Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/22/24

Many organizations are focusing their healthcare IT and clinical investments on Social Determinants of Health. This could include configuring patient portals to gather relevant information, enhancing EHR workflows to allow clinicians to view and act on patient-specific factors, and looking at the data from a population-based perspective.

For some organizations, the return on investment that is needed to gather the data is clear. For example, a community health center might be the recipient of a grant that provides funding for gathering the data and taking steps to improve outcomes based on that data. For others, the return on investment might be less obvious.

A recent article in JAMA Health Forum reviews the need for benefit-cost analysis as organizations look at making investments in care related to social determinants of health. The authors note that there are many examples of the links between social factors and health outcomes in the literature and that organizations have responded by focusing on those with the strongest links. However, adding benefit-cost analysis to the review process would allow comparison of different interventions to determine which would be likely generate the most benefit.

This approach would allow greater understanding of the importance of spending your healthcare dollars in the right place, with the authors noting, “An effective intervention to address a minor risk factor may generate much larger net benefits than a less effective intervention targeted at a major risk factor.” We all have examples of health systems and other care delivery organizations that have fallen under the spell of shiny objects and then struggle to get return on their investments.

Sometimes those projects are more exciting than others and might bring more publicity, but there may be less clarity around how they will actually improve health or reduce morbidity and mortality. On the other hand, certain interventions can have tremendous outcomes, but aren’t seen as exciting. For example, how many people think that nutrition education is sexy? Talking about balanced meals or food deserts or the benefits of community gardens certainly isn’t as exciting as seeing your orthopedic surgery practice mentioned on the wall of the local baseball stadium, that’s for sure. But which one is likely to drive improved health outcomes for the long haul?

The authors discuss this in the context of organizations that focus their attention on return on investment goals that have short time horizons. This leads to failure of visualization of potential long-term gains. We see this with payers denying expensive therapies that may lead to savings many years down the road, when the patient might be on Medicare and offer no calculable benefit for the payer. The authors summarize this: “In contrast, benefit-cost analysis is generally conducted from a societal perspective and considers benefits and costs across all sectors and populations and over extended time horizons with appropriate discounting of future benefits and costs.”

This got me thinking about how we sometimes don’t give full consideration to the longer-term impacts of the healthcare IT projects that we are doing. Leaders are often under the microscope to show positive financial outcomes almost immediately after a project goes live. They are expected to demonstrate shocking reductions in costs or dramatic increases in revenue, and projects that fail to deliver such splashy results may be at risk for being canceled, or even worse, placed on pause and left in limbo. With complex processes, however, it might not be appropriate to push for a dramatic change.

When there’s a significant change happening, I’m a big fan of using pilots to make sure that process “improvements” aren’t going to create unintended problems. However, the pressure to constantly deliver results may make technology leaders less likely to consider piloting or a slower rollout of change.

Alternatively, an intervention might deliver significant results, but then teams move on to other projects, preventing forward movement in the cycle of continuous improvement. In other situations, the maintenance phase is skipped and processes slowly drift back to inefficiency, ultimately eliminating long-term gains.

If organizations focused more on longer-term analysis and ensuring sustained change, would it make a difference in the projects they select? Unfortunately for many, being able to target long-term goals is a luxury given the fact that a results-oriented culture actually means one of immediate results rather than truly designing models that will be sustainable for the long haul. We see this phenomenon often with the rip-and-replace approach to solutions, when we know in our hearts that the organization never spent the time, effort, or money that was needed to make the first solution successful.

I saw another example of this shortsightedness in my community earlier this month. A local hospital that was looking to reduce headcount decided to shutter its medical weight management clinic. Given the obesity epidemic in the US, this doesn’t seem to make much sense at first glance. However, in our community bariatric surgery is seen as more exciting than medical weight management, primarily because it generates higher operating room utilization and therefore greater hospital revenues.

Unfortunately, patients now have fewer choices and might be pushed towards interventions that aren’t right for them. It would be interesting to look at the modeling of both service lines looking at a three-year, five-year, and 10-year horizon to examine not only which one is more favorable from a revenue standpoint, but which one is likely to deliver the best clinical outcomes. I wonder if they even looked that far.

Other organizational cuts occurred in pediatric and women’s health service lines. That looks like it will create a significant gap in services for local families. It will be interesting to see if other hospitals in the area are able to increase access in the service lines that were cut or whether families will just be left with longer waits for services that were already scarce at times. Even without a detailed analysis, I can’t imagine that making it more difficult for women and children to receive care is in the best interests of the community in the long term.

The organization is classed as a non-profit, so we will see the community benefit statements they put out over the next couple of years, detailing their efforts to serve the underserved. I suspect they hope that no one is looking, and given the way that other hospitals in the area behave, I doubt anyone is.

Is your organization looking at the longer term or bigger pictures, or is the focus on delivering results in the next two quarters? Leave a comment or email me.

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