EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 11/7/19

It’s been a crazy week, with a couple of days of travel being paid back with hundreds of emails in my inbox. Even as I unsubscribe and use filters, it seems like there is always something going on that generates more correspondence than it should (think reply-all apocalypse).

I’d love to sell services around creating an effective email policy to some of the organizations I work with. It seems to be a skill that is sorely needed both in the commercial space and in the volunteer space. I’m getting ready to head out for a week-long trip and am trying to pre-tie loose ends, and predicting what might need to be taken care of in my absence is always a challenging exercise.

The Drug Enforcement Agency is one of the major causes of increased email traffic in my inbox. It seems like my recent renewal has triggered enrollment in a number of mailing lists that have to be individually stamped out like a game of Whack-a-Mole. Some of them have forced me to go through the unsubscribe process twice to get them to stop. The mailing list preferences have names like “Prescribers” and “Prescribers-All” so you don’t know what you’re really unsubscribing. I like to have as little contact with the US Department of Justice as possible, so I hope I have finally gotten things back to where they were prior to my renewal.

Registration is open for the 2020 ONC Annual Meeting, with the theme of “Connecting Policy and Technology: Bringing the EHR to the Patient.” The event will be held in January 2020 in Washington, DC. The published agenda only shows the various time blocks for sessions, with a note that the full agenda is coming soon. Personally, I like to see the agenda before I plunk down money on a conference, but I’m guessing that most of the people who attend the ONC meeting are going to go regardless.

I enjoy attending conferences as a way of learning new things and engaging with people in person, but the cost of many of them poses a barrier. Maybe we should start a “Send Jayne On the Road” conference fund so I could report from around the country and across the globe. Warm locations preferred between November and February, of course.

CMS is plugging information sessions for its new Kidney Care First (KCF) and Comprehensive Kidney Care Contracting (CKCC) Model Options, which are part of the Kidney Care Choices (KCC) model. They are targeted towards nephrologists and dialysis facilities along with accountable care organizations that focus on kidney disease, and build on the Comprehensive End-Stage Renal Disease Care Model structure.

It’s good to see a model with a goal to delay the need for dialysis and encourage transplantation, but the reality is there is still a shortage of kidneys out there. We also need to be spending money to reduce the causes of chronic kidney disease, including diabetes and hypertension.

I recently attended a local health IT event and sat with some students. One of them was from a different country and is in the US pursuing a master’s in public health. His big observation is that public health in the US is far less prominent (and less well-funded) than in his home country, which was a surprise because he had assumed that because the US has “rich resources” that we would have it together.

Public health often gets the short end of the stick. I learned a great deal about public health informatics while working towards my clinical informatics board certification. It’s a fascinating field that has great potential to positively help people.

If you haven’t received your influenza vaccine, there’s still time, but the season is ramping up. Flu season officially began October 1 in the US and roughly two percent of all visits to healthcare providers in the past week were for influenza-like illnesses.

We’re seeing quite a bit of it at our facility, and even though the flu tests may be negative for influenza A or B, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has a bill and webbed feet, we’re treating it as such. Louisiana leads the nation at reporting “widespread” flu activity, so make sure you’re prepared if you’re headed to the Big Easy.

Patients are always surprised when I quote flu statistics to them. I receive a weekly virology digest from our medical center’s infectious disease division that shows how many patients were tested and which viruses are prevalent in the community. I want my patients to know that we’re using evidence and data in their care and not just our best guess.

With Google recently announcing the decision to buy Fitbit, I’ve been asked a couple of times what I think about the company’s role in healthcare. A recent CNBC piece quoted Google Health head David Feinberg outlining plans to bring Google search technology to bear against EHRs as well as generally improving health-related searches on Google. Feinberg spoke at the recent HLTH conference and outlined some pretty far out sounding uses for auto-complete in the EHR as well as better enabling surgeons who visit YouTube before operating on patients.

I like my physicians to already have necessary skills before working on me and am not sure I want them watching a video to know what to do before they walk in the room. I just referred a patient to the emergency department this week because she needed a procedure that I haven’t done in 20 years and my physician assistant hadn’t done in 15. Although it was tempting to watch a refresher video and give it a go, that’s not the best care for the patient.

My clinical care recently has been challenging enough, and the root of much of what I have been seeing is our broken and chaotic healthcare system. One morning I saw a patient who had been briefly paralyzed after a fall, but who came to urgent care because he didn’t have insurance and didn’t want to go to the emergency department. The diagnosis was an unstable neck fracture that could have led to more permanent paralysis at any time, and yet he still refused our calling an ambulance to take him to the ED.

The following day, I saw a patient who qualified for Level 1 trauma status after a vehicular-pedestrian hit and run who also came to the urgent care because he didn’t have insurance. He at least consented to the ambulance transfer. The ED physician called me to give follow up and was shocked that patients like that come into the urgent care. We see them all the time, and unfortunately their visit to us just adds another layer of cost to the system. It’s a sad commentary for healthcare in general.

What’s the saddest commentary on healthcare you’ve seen recently? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.