for others' profits could still enter data directly into the computer. If they want to.
I note that if physicians really were empowered, the current status quo of clinicians as (unpaid) data-input personnel for those who profit from the data likely would never have come to pass.
Entering orders would still be done by clinicians, although that process and the process of alerts and reminders also needs a major reworking, such as use of advanced NLP to allow a more natural input of orders.
In summary, in the late 1990s the mantras of eliminating paper from medicine, and of clinicians needing to perform clerical work, were challenged and shown to be injurious to health IT progress in a critical care setting, invasive cardiology.
The lessons learned are more valuable today as they were then, considering that the health IT "experiment" is facing significant opposition today, with significant clinician rancor. The CEO of the American Medical Association perhaps summed it up best when he referred to HIT as "the digital snake oil of the early 21st century" as at http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/2016/2016-06-11-a16-madara-address.page.
These are unfortunate and undesired positions for the AMA CEO, and for the aforementioned medical society leaders as expressed in the letter to HHS to express, but this development has its real-world reasons.
Correction calls for modifying/softening cybernetic-enthusiast ideas like "paperless" and a more appropriate allocation of computer-related tasks. Refocusing on "Clerical work for clerical employees; clinical work for clinicians" would be a good start.
In the past week I've received two emails that made me highly suspicious of medical/insurance identity theft.
The emails came from Independence Blue Cross, ibx.com, into the email account I receive normal mailings from them, and seemed to indicate someone had created an unauthorized user account (I redacted my email address below):
Aug. 5, 2016:
From: noreply@ibx.com Date: Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 7:19 PM Subject: User Created To: [my email address redacted] User Created With UserId - userId20392, Password - password20392
July 27, 2016:
From: noreply@ibx.com Date: Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 1:59 PM Subject: User Created To: [my email address redacted]
User Created With UserId - userId1546, Password - S04bd9u3tR
These userid's and passwords did not work at ibx.com's website, but my concern was that, if these were false accounts, the creator could have logged in and changed the password.
After the first email I left a message with the IBX fraud line, but heard nothing in response.
The metadata (IP headers) of the messages looked like this (I redacted my email address):
Delivered-To: [my email address redacted] Received: by 10.237.44.68 with SMTP id f62csp1992388qtd; Fri, 5 Aug 2016 16:20:27 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.36.77.145 with SMTP id l139mr7340323itb.19.1470439227798; Fri, 05 Aug 2016 16:20:27 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: Received: from cnxsgusgma01.cnxuat.com ([216.183.110.200]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id q123si19839234iof.67.2016.08.05.16.20.27 for ; Fri, 05 Aug 2016 16:20:27 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning noreply@ibx.com does not designate 216.183.110.200 as permitted sender) client-ip=216.183.110.200; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning noreply@ibx.com does not designate 216.183.110.200 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=noreply@ibx.com Received: from IBCSGUSGAA01.cnxuat.com ([192.168.230.147]) by cnxsgusgma01.cnxuat.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(8.5.9600.16384); Fri, 5 Aug 2016 19:19:39 -0400 Received: from ibcsgusgaa01.cnxuat.com ([127.0.0.1]) by IBCSGUSGAA01.cnxuat.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(8.5.9600.16384); Fri, 5 Aug 2016 19:19:58 -0400 From: noreply@ibx.com To: [my email address redacted] Message-ID: <1180377472 .11989.1470439198021.javamail.ibcsgusgaa01="" ibcsgusgaa01=""> Subject: User Created MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-Path: noreply@ibx.com X-OriginalArrivalTime: 05 Aug 2016 23:19:58.0024 (UTC) FILETIME=[E1DD4C80:01D1EF6F] Date: 5 Aug 2016 19:19:58 -0400
User Created With UserId - userId20392, Password - password20392
After the second, I called IBX. I was told it is a "malfunction", that these emails were not anything nefarious, other subscribers were affected, and that it "would be corrected soon."
I had already looked up the "Received from" header cnxsgusgma01.cnxuat.com [216.183.110.200]:
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use # available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html # # If you see inaccuracies in the results, please report at # https://www.arin.net/public/whoisinaccuracy/index.xhtml # # # The following results may also be obtained via: # https://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=216.183.110.200?showDetails=true&showARIN=false&showNonArinTopLevelNet=false&ext=netref2 #
Connecture, Inc. INFLOW-7524-7780 (NET-216-183-110-192-1) 216.183.110.192 - 216.183.110.255 Inflow Inc. INFL-AR-1 (NET-216-183-96-0-1) 216.183.96.0 - 216.183.127.255
Other IP's in the header appear to be of local (internal) workstations at the companies involved.
Who are these mysterious companies from which these emails seem to have originated?
Health insurance has entered the consumer age. Be ready. (We are.)
While there is almost universal agreement that health insurance will predominantly be distributed online in the near future, few American consumers have yet to experience it. In fact, most Americans have very little experience shopping for health insurance at all – let alone while making sense of numerous and often deceptively similar plans.
All of that is changing. Reform, the health insurance industry’s efforts to become more efficient, and Americans’ affinity for doing business online are all converging in the form of health insurance exchanges that present users with unprecedented freedom of choice.
Choice, of course, leads to questions. Which plans does my doctor participate in? Do they address my health needs? What about my family and my children? What happens if I need to go to the emergency room? How much will it cost – not just this month but year round? Am I eligible for a subsidy, and if so how much? In short, what’s the best plan for me and my family?
In health insurance, there are no cookie-cutter answers. That’s why health insurance exchanges and online distribution systems must do far more than enable consumers to enroll for coverage.
That’s where we come in. For more than 15 years we’ve focused on a singular goal: To create online systems and exchanges that empower Americans to choose the right health insurance plan online with confidence the first time, and every time.
As of January 4, 2005, Inflow, Inc. was acquired by SunGard Availability Services, Inc. Inflow, Inc. provides facilities-based information technology outsourcing solutions to companies with critical business and network applications. The company offers its services in three primary lines: application hosting and management, business continuance and disaster recovery, and enterprise data-center management. Its application hosting and management services include application hosting and colocation, multi homed internet access, security services, application and infrastructure management, and network and system development. The company’s business continuance and disaster recovery services consist of business continuance planning/consulting, managed storage services, and content distribution services. Inflow’s enterprise data-center management services comprise onsite data-center management, operational support system management, data-center development, data-center audit services, data-center migration assistance, and business process documentation. Inflow, Inc. was founded in 1997 and was based in Thornton, Colorado.
Emphases mine.
So, perhaps millions of Independence Blue Cross customers are receiving emails that would reasonably cause suspicion in this day and age for identity theft, from companies that gloriously promise:
To create online systems and exchanges that empower Americans to choose the right health insurance plan online with confidence the first time, and every time.
To provide facilities-based information technology outsourcing solutions to companies with critical business and network applications
Confidence is the last thing the emails I received on behalf of ibx.com inspire in me.
If this information is being spilled (to the subscriber's own email account, but who knows where else?), I can only fear that other information is not quite secure, and wonder if these "ghost accounts" are just a glitch, or insiders spying on PHI, or other effects of either massive bugs or hacker attacks.
IT companies and companies that outsource their critical IT to others (including health IT makers and health IT buyers such as hospitals) - and the IT service providers themselves - need to really, really get their houses in order.
They need to stop beta-testing buggy software upon their customers (or live patients in the case of clinical IT).
Problems like this reflect significant and trust-busting incompetence, at best.
The Role of Standards in Preventing & Mitigating Health IT Patient Safety Risks
Purpose: Health IT Community Technical Workshop for all Stakeholders: Learn and Share Industry Best Practices.
Objectives: Bring together all Health IT stakeholders to share best practices and review the fundamentals of risk prevention and mitigation that apply to Health IT. Health IT standards are part of the foundation needed to deliver high quality, patient-centric care. The industry continues to gain a better understanding of the relationship between managing risk and providing quality care through the safe use of Health IT.
This forum is an opportunity to receive updates on the latest standards development process related to risk prevention and mitigation, quality assurance and safety-related usability, to find out about recent findings from studies conducted on this subject, and to bring industry stakeholders together to share best practice, and define the path forward for risk prevention and mitigation that apply to Health IT.
This workshop is an admission that the industry lacked in understanding "of the relationship between managing risk and providing quality care through the safe use of Health IT" at a time when rollout of bad health IT was pushed like a Miracle Cure by government and industry pundits, and became a national mandate,
To all the boneheads who did push this technology out the door prematurely before its risks and safety were reasonably understood, and/or ignored the "iconoclasts" as they were derogatorily known, thanks for harassing doctors and nurses to the point of exhaustion, harming patients via cybernetic experimentation without consent, and wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. (It would have been a very good thing, I note, if efforts like this had been mandated before my mother's demise of care continuity failure precipitated by bad health IT.)
NIST, this workshop is late, but better late than never.
However, I am increasingly of the belief that this technology is unsuitable for busy clinicians, as long as they bear the clerical burdens, and can never be fixed it that arrangement is not drastically changed.
"Best practices", I believe, call for a return to paper (specialized forms depending on the setting) for clinical data capture by busy doctors and nurses, and data entry into a computer via clerical personnel.
Why do I hold this belief?
I designed such a system for invasive cardiology (a highly complex, critical-care medical domain) 20 years ago that was highly successful and popular, even among busy invasive cardiologists, to replace a direct-computer-entry commercial product from hell. This is written up at this link: http://cci.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/?loc=cases&sloc=Cardiology%20story
After modeling the dataset for the domain of cardiac catheterization to a high degree of granularity, the forms were designed and tested collaboratively with the invasivist leaders, as seen below.
The physicians recorded real-time onto the forms, or shortly after they de-gloved. There were also specialized forms for the cath lab technicians and nurses. Click to enlarge. Each section could be supplemented via dictation if needed, and the text transcribed and sent to the application server for inclusion on the full cath report, via a direct link from central transcription.
No wasting of clinicians' valuable time and limited cognitive energy navigating lousy EHR user interfaces, interacting with a multitude of mind-numbing icons and widgets, and other frustrations looking to enter critical data.
Physician's data collection form, side 1. Click to enlarge.
Physician's data collection form, side 2
Cath technician/nurse's data collection form, side 1
Cath technician/nurse's data collection form, side 2
Clerical employees were hired to perform data entry from the paper forms and inquire with the doctors when there were questions about data recorded during the cath.
Forms for less specialized medical domains would be significantly simpler.
Addendum:
Ca. 2007, (non-medical) Siemens Healthcare IT executives in Malvern, PA (a Siemens division now bought out by Cerner) were shown this project by me, still in use just a few miles south of them in Delaware, and deemed it "impractical" for commercialization. I thought that very sadly ironic considering the incredible engineering prowess and accomplishments world-wide of parent company Siemens A.G.
In my direct first-hand experience, non-medical IT executives are one of the biggest impediments to health IT progress (and safety), in both hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry.
http://www.siemens.com/about/en/ About Siemens Siemens is a global powerhouse focusing on the areas of electrification, automation and digitalization. One of the world’s largest producers of energy-efficient, resource-saving technologies, Siemens is a leading supplier of systems for power generation and transmission as well as medical diagnosis. In infrastructure and industry solutions the company plays a pioneering role. As of September 30, 2015, we had around 348,000 employees in more than 200 countries. In fiscal 2015, they generated revenues of €75.6 billion.
