Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 11/7/22

There has been a lot of discussion recently about practices that send patient portal questionnaires for existing patients to enter their medical histories. Certainly as a patient, I don’t want to enter information that already exists in my chart, and as a physician, I don’t want to have to reconcile a bunch of information that might already exist in the chart against patient-provided information that may or may not be accurate. Some patients are great at knowing their histories, others are less so.

Once a year, I have an appointment at a major academic center’s high-risk breast cancer program. This year, I was pleasantly surprised that for the first time, they didn’t ask me to provide information that they already had in my chart. The check-in process was quite streamlined even though three separate appointments were involved, so I was looking forward to a smooth visit.

The visit itself was great, with speedy access to an exam room, an upgraded exam gown (flannel with satin trim, if you can imagine), and a short wait for the physician. From there I went to the imaging center waiting room. Although the technician was apparently looking for me in the wrong waiting room (they have three), they ended up locating me quickly enough to get me to my imaging appointment early.

My technician was personable and efficient, making me feel like a valued patient and not like just another patient in a long line of tasks for the day. From there it was back to a different waiting room, where I received preliminary imaging results and met with another physician.

After discussing the care plan, they mentioned that a final radiology reading would be available to me via patient portal within 24 hours. They also explained that due to their current patient mix, they were asking some patients to schedule with a midlevel provider rather than the physician for their next visits. Knowing what I know about healthcare economics and physician staffing, I understood what they were trying to do in making sure the physicians have capacity to manage the patients who need active management of breast cancer and who are planning surgeries in the near term. As a patient, you put a certain level of trust in a leading academic institution to have appropriate physician oversight when you’re seeing a midlevel provider, and as a physician, I know how to advocate for myself if the need arises.

The visit hit a glitch during the checkout process, since there was no one to staff the checkout desk and everyone was being sent to the waiting room. There was quite a line since most patients needed multiple follow-up appointments for imaging, biopsies, or additional clinical appointments. I had plenty of time to read the Patient Bill of Rights they had posted on the wall, which specified that patients might see a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner as part of their visit. It also spelled out that patients have the right to see the physician if they prefer, although that might result in the rescheduling of their appointment. It’s standard stuff, and I didn’t think too much of it until the patient in front of me began to check out.

She handed over her check-out instruction sheet and began asking questions about the providers listed on the board behind the receptionist, as well as their credentials. She was asking which were breast specialists and which were other types of surgeons since it’s a mixed office. The receptionist was describing them, and when she got to the nurse practitioner, she said “Oh, she does everything,” to which the patient responded asking, “Why didn’t she go to medical school then?”

My ears perked up at that and I knew it was going to get interesting. It’s not hard to overhear things when you’re literally three feet apart, and apparently the patient had been given the same information that I had about not seeing the physician at the next visit and wasn’t aligned with the plan. She was shopping for a different surgeon rather than see someone she stated had less education. Having just read the Patient Bill of Rights, I wondered how the office would handle it. The receptionist said she would go and check with the physician.

While she was gone, the patient — with whom I had exchanged pleasantries about my cute tote bag while we were both in the imaging waiting room — turned to me and mentioned that she knew what the answer would be since the doctor had already told her she had to see the nurse practitioner. She went on to say that she was a cancer survivor and that she is scared to not see her surgeon, who knows her the best. I nodded empathetically and waited to see what would happen.

The receptionist came back and announced that she had spoken to the physician and the answer was still no – she would need to schedule as directed. Clearly that didn’t align with the posted Patient Bill of Rights, and honestly if the organization isn’t going to follow it, they need to take a good look at either modifying it or removing it from the office while they reconsider.

I was able to get my follow-ups scheduled and headed home, eager to get my final reports and try not to think about the whole situation for another six months, which is sometimes the best way to approach it as a patient. I buried myself in work the rest of the day, waiting for the familiar notification from the patient portal app that my result was available.

Unfortunately, the notification didn’t come. Nor did it come the next day, or the next, or the following one. I was busy with work and didn’t have a chance to call and wanted to also give a little benefit of the doubt since I know healthcare is in crisis. But now we’re in the weekend, and I’m relegated to wondering where there is a backup in radiology, whether my study was missed, or whether I’m going to get a callback to come back for more images. I know the system’s EHR and how it’s configured to handle release of test results to patients. Once radiology images are final, they release to the patient. The question then becomes whether something is wrong with the EHR and portal systems, or with the test itself.

Since it’s the weekend, I guess I’ll sit and wonder for a few more days, which is never a position a patient wants to be in.

Thinking about the situation as a whole, I think the practice needs to do some introspection around its messaging. In addition to the Patient Bill of Rights issue, they need to provide additional instructions on what to do if imaging results don’t come back. I’m a physician and know to track it down when Monday comes, but a lot of patients might be from the “no news is good news” generations, or don’t have patient portal access, and wouldn’t know to follow up a missing result. In the mean time, I’m off to a conference, so I will rely on my calendar to remind me to make the call.

Does your organization’s patient summary give instructions on what to do when results don’t return? Do you honor your posted Patient Bill of Rights? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 11/3/22

I’ve experienced an uptick in email solicitations over the last couple of weeks. It’s been fascinating to see the different content and how marketers are trying to use various strategies to get the reader’s attention.

Quite a few of them are going for the friendly-sounding approach, with short sentences and colloquial language. One of the repeat senders is further trying to build on the familiarity by mentioning the local weather and a nearby restaurant, which is fascinating but a bit odd since it’s in an adjacent town. I wonder what the algorithm looks like that says, “hey, let’s pick something close, but not creepy-stalker close” and throw that into the email. They even go so far to mention “location inferred from your company” regardless of the fact that my “company” is located hundreds of miles from the town they mentioned.

I strongly suspect that the emails are stemming from mailing lists related to the conferences I’m attending in the next couple of weeks. It’s one more way for meeting organizers to increase conference revenue, even though it’s annoying for the attendees. I don’t recall seeing any kind of “don’t sell my information” opt-out checkboxes during the registration processes for either of them, but there’s always a chance that I missed them along the way (although from past experience, it’s more likely that the conference didn’t give attendees the chance to opt out). Much like the weeks following HIMSS, I’m sure I’ll be spending quite a bit of time creating new email filters and wading through various pieces of junk email.

I do have to say that I’m a little nervous about my upcoming conference attendance, especially since flu cases are on the rise. The US has already seen more than 880,000 cases of lab-confirmed influenza, and that number doesn’t include the patients who are tested using in-office test kits at physician offices and urgent care centers or those patients who don’t present for testing. Physicians who care for children are concerned, since more than 75% of pediatric hospital beds are full. The leading viral strain at present is H3N2 influenza, which has in past years been associated with higher severity of illness for older adults and children.

Based on what I’ve seen during recent travels, I’m betting I will be one of the few people wearing a mask in crowded situations. I have to admit that I did enjoy the first HIMSS post-COVID, when a good number of people were masking, because I used to nearly always return from HIMSS with a sore throat, runny nose, and generally feeling of cruddiness consistent with a respiratory virus. Especially if you’re not going to mask, now is a great time to get a flu vaccine if you haven’t already received one. I know that lots of people are tired of thinking about contagion after the last couple of years, but the basic tenets of public health are always a good idea.

Speaking of vaccines, while some organizations have kept their vaccination requirements static, several leading universities are requiring students to receive the new bivalent COVID boosters. Schools requiring the new boosters include Harvard University, Yale University, Tufts University, Fordham University, and Wellesley College. Pushback is expected, and the comments on the article are all over the place. Uptake of the new booster has stalled in my community and my urgent care and emergency department colleagues are still exhausted, so some of us are dreading what might happen over the coming months when people move their activities inside and begin gathering for the holidays.

After a recent medical visit, I was flipping through my health system’s patient portal to see how various kinds of documents were rendering and whether there were any changes after the recent updates to requirements for release of information to patients. I found a visit from a few months ago that now had a visible visit note when it didn’t previously have one. I’m confident I would have remembered seeing a note previously based on the last line of the document: “This dictation was done with voice recognition software and may contain errors and omissions.” That’s certainly far from a vote of confidence for the treating provider. Maybe I’m old school, but I can’t imagine putting something like that on one of my notes or signing a note without proofreading and correcting it. I know that everyone in healthcare is stressed, but I’d be embarrassed to allow that in any of my patients’ charts. I had already decided to look for a new physician in this specialty and this just confirms my decision.

It’s common for researchers to create catchy names for their studies, so I was excited to see COSMOS, otherwise known as the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study. It’s a randomized clinical trial looking at cocoa extract supplement in comparison to a standard multivitamin with respect to cardiovascular risk reduction. A sub-study, COSMOS-Mind, will look at whether the cocoa extract supplement improves cognitive function and reduces the risk of dementia. Of course, I’m a big fan of chocolate (although usually in baked goods rather than in a capsule) so I’ve been keeping an eye out for the study outcomes, which finally came out this week.

The results were exactly opposite of what was expected. The multivitamin, rather than the cocoa supplement, was found to be more closely associated with improved cognitive function in older adults. The benefits were greatest in patients with a history of cardiovascular disease. Since nearly 90% of the study participants were non-Hispanic whites, the authors note that additional work is needed to confirm the findings, in particular with a more diverse patient population. Halloween passed in my neighborhood with only a small number of trick-or-treaters, so I’ve got plenty of cocoa on hand. I’m looking forward to the mood boost even if it’s not going to prevent dementia.

How was the Halloween traffic in your area? Will you be nibbling chocolates for weeks to come? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/31/22

I spent a good chunk of time this weekend preparing cranky correspondence to send to organizations that can’t seem to figure out that I don’t work for them any more or that I’m no longer a participating provider with a given payer since leaving the practice. Since I resigned from these organizations anywhere from six months to three years ago, I’m tired of dealing with the continued messages and requests for information. The off-boarding processes were variable across the different organizations, so it’s not surprising that there’s still a bit of a mess to tidy up. Still, one would think that with part-time or contractor physician positions, they would have their act more together.

Let’s take my most recent in-person employer for starters. I was a part time W-2 employee and resigned more than one calendar year ago. Apparently I didn’t get terminated properly with a couple of payers, who continue to reach out to me asking me to update my provider file with copies of my license, Drug Enforcement Agency registration, and state control substance documentation. I’ve sent multiple emails informing them of my last date of employment at the practice, and although a couple of them eventually stopped sending me reminders, there are a couple that are persistent. It’s tempting to ignore the communications, but I want to make sure all my provider files are closed out properly in the event that I join a new practice down the road. It’s always good to have definitive closure, but let’s hope it doesn’t take another 12 months to get it.

Then there’s one of my telehealth side gigs, where I only saw patients for a couple of months before determining that not only was the platform horrendous, but they could never seem to figure out how to pay me correctly. Despite having given ample notice that I was leaving and would not be seeing any patients during my notice period, they went ahead and signed me up for multiple insurance plans after I tendered my resignation. It’s likely a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, but I’m tired of getting correspondence from various state-specific plans that can’t seem to understand I’m no longer participating in the provider group or planning to submit any claims.

This same platform continues to text me about high patient volumes despite my trying to opt out of the texts by following the included instructions. I’ve also tried sending emails to various individuals within the company with no response, which leads me to think that either those individuals have moved on or they don’t care. Since I no longer have access to the platform, I can’t look up any additional email addresses or contact information than what I have, so I’m sending my correspondence directly to the CEO and CMO of record as well as the head of the physician group, in hopes that they will respond and point me in the right direction.

There’s also another telehealth side gig, where I signed up but never saw a single patient. After watching them exhibit some unseemly behavior with colleagues, I decided not to engage with them. They followed up on my resignation letter by sending me an administrative termination of their own several weeks later, which I thought was somewhat overkill. They’re still sending me regular emails asking me to complete required training and given their track record with others I want to make sure my provider file is entirely closed out.

My favorite target of cranky correspondence is Illinois Medicaid, which is the “undead” of administrative healthcare organizations. I haven’t been a participating provider since 2014, but every now and then, some computer system somewhere goes haywire and decides that I need to update my provider records. The letters come on paper to my home, I always reply on paper because it seems to work, and I don’t hear from them again for a couple of years. I don’t want to wind up published in a directory as someone who is participating because it has the potential to lead to a lot of phone calls and wasted effort for patients who are just looking for a primary care physician and will keep working their way down the list until they find someone whose patient panel isn’t closed.

We’ll see if this batch of letters and emails is successful at tidying up loose ends or if I’ll still be dealing with them in 2023. It seems like there ought to be a better way. I know there are services out there, but the last time I looked at them, they were fairly pricey. Maybe I can find a retired medical practice manager who is looking to make a little cash on the side and enlist their help to get it done. With the number of people fleeing healthcare employment, it’s not a farfetched idea.

I also have a former employer in the tech space that can’t seem to figure out that I don’t work there even though it’s been more than four years. Not only do I get correspondence from the company proper, but also all of their vendors, including health insurance and more. They just sent me notice of the upcoming open enrollment period for health insurance and encouraged me to sign up quickly and not wait until the last minute. I wonder what would happen if I tried to register for a health plan – might be a good project for next weekend assuming an adequate number of cocktails beforehand.

Speaking of cocktails, I’m prepping to attend back-to-back conferences with CHIME and HLTH and the social event invitations have been trickling in. I almost spit my drink when talking to some colleagues about the latter, which they referred to as “the conference with no vowels.” There’s a lot of discussion about the utility of the HLTH conference and whether it’s worth the money. This will be my first year attending, so I’ll have to let you know in a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to some warmer weather in San Antonio and Las Vegas, respectively. I’m not looking forward to being in crowded indoor spaces and potentially bringing home COVID, influenza, or some other respiratory illness, so we’ll have to see how it goes.

Any recommendations for a first-time attendee at HLTH? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 10/27/22

Hospitals and health systems are often sponsors and supporters of various sports teams. Although I understand the reasons and how marketing works, I’m always annoyed since deep down all that spending is fueled by patients.

One of our local surgeons, who is frankly embarrassed at his organization’s sports sponsorships and luxury suites at the local ballpark, shared this piece about a shakeup in stadium naming rights for one of the newest Major League Soccer teams. Health insurer Centene has backed out of a deal to be the naming sponsor for the newly constructed stadium in St. Louis, where the aptly named St. Louis City SC is set to play. The stadium will now be called Citypark while the team hunts for a new naming sponsor. Centene had previously inked a 15-year deal for the naming rights, but a recent statement to local media said it would be realigning partnerships to create “long-term, tangible value for local communities.”

Millions of taxpayer dollars flow through Centene every year via government programs such as Medicaid, so I’m glad they’re reassessing the use of their funds. Not to mention that recent reports indicate that their Medicare Advantage quality scores have been worse than expected, which places its 2024 revenues at risk. The organization recently announced it plans to hire a chief quality officer. I’d much rather see money spent on that role than to name a sports facility. At the same time, Centene noted that quality improvement will be “a compensation metric by which all employees’ performance will be measured this year.” I hope they set things up to truly incentivize the employees as opposed to making it a way to squeak out more cash for the shareholders.

I admit that I’m suckered in by clickbait headlines as much as the next person, so I felt compelled to click on the recent Medscape feature on “Physicians Behaving Badly: US vs. UK.” I had literally just come off a call with a colleague where we discussed various patient misadventures, including misdiagnosis, failure to receive informed consent prior to a procedure, fraudulent patient care documentation, and more. The survey looked at 2,800 physicians in the US and UK. In case anyone is curious, the US ranked higher in several unseemly behaviors, including being verbally or physically aggressive; disparaging others; using racist language; and bullying and harassment. UK physicians ranked higher in public intoxication. “Making unwanted advances” was a choice in the US survey but not in the UK version, and conversely sexist behavior was a choice in the UK but not in the US, so it was hard to compare the two.

When faced with physician misbehavior, US physicians were more likely to complain anonymously to the employer or human resources, where UK physicians were slightly more likely to do nothing. For both groups, the leading demographic for misbehavior was age 40-49, with men outnumbering women twofold. As far as how those surveyed think physicians should behave, data was almost identical for both the US and UK, with two-thirds thinking that physicians should be held to higher standards than the general public due to their role. I dislike seeing healthcare professionals behaving badly, regardless of their title, role, or geographic location. I’ve seen more training programs addressing professionalism in their curricula, so let’s hope things improve.

If primary care physicians spend more time in the EHR, does that lead to improved clinical outcomes? A study published this week in JAMA Network Open looked at this question. Researchers performed a cross-sectional study of 300 primary care providers at two large academic health centers. They found that each additional 15 minutes of daily use of EHR messaging led to improvements in glucose control for diabetic patients, improved management of hypertension, and higher breast cancer screening rates. Of course, that amount of time sounds small, but over the course of a year, 15 minutes a day adds up to an additional week and a half of work for a clinician who is more likely than not to already be burned out and stressed.

The authors noted that “these results underscore the need to create team structures, examine PCP and office workflows, and enhance EHR-based technologies and decision support tools in ways that enable high quality of care, while optimizing time spent on the EHR.” Since so much of EHR messaging work is not part of a clinician’s visit-based, revenue-generating work, they also note that “the associations we have identified between increased in-basket time and enhanced ambulatory quality of care highlight the importance of continuing to develop and expand value-based reimbursement systems that adequately reward outside-of-visit care delivery.”

They note that both academic health systems in the study have dedicated population health teams that support primary care physicians in tracking quality performance. They’re also both located in the same geographic area that has a relatively heterogeneous patient population, and as such, they may not represent the majority of primary care physicians in the US.

My favorite quote from the piece is this: “Our findings suggest that although increased EHR time, particularly after hours, has been associated with increased emotional exhaustion and burnout, it may represent a level of thoroughness, attention to detail, or patient and team communication that ultimately enhances certain outcomes. This finding is consistent with recent research reporting a trend toward better outcomes for measures of health care use for family physicians who reported some level of burnout, suggesting that the extra attention given to clinical problems and extra communication that may occur during additional time spent by PCPs may be valuable for patient outcomes.”

Primary care physicians are living in a way that most are counseled against. Time and again, we have seen their willingness disregard the phrase about “not setting yourself on fire to keep others warm.” In the US, they’re among the most hard-working of physicians with the best opportunity to intervene in chronic conditions and lifestyle issues, yet they’re at the bottom of the pay scale and often with the least support staff. The failure of policymakers to align payments in a way that will best serve patients and reduce overall costs will continue to haunt us for decades.

Do you have a primary care physician, and can you actually get a timely appointment? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/24/22

I’ve used a GPS watch to track my hikes and other travels for almost a decade. Recently, some of the features on my trusty Garmin Forerunner 25 have become erratic and had me looking for an upgrade. I’ve had it for seven years and it has served me well, but I was annoyed after the GPS went rogue a couple of times and the sleep tracker started showing the same pattern whether the watch was on my wrist or on the bathroom counter.

After extensive troubleshooting with Garmin, they couldn’t come up with a remedy and offered me a discount, but only if I stayed within the Forerunner line. I wasn’t thrilled with the options and had been casually looking at other models when a friend clued me in to a sale, spurring me to make a decision.

Wearables hold an interesting place in the hearts and minds of patients. I have plenty of friends that are obsessed with “closing the ring” on their Apple watches to the point where they are almost a servant to the technology. I’ve taken care of patients who take their daily activity tracking data seriously, to the point of messaging their physicians asking about what the slightest blip in their numbers might mean.

I’m not training for half marathons anymore, so I don’t need a lot of the training or coaching features that are out there. I wanted something with decent battery life, both as a watch and in GPS mode, as well as something that looks a little more stylish and a lot less rubbery than my current device. I settled on a watch from the Garmin Venu line.

Garmin’s packaging has become more streamlined since my last purchase. However, the setup process was considerably more complicated. Although I already had the Garmin Connect app on my phone, I couldn’t get it to pair with the watch and had to update the app. It still didn’t work, so I thought I would set up the watch manually then try the Bluetooth piece later.

Garmin is apparently confused about sex versus gender and how biological sex is more aligned with physiologic parameters than gender and only gave a choice of two genders. I picked the stereotypical pink icon with the ponytail, but hope someone at Garmin gets educated about the difference between sex and gender.

The next step was trying to set the watch via the GPS, which didn’t work. I’m assuming the GPS wasn’t working well inside my house, but since you’re supposed to have the device plugged in with the USB cable and charging while you do this, I was just following the directions. I’m not sure how many people have USB ports in their driveways.

I also ran across the menstrual tracking option on the device, which I promptly turned off. Most people don’t realize that HIPAA does not protect this kind of data when it’s being sent to an organization that is not a HIPAA-covered entity, and especially given the political climate, I have no plans to share that via a wearable.

During this process, the watch fell on the floor no less than three times due to the short USB cord that was connected to my floor-dwelling PC, coupled with the fact that it hooks perpendicularly into the back of the watch, making it unable to be placed flat on a surface.

The next step was to apply a system update to my phone, which for some reason took several hours. I tried several more times to get it to connect without any luck. Ultimately, I used Garmin Express to connect it directly to the PC, after which it forced a firmware upgrade to the watch. I was hopeful that would do the trick, but it didn’t. However, while the watch was connected to the PC, I was able to connect it to my wifi network, so at least that was something.

After disconnecting the watch, I had to take care of some household tasks and noticed that the watch wasn’t counting steps. It was counting heart rate and respirations, which I find less useful, and not doing the one task that was most important to me. After lots of fussing about with the menus, I tried a system setting to see what version the firmware was on, and it said that an update was needed. I tried to connect it back to the PC, but it wouldn’t pick up, and after plugging it in and unplugging it way too many times, it finally connected and the Garmin Express software showed that despite the recent status of “update complete,” three more updates were now needed.

Each time an update completed, I had to do a manual sync to get the next update to register, and also restart the watch. Meanwhile, Garmin Express kept telling me that the watch wasn’t connected, while the watch showed that it was.

I was asked no less than three times during the process to set up wifi and went through the entire process to have no change in the user experience. I went back to the main Garmin Express menu and was now told that I had 37 updates available even though the previous screen had said, “You’re up to date!” There is nothing worse than a confusing user interface that doesn’t tell you what’s going on or what you really need to do.

After two more unplug-and-restart cycles, the update counter disappeared and and miraculously, over 4,000 steps appeared on my watch. There’s no way they’re legitimate considering I was only wearing the watch for a couple of trips to the laundry room and back. After some digging, I figured out that somehow the steps on my old watch had been ported onto the new watch, which was definitely unexpected.

Fast forward to nearly a week worth of intermittent attempts to connect via Bluetooth. I gave up on it. I can pair the watch to someone else’s phone and pair my phone to other devices, but can’t pair the watch to my own phone. Without the Bluetooth, you lose out on several valuable features – music, alert notification for falls or incidents, and a couple of other things. I’m still able to sync the watch with my PC like I was the previous model. I hadn’t planned to allow it to display text messages or emails, so I resigned myself to being a little retro with my connectivity. I’m hypothesizing that the battery life will be much better without the connection, but I’ll know for sure in a few more days.

It’s snazzier than my previous device. I like its subtle coloring and low profile versus the chunky black model I’ve been wearing for years. For the first couple of days, the synthetic material watch band had a particular smell to it, which probably wouldn’t mean much to the average person, but to me smelled like an operating room. Although it brought back some fond memories, I was glad when it dissipated.

Overall, I’ll give this particular Garmin a solid B. It’s better than my last one, but not as great as it could be. The price was right.

What’s your favorite wearable, and how do you like (or dislike) its features? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 10/20/22

I went to look at the pricing and deadlines for the HIMSS23 conference earlier this week and it looks like they’re doing a little bit of a cash grab in switching up their pricing. It used to be that the basic conference pass, at the lowest price point, included access to the session records. Now you’ll have to pay an upcharge of nearly $300 for that privilege.

In addition to the recordings, the middle price point also includes access to the pre-conference forum as well as admission to the Thursday night special event. The highest price point adds on attendance at the CXO experience and the Executive Summit / Reception. I haven’t done my registration yet, so I can’t see whether there are a la carte offerings for the different items as well, but hopefully I’ll get around to that soon.

Within the last couple of years, I worked for a couple of telehealth companies. Over the weekend, one of them began texting me about surges in patient volume, despite the fact that I haven’t worked for them in months. For a while I was wondering what kind of activity happened on their system that my phone number has come back from the dead, and then it occurred to me that maybe they’ve just had a slow summer and they’re starting to see an uptick in patient requests due to the increase in cases of influenza and other viral illnesses. Regardless of the reason, texting STOP made them requests go away, which dramatically increased my provider satisfaction.

Speaking of satisfaction measures, I recently received a survey from a vendor who knows I’m extremely dissatisfied with their service. I tried to dodge it by ignoring it, but I kept being peppered by requests that appeared to be from the individual service rep, who is well aware of my dissatisfaction. I know about statistical sampling and the need to have an adequate number of responses, but it boggles my mind that they would continue to beat down the door of a disgruntled customer to the point where I felt like providing an even more negative response than I had intended to deliver. I slept on it for a couple of days then finally sent it over, trying to be as fair as possible. I hope I’m tagged in their customer relationship management as being in remediation, and that based on my very pointed feedback, that they reconsider how they’re sampling customers for routine surveys.

One of my friends reached out to ask my opinion on a medical billing situation. Apparently his insurance only covers vaccines when they’re administered in a physician’s office as opposed to covering them when they’re given at a retail clinic. At least in my community, pricing at Walgreens, Target, and CVS are all cheaper than a vaccine at a physician office and are often more convenient for the patient. I tried calling for a flu vaccine for a family member at their own primary care provider’s office, and after several weeks of trying to get through and continuing to be placed in voice mail purgatory, I gave up and took him to Costco for a quick and convenient vaccine. Fortunately it was covered by his insurance, but it just goes to show how off-kilter our current healthcare delivery system is.

Quote of the week: I loved this quote on the recent Monday Morning Update: “It’s a good lesson for vendors who think AI/ML is the universal hammer for all healthcare nails – Epic has 40-plus years of experience working with the best health systems in the country, so if it can mess up a clinical algorithm, imagine the clinical damage your cool startup and its team of former beer-ponging Facebook engineers could do.” I’ve worked on several AI and ML projects in a variety of settings, including academics, startups, and with startups that were spun off from academic medical centers. I’ve found that doing AI/ML the right way is almost universally harder than people think it is, especially if you want to ensure that you’re training your models in a way that avoids bias and works for diverse populations. If you’re like some of my former colleagues who jumped from retail IT to the clinical space and thought they knew it all, I hope you’re employing experienced clinical informaticists to save you from yourself.

This week included some adventures in healthcare, with weirdness on both the clinical and revenue cycle fronts. I had an annual visit with one of my subspecialists, who uses a scribe. Usually I find that it makes the visit more efficient, and this visit was no exception. Since we’re in the era of unbridled data sharing, I couldn’t wait to see what my visit note looked like. At this clinical office, they never take my co-pay and I always wind up receiving a bill, so I tried to pay the co-pay at checkout. They told me I didn’t have one, and I insisted that I did and offered to show them my card that said so. The clerk said she would check in the system and figure it out, then came back with a “definitely no co-pay” verdict. I asked her to check the practice management system, where she’d clearly see my annual visits and the subsequent copay being billed and my payments, but she refused. This is the only office I’ve been to that refuses cash at the time of service, so I’m not sure what era their billing team is living in.

The weirdness continued when I returned home and looked at my visit note, which was already available. Imagine my surprise when I saw the documentation that the patient had completed a questionnaire, including a comprehensive review of systems, and that I had discussed it with the physician, since neither of those events occurred. The templated documentation also noted that the document was scanned, which is interesting because I’ve never completed anything like that at this office. This is the second time this year I’ve been confronted with erroneous visit notes and I’m still wondering what the best way is to handle them. In this case, it doesn’t impact the outcome of the visit or my future care, so I’m not that excited about bringing it up. In the other case, there were material errors in the chart, but I still don’t know the best way to deal with them. I’ve decided to leave that provider’s care anyway, and the errors aren’t anything that are going to impact future care or payments or anything else, but they’re just annoying.

Have you had errors in your visit documentation after seeing a healthcare provider? How did you handle the situation? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/17/22

When I speak with physicians who don’t have a lot of experience with using telehealth for urgent care patients, they’re always concerned about quality. Many of them aren’t aware of some of the different techniques you can use to assess patients, or the ways you can instruct a patient to perform different maneuvers to help in that assessment.

It seems kind of funny at times, because in medical school we were always encouraged to remember that the patient’s story often provides the majority of information needed to narrow the options for diagnosis. Despite what we might think in a world of high-tech diagnostics, it’s not always about doing a lot of tests or even about performing hands-on examination techniques.

In my time as a “fast track” physician in a high-volume emergency department, I’ve seen a lot of patients who did not truly need emergency services. As telehealth expanded during the COVID pandemic, hospitals were looking at different ways to manage increasing emergency volumes and figuring out different ways to care for patients who didn’t need high acuity care. Some organizations turned to telehealth, adding phone booth-style cubicles where patients who met certain triage criteria could consult with a physician. Others moved to a “physician in triage” model to help expedite care, although that occasionally backfired when patients left after being triaged but were still stuck with a bill since they were seen by a physician.

With that in mind, I was excited to see an article last week in NEJM Catalyst that examined this phenomenon. Titled, “Converting an ED Fast Track to an ED Virtual Visit Track,” the case study looks at the Stanford Health Care experience as it substituted remote consultations for in-person visits in the emergency department. The effort started in December 2020, as the organization accelerated an already-approved plan to add virtual visits into the ED’s offerings. As we’ve seen with a number of technology initiatives across the US, the challenges posed by the COVID pandemic led to many different advances in care delivery capacity.

Historically, the goal of a fast-track area within an emergency department is to be able to treat low-acuity patients faster, since higher-need patients will always be prioritized. Typically, the fast-track area has dedicated physicians and nursing staff who can quickly evaluate and manage a variety of non-emergent problems, such as cough/cold, sore throat, ear pain, rashes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, low-grade burns, minor lacerations, sprains, lower-acuity fractures, and the like. On any given shift in the fast track, I’d see kids who were sent home from school too late to get an appointment with their primary care physician, people who were injured at work, and those who might not have a primary physician or other access to healthcare but who had run out of prescription medications or had other care needs.

At my hospital, the fast track was staffed by family physicians since the majority of patient complaints were the kinds of things we see in our offices day-in and day-out. That freed the board-certified Emergency Medicine physicians to manage more complex cases, including strokes, heart attacks, major traumas, gunshot wounds, serious burns, etc. It sounds like Stanford’s fast track unit was a lot like mine, with its own physicians, nurses, and ED technicians. However, due to COVID surges, Stanford implemented a Virtual Visit Track in place of its fast track, adding the offering to both adult and pediatric emergency departments. In that program, a physician is seeing low-acuity patients from a remote location, while dedicated support staff in the emergency department provide services that must be done in person.

In the Stanford program’s first year, 2,000 patients received virtual care through the offering. The volume of patients has been sustained, with around 1.5 patients per hour being diverted into the virtual visit track during an eight-hour shift. This metric was tracked closely since 12 patients per shift was the break-even point for the resource investment. The wait time for patients in the virtual track was around 1.9 hours compared to 4.2 hours for patients seen in-person for the same level of care.

Additionally, researchers looked at the quality of care being delivered, comparing virtual care to the standard in-person care normally available. The virtual care was found to be non-inferior. Research also showed that virtual patients had a lower median return visit rate than in-person patients, although the numbers were not statistically significant.

It’s great that this type of research is being performed so that we know whether the interventions we’re applying to the healthcare system are actually effective or if they’re just another shiny object that we thought would make a difference but didn’t. We’ve all seen plenty of the latter over the years, as hospital administrators brought back ideas from conferences and did a lot of “transformation” work without knowing for sure it would work.

I remember when my hospital jumped on the Disney Institute bandwagon back in the mid-2000s. A lot of money was spent on educational in-services, culture promotion, institution of dress codes, and uniformity across patient care units. I’m not sure any of it did much to drive patient outcomes or to retain staff. Frankly, as far as the latter, I think re-engineering the hospital cafeteria’s late-night offerings did a lot more to boost morale than the Disney principles ever did.

I was involved in a “virtual first” offering with one of my clients a couple of years ago, and it was an interesting experience. I know how my visits went, but when we looked at the work of all the clinicians on the panel, there was a lot of variety. Unfortunately, the program was slow to grow, and during my time there, we never had enough visit volume to get to the point where any research would have been statistically significant. Seeing this article makes me want to reach out to my successor and find out what their volumes have been since I left and if they’ve been doing any quality work. It would be gratifying to know that something I helped get off the ground was making a difference.

Has your organization done any work looking at the quality of virtual offerings compared to standard care? Is it a case of the newer offering being merely “non inferior” or does it really shine? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 10/13/22

The HLTH conference team has announced the headliner for its Industry Night celebration. Let’s just say nothing celebrates digital health and transformation quite like Ludracis.

The American Telemedicine Association shifts the dates of its ATA2023 Annual Conference & Expo. The conference moves from a mid-week placement to begin on Saturday, March 4 and will run through Monday, March 6. The organization notes this is to accommodate busy schedules and to ensure that “even more frontline providers and virtual care practitioners” can attend in person. The meeting remains in San Antonio and two of the evening events have “Celebrity Mixologist” in the title, so it looks like it will be entertaining as well as educational.

The National Center for Health Statistics releases provisional life expectancy estimates for 2021. It shows that from 2019 to 2021, US life expectancy dropped by 3 years for men and 2.3 years for women. The new values – 73 years for men and 79 for women – are the lowest since 1996. Approximately 75% of the drop was attributed to COVID-19 deaths, with the remainder including overdose deaths, suicide, chronic liver disease, and homicide for men. Women lost years due to COVID-19 as well as heart disease, stroke, and chronic liver disease. Losses were not as high as they could have been, however, since they were somewhat mitigated by reductions in deaths due to influenza, pneumonia, and other respiratory diseases.

Mr. H recently posted a poll to assess “Which of the following items did you earn after age 35 that has been most valuable in your career.” Although there were some good choices, including master’s degrees, doctorates, professional degrees, and more, the list didn’t include my personal pick: my Clinical Informatics board certification. As a relatively home-grown clinical informaticist, most of my training was of the on-the-job variety and a good chunk of the learnings were through the school of hard knocks. I didn’t have the opportunity to do a fellowship in the discipline, but worked my way through the major texts of the specialty through grim determination and the Interlibrary Loan system.

In second place, I’d put vendor-specific certifications. I don’t know how much they’ve really helped me with my career, but they’ve definitely helped me do the day-to-day aspects of my job better. Even though I’m in a leadership role, having the certifications allows me to speak the same language as my analysts and better understand the different features and functionalities that we’re implementing. It’s also entertaining when people discover that although you’re a physician, you have certifications in the practice management and billing portions of the application. Not to mention that I’m always happy to talk about EDI and Coordination of Benefits over a cocktail or two.

The Medical Group Management Association, in conjunction with Jackson Physician Search, releases a report on physician turnover in the US. The sample size was small at 326 physicians, but the data is recent since it was obtained in August 2022. Among the most interesting findings: 51% of physicians have considered leaving their healthcare employer in the last year, with 41% considering leaving medical practice and 36% contemplating early retirement. I wonder what percentage of those who are considering leaving medicine could be mitigated if care delivery organizations were willing to create more novel practice arrangements.

For example, I have several friends who have left medicine in the last couple of years because they didn’t want to work full time as primary care physicians. There’s a perception that having part time physicians is difficult or creates scheduling or administrative headaches, so they would rather let people leave. My former medical group was unsupportive of job-share arrangements. Although there was one highly successful physician pair who was tolerated due to their seniority, no additional arrangements were allowed. Assuming the right contractual language and appropriately paired physicians, there’s no inherent reason why a physician job-share wouldn’t be successful.

In the last two decades, I’ve been let go by two emergency department staffing groups because they made the determination that they didn’t want to contract part-time physicians. They can’t use administrative burdens as an excuse since both of them allowed part-time nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who are actually harder to schedule than physicians due to supervisory requirements in my state. Those of us who were let go each time concluded that the motivation was largely financial, although staffing groups would never admit to it.

Several of us started doing our own variations of an in-town locum tenens gig, where we provided supplemental coverage for acute ambulatory visits at peak times such as Mondays or Friday afternoons. We would also cover vacations, maternity leaves, and time off due to FMLA. There was good uptake on our services by individual physicians, but we could never quite get the big health systems in town (or their affiliated medical groups) to consider making us part of their teams. I guess they would rather see physicians scramble for coverage on their own, or worse for morale, just not take time off.

I’d love to get back to seeing patients in person and would be happy to work evenings and weekends if someone were looking for a part-time doc. Unfortunately, the only place willing to hire someone for fewer than 12 shifts per month is my former urgent care, which I wouldn’t touch with the proverbial 10-foot pole.

The MGMA report has a whole section on burnout and summarizes the results of a May 2021 look at burnout. At that time, 86% of healthcare leaders said they didn’t have a formal plan or strategy to reduce physician burnout. By August 2022, the number of leaders who admitted not having a plan had dropped to 66%. Although it’s a move in the right direction, every organization should have a plan in place to address burnout not only of physicians, but of all members of the clinical care team.

We’re living in unprecedented times and everyone is stretched to the limit. Case in point: the charge nurse in the emergency department at St. Michael Medical Center in Washington called 911 because the department’s five nurses were overwhelmed with 45 patients in the waiting room. She requested that firefighters come assist and they did, taking vital signs and helping turn over rooms between patients.

What is your organization doing to help with burnout? Or are they just keeping their collective heads in the sand? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/10/22

I spent the majority of this weekend on staff at my favorite outdoor classroom program, which focuses on teaching a variety of outdoor skills to adults. Fall has definitely arrived, with frost on the tents the first night and ice the second night. Even though I’ve been doing this a long time and have a good routine to make the experience as comfortable as possible, my body seems to be greeting those early mornings with an increasing number of creaks and groans as I depart my nice cozy sleeping bag. It’s worth it, however, to see people learn new skills and become comfortable with spending time in the great outdoors.

This time around, I was also the designated health officer and was extremely glad that the weekend had zero incidents requiring my professional skills. The only casualty was a box oven that caught fire in a fairly spectacular fashion but was quickly extinguished.

People are always curious when they find out I’m a telehealth physician and wonder how much we can really do without laying hands on a patient. One attendee was shocked that we’re “allowed” to diagnose anything when we’re not seeing someone in person. I explained that a diagnostic process involves a good amount of history-taking and listening, and once you frame it in that fashion, people start to remember that their own physician might not do much more of an examination than listening to their heart and lungs at an office visit. I also was able to explain some of the technologies that are available to assist physicians and patients. People tend to forget that home blood pressure cuffs and scales can provide data for diagnosis and management as well.

Of course, people also tend to ask for medical advice. This weekend’s hot topics included what I think of the new COVID booster along with what I think is the optimal timing of the flu vaccine.

Generally, I tell people that I’ve already had the new COVID vaccine and have no concerns about giving it to loved ones, and there’s not much more discussion. On the flu vaccine, however, it seems like everyone thinks there is some kind of secret to the best timing. Historically, influenza tended to peak somewhere between January and April, so getting a vaccine in early fall was ideal. There have been a lot of changes to the patterns of various viral infections since the COVID pandemic and there’s a chance our predictions for this year’s flu season might not be as accurate as they’ve been in the past, so my strategy is to recommend people get it as soon they are able, particularly if they are high risk, and to take common sense precautions to avoid infection – like washing their hands and staying away from sick people.

We had some staff members who were unable to participate this weekend due to COVID infections, so I am doubling down on the recommendation that if someone has an important event they’d like to attend, it’s a good idea to up their masking and distancing game if they want to improve their odds of making it happen. Many of the members of our instructor team are IT professionals and are now working from home permanently, so there were a couple of good conversations around the new normal of working when you’re sick along with strategies for juggling work commitments when you might have a sick child at home. People reported a wide range of ways they handle this depending on workplace culture. It seems like more organizations are expecting people to work while sick because they’re remote, even if they have designated sick time.

This conversation led into a follow up discussion of “the perils of unlimited PTO,” which seems to be increasing in popularity among tech companies for a variety of reasons. Workplaces definitely vary in how they’ve implemented it. Some still track time off but it’s unlimited, which doesn’t help much with managing administrative overhead. Others leave it up to supervisors to track their teams’ time off and intervene if there are issues. Another strategy is to not track time off at all. The people in the discussion felt that not having any tracking at all made them more likely to not take an appropriate amount of time off, because they didn’t have any kind of visual indicator of what they had taken or any way to judge where they are in comparison to their peers.

I’ve worked in a couple of unlimited PTO organizations. They have also had extremely flexible work hours, which when combined can be a recipe for working way more hours than one might normally do in a traditional time management structure. My advice for those moving into this model for the first time is to track your hours and your work pattern for a period of time and find out how many hours you’re really working and whether you’re doing more than you think. Having been a consultant and needing to quantify my time in various increments – some as small as six minutes – I know with good accuracy how long many tasks take. People who are working flexible hours and tend to answer emails “here and there” after hours often underestimate how long those take and those minutes add up. I recommended a time tracking exercise for one of my mentees recently and he found that his new position with unlimited PTO and a flexible remote schedule actually had him working 25% more hours than he previously worked.

This drifted into a conversation about so-called “quiet quitting.” It was interesting to hear that those in non-healthcare tech positions were seeing similar manifestations of the phenomenon as those of us who are in healthcare IT. I think at times we think that there’s something particularly challenging about being in healthcare or having been impacted by the pandemic, that we think we’re worse off than everyone else. However, it seems that everyone is similarly burned out and looking for solutions to live a more balanced life. I hope that spending a couple of days in the woods provided some food for thought about the need for balance as well as some strategies for getting more enjoyment in the outdoors. If nothing else, the participants should have gone home with a sense of accomplishment after spending the night in a tent in freezing weather.

Does your organization have unlimited PTO? Do you feel like workers take enough time off to recharge? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 10/6/22

CMS has released a Request for Information on the idea of a national directory of health care providers and services. The announcement notes that such a compilation might “help facilitate care coordination, health information exchange, and data reporting efforts.” They note, “We envision that an NDH [National Directory of Healthcare Providers and Services] could serve as a centralized data hub for providers’ directory and digital contact information, which would contain accurate, up-to-date, and validated data in a publicly accessible index.” On the surface, this seems like a good idea, until one realizes that there have already been efforts to attempt to create a master database.

My current CMS provider records contain a practice address where I haven’t worked since 2011 despite multiple attempts to update it, so I’m not optimistic about efforts to maintain yet another database. It would also be difficult to account for the information for physicians and other providers who work part time at different institutions, which can be common for certain specialties or classifications of physicians. For example, faculty physicians at my academic medical center might have separate practices (complete with separate billing and communications information) at the faculty practice, the residency practice, the hospital service, and the local Veteran’s Affairs clinic. Similarly, many physicians “moonlight” or pick up extra shifts via urgent care or telehealth companies, so that will add to the confusion. The public comment period ends on December 6, so be sure to submit your thoughts.

The concept of patients calling physicians by their first names is always a hot topic in the virtual physician lounge so I was glad to see this research letter published this week in JAMA Network Open. In the introduction, the authors note the sentiments shared by many physicians, that using the title “doctor” helps in “acknowledging the physician-patient relationship, signifying respect for physicians, and following established social norms.” They mention the results of two previous related studies – one that found that almost three out of four physicians were called by their first name, with 61% finding it annoying, and another that found that having “DOCTOR” boldly indicated on ID badges was associated with fewer episodes of misidentification among female physicians and physicians in underrepresented groups. With that background, the authors set about determining the factors associated with use of the physician’s first name in patient portal messages.

The authors performed a retrospective review of patient messages in the Mayo Clinic EHR from October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2021. Natural language processing was used to identify the greeting and/or closing salutation and those phrases were classified according to formality. Patient demographics (age, gender) as well as physician demographics (age, gender, degree, training level, and specialty) were all identified. The authors found that female physicians were twice as likely to be called by their first names after controlling for other factors. Physicians with a DO degree were also more likely to be called by their first name, as were primary care physicians. Interestingly, female patients were less likely to use their physician’s first name. There was no difference based on patient or physician age or physician training level.

The study has a few limitations noted by the authors, including inability to control for physicians who may prefer to be addressed by their first names or for cultural/racial/ethnic nuances in greetings. The dataset was also from a single health system, so might not be applicable to other organizations. It would be interesting to see how these factors play out in different regions across the United States, since there are definitely nuances in how people are addressed regardless of whether they’re physicians or not. I’ve been called everything from “ma’am” to “y’all” to “sweetie” to “hey yo” to things that are not fit to print while practicing my physician trade, so I’m guessing there might be variation on professional titles as well. I’m currently following a thread in a CMIO group about patient portal messages and which state might best exemplify “upper Midwest nice,” so there’s definitely a physician perception of regional variability.

The authors note that “whether being informally addressed by other medical professionals or patients, untitling (not using a person’s proper title) may have a negative impact on physicians, demonstrate lack of respect, and can lead to reduction in formality of the physician-patient relationship or workplace.” They go on to state that organizations need to focus on a supportive culture and that guidelines, practice changes, or patient education may be needed. The idea of lack of respect is a common sentiment around the virtual water cooler, but times are changing and, at least in the US, social norms feel far more casual than they did a decade ago. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of comments might be added to the article since it’s so new. Responses have been mixed on several platforms that have posted articles referencing the study.

Regardless of title, role, or status, it’s always a good idea to ask people what they prefer to be called, and to discuss if you feel the need to call someone something different than what they request. I’ve worked with seasoned nurses who actively struggle with the idea of calling physicians by their first names even when asked to do so, and in those cases I’m not about to force the issue. Similarly, I wouldn’t dream of calling an adult patient by their first name without their permission, and am happy to note individual preferences on the patient chart. Half the time I refer to pediatric patients by formal titles just to make them laugh since they’ve likely never been called “young Master Johnson” or “my dear Miss Jones,” and it’s fun to watch their faces. I rotated in the UK many years ago and did enjoy the certain level of formality at my practice site where everyone referred to each other as “Nurse Thompson” and “Dr. Jones” and “Trainee Jayne,” but I don’t know if that style has remained.

Does your organization have a policy on title use, or is it anything goes? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/3/22

For those organizations participating in the Medicare Promoting Interoperability Program, Monday, October 3 marks the last day to begin your 90-day reporting period. Eligible hospitals and Critical Access Hospitals that don’t successfully attest will be hit with a “downward Medicare payment adjustment,” also known as a penalty. Participants must also use Certified EHR Technology, report on the safe use of opioid medications, complete a Security Risk Analysis, and document a self-assessment using the SAFER Guides. Hospitals spend a tremendous amount of resources trying to make sure they hit all the requirements, so for those of you immersed in this work – may the odds be ever in your favor.

A friend of mine sent over this job posting from Amazon. They asked my opinion about the posting itself and if I could read between the lines to figure out what the job is really about. It reads to me more like a business development or sales role, specifically targeting telehealth, imaging, and analytics. In the job posting, Amazon has an entire paragraph about its inclusive culture and specific focus on race, ethnicity, and gender diversity. However, they missed the mark on actual physician inclusivity, since the preferred qualification is MD – I suppose DO and internationally-trained physicians need not apply.

News of the Weird: We see writeups of healthcare fraud all the time, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen one that is tied to a sex worker scheme. The Department of Justice announced that nine defendants in California have been hit with criminal charges related to sex services that were billed to their labor union’s health insurance plan. There are more than $2.1 million in claims at stake. Seven of the defendants are dockworkers at the Port of Long Beach.

The 46-year-old ringleader was charged with one count each of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and aggravated identity theft. She owned three clinics that provided chiropractic treatments, acupuncture, and sexual services. Taking advantage of insurance plan policies that allowed chiropractic services without a deductible or out-of-pocket payments from patients, she hired women, including those from strip clubs, to perform sexual services. Claims were filed for chiropractic and physical therapy sessions that never occurred. Some claims were filed under the names of spouses and children, with kickbacks being paid to plan members in exchange for the false claims.

It’s not just COVID that has the attention of physicians: Norovirus causes a wicked gastroenteritis, and is feared by schools, day care providers, and cruise lines alike. Although cases declined in April 2020 due to changes in behavior due to the COVID pandemic, cases started increasing rapidly in January 2022. The number of outbreaks in the 2021-2022 surveillance year was triple the previous year. It’s simple advice – wash those hands, folks, and stay home if you have diarrhea.

I’ve written before about my sometimes love-hate relationship with wearables. Although I like my Garmin wristwatch (which also does passive activity tracking such as steps or sleep alongside active GPS activity-logging), it’s been temperamental of late. Sometimes I’ll attempt to synchronize it with my PC, and it randomly fails to import several days of step or sleep data, where other times it functions just fine. I did a lot of troubleshooting with Garmin this week and didn’t reach a satisfactory outcome, although they did offer a 20% discount on a new watch in the same line since my model is no longer made. Unfortunately, the units in the same line have more bells and whistles than I need, where other lines that are a better fit are excluded from the discount.

The experience has me looking for alternatives from other vendors, but I’m not sold on anything just yet. I was interested to see this opinion piece this week though, which talks about the potential liability issues for “prediagnostic” wearables including some smart watches. It notes that many of these technologies are not regulated as medical devices and that although patients may use them to assess their health, there are legal gray areas where liability is concerned. From the physician standpoint, it’s unclear what happens when particular product is recommended, and it turns out not to be accurate. The article goes into gory detail about the various types of liability and differing jurisdictions for claims, if readers are interested. One proposed solution would be for states to pass laws that specify that physicians receiving this “prediagnostic” data should manage it like any other patient self-reported information. This will definitely be an interesting area to watch in the coming years.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve all encountered changes to the ways we’re used to working. For me, going from having quite a bit of travel to having none at all was a major transition. I’m definitely back to traveling and have experienced two vendor conferences, a couple of company meetings, and some personal travel in the last six months. Other than HIMSS in the spring, I haven’t attended any general industry conferences, but that’s about to change since CHIME and HLTH are both on my docket for the coming months. I haven’t been to either of them previously so am looking for advice or recommendations on how to best navigate them. It looks like CHIME has added a clinical informatics pre-session, so I’ll have to figure out if I can squeeze that onto my dance card.

I didn’t make it to my specialty organization’s annual meeting due to conflicts, but several friends attended. One of them mentioned the keynote by author Malcolm Gladwell, who said of family physicians, “If there’s a problem with (trust in) healthcare, there’s no solution without you.” He went on to say, “You can’t solve it with better technology. You can’t solve it with better drugs. You can’t solve it with a fancy EMR. We solve it with communication, listening, and empathy.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily align with what many patients want, which is cheap, transactional service-oriented encounters. It will be interesting to see how the family medicine community responds to the challenge and whether people flock to the specialty or continue to retire early. Either way, I’ve got my calendar marked for next year’s conference in Chicago so I can see where things are trending.

What are your conference plans for the coming months? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 9/29/22

I spent some time in the wilderness this week, in an attempt to catch up on some sorely needed rest and relaxation. Unfortunately, changing time zones wasn’t terribly helpful on the rest piece, but there was definitely some relaxation and a lot of silliness as a group of adults tried to assemble a complicated Lego set while under the influence of cocktails. I had identified goals for this journey including completion of two specific hikes that I wasn’t able to manage on a previous trip. Although the first one was a success and helped me adjust to the altitude, the main event was a bust. I’m surprisingly OK with it and suppose I’ve reached the point in my life where the journey is equally as important as the destination, if not more. After my recent exposure to a patient injured while traveling, I’m also beyond grateful that the only problem I experienced was a close encounter between my favorite hiking pants and some tenacious tree sap.

It feels like everyone I know in the healthcare IT world is talking about the planned October 6 deadline for organizations to comply with the HHS information-sharing rule. Many care delivery organizations are relying on their EHR vendors to ensure compliance, which, depending on the vendor, has led to a flurry of last-minute upgrades. From what I hear around the virtual water cooler, vendor readiness has ranged from “competent” to “clueless,” with many vendors missing deadlines and others who are not communicating their status. This week, a group of high-profile stakeholders (including CHIME, the American Academy of Family Physicians, The American Hospital Association, and others) sent a plea to the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services in an attempt to postpone the deadline. The letter asks for a one-year extension in addition to using warning communications before entities are subject to formal investigations or fines.

Reasons for a delay include: inability to support access to and exchange of electronic health information (EHI); lack of definition around EHI and confusion around the Office of the National Coordinator’s (ONC) EHI infographic; confusion on how exceptions can be applied when information cannot our should not be exchanged; concern around the protection of sensitive information such as drug use, mental health, and reproductive information; and lack of responsiveness to questions submitted to ONC. Specifically, from the patient perspective, the letter cites “the harm occurring when laboratory results and reports are released in instances of life threatening or life limiting diagnoses.” As someone who has been in that situation – which is hard to cope with even when you’re a practicing physician with medical knowledge and not just the average patient – I can support that concern completely. There will be harm, but it’s going to be impossible to quantify. If this effort were a research project, I can’t imagine the Institutional Review Board that would approve it.

Less exciting but also coming in October: it’s time for the annual updates to the ICD-10 database, effective October 1. Codes can be added, deleted, or revised. Incorrect coding can lead to payment delays or denials, so I hope everyone’s vendors and technology teams have this adequately covered. Some of the changes are certainly reflective of the times we’re living in, including: expansion of codes for various substance use disorders, indicating that the disorders are in remission; additional codes for reactions to severe stress; addition of codes for accidents related to electric bicycles; and three new codes for problems related to housing and economic circumstances. Other codes that caught my attention include six new codes for fractures related to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and two additions for patient noncompliance with medical advice.

I was excited to see data released by Blue Cross NC addressing the increase in use of telehealth services. The company recently completed a two-year review of telehealth claims data. Based on recent trends, those covered by its policies will have access to 77 additional telehealth services effective January 1, 2023. Interesting data points: in 2020, the plan saw a 7,500% increase in telehealth claims; telehealth accounted for 47% of behavioral health visits and 10% of family medicine visits, but only 2% of specialist visits. The data is a little murky, though, because family medicine and pediatrics are listed separately from “primary care,” so I’m not sure what’s going on there, since both specialties are clearly considered primary care. I was amused by the fact that although the company’s spokesperson said the changes are “so members can access easy, affordable care no matter where they live,” the new policy specifically excludes members receiving care from out-of-state providers. Looks like vacationers might be incentivized to be less than truthful about their physical location in the name of better coverage.

Those who know that telehealth services won’t be covered by insurance might want to make sure they’re accessing care from a trusted site. One of my colleagues recently had a direct-to-consumer telehealth experience when they were trying to get relief from a rash that might have been related to insect bites but was instead told that they had been infected by flesh-eating bacteria. Although they requested a refund on the visit it was less than timely, and I’m pretty sure they’ll never use that vendor again.

Recently, I’ve been inundated with LinkedIn requests. Although some of them have been legitimate and likely triggered by networking at the recent Epic User Group meeting, others are entirely spammy. Word to the wise: I’m not going to accept your connection request if your profile doesn’t have a picture, only includes your first name, or if you’re asking me to buy something. Another pet peeve: those who prefix their names with “Dr.” without any credentials on their profile. I received a request today from someone I’ll anonymize as “Dr. Harley” and neither his first name nor his last name included “Harley.” Unless you’re a top-notch motorcycle mechanic, I’m not sure what you’re gaining by styling yourself this way.

Have you seen a burst of LinkedIn requests? Do you find them useful at all or just annoying? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/26/22

It seems like lately I have been seeing more of the patient side of healthcare than I care to. That trend continued this week as I was again pulled into the caregiver role. A close friend experienced an accident while far from home, leading to injuries that prevented them from traveling under their original arrangements. Initially, I was engaged to help arrange travel that would get them home quickly, while also accommodating medical needs. That was an adventure in itself, involving lots of phone calls, some hypothesizing about the patient’s condition, a remote airport, dense fog, and a circling plane that ultimately had to be diverted before making another attempt the next day. That kind of experience is certainly nerve-wracking for those trying to coordinate things from afar and even worse for the patient.

Because I wasn’t able to speak with the medical team at the hospital where they were treated, I was hoping to get a greater understanding of the clinical picture by reviewing the notes available in the hospital’s patient portal once the patient made it back home. Initially, I just had the information from the discharge packet, which was lacking some important elements, namely three of the four diagnoses that I expected to see based on the patient’s description of the situation and the other data on the discharge summary. However, there was an access code for the patient portal, so I was eager for the patient to login and take a look.

Unfortunately, there was a problem with accessing the portal, because despite keying in the access code and the patient’s demographic information, it wouldn’t allow us to proceed. We tried to make an account from scratch without the access code, and that didn’t work either. For some reason the system wasn’t able to validate the patient’s information. Of course, the patient knew their own demographics, and the date of birth and name were featured correctly on the discharge paperwork, so we could only hypothesize that the Social Security Number was wrong. Upon making it home, the patient called the portal assistance number on the discharge paperwork only to be told that no one could assist because it was a weekend. I joked that I hoped there weren’t any typos in the insurance information that was entered, because dealing with a denied claim can be a months-long challenge.

On Monday, the patient called the number given with the failed portal login message, and was immediately transferred not to a patient assistance line but to the hospital’s internal IT department, who couldn’t assist. After three more transfers and 40 minutes of being on hold, they finally hung up and called the Emergency Department directly. It turns out that there wasn’t a typo in the Social Security Number, but rather that it hadn’t been entered at all when the patient was registered by the Emergency Department. The receptionist was able to add it to the account, allowing the patient to finally access their information five days after the visit. We were able to see the patient’s Emergency Department progress note as well as the Radiology reports, but unfortunately there was no access to the images that would certainly be of interest to any physician with whom they’d follow up, given the nature of the injuries. There was no information on how to get the images, so we assumed there would have to be another phone call to the hospital.

On one hand, I wished the patient had known to request copies of the images while they were still at the hospital – but most patients don’t think of that, and a patient with a head injury who was having memory issues at the time definitely shouldn’t be expected to be responsible for that. The care team knew the patient was from out of state – in the facilities where I’ve worked in recent years, we’ve always been able to create a CD with images in that type of situation. It doesn’t sound like anyone offered that as an option, at least as far as the patient can remember. On the other hand, the patient doesn’t necessarily remember giving anyone a photo ID, which would be surprising in a hospital that’s part of a large integrated delivery network. At least they remember giving someone an insurance card, but all bets are off as to how the financial part of this experience will play out.

In looking at the Emergency Department note, its contents confirmed my suspicions about missing diagnoses. The physician mentioned several different findings that should have triggered additional diagnoses for the visit, but apparently didn’t. He also failed to mention the patient’s significantly elevated blood pressure and didn’t enter any comments for the patient as far as when they should follow up with someone, and what kind of physician would be advised. As a physician who has spent the last 15 years practicing in emergency care facilities, it was appalling. In every facility where I’ve worked, we’ve been encouraged to put all pertinent diagnoses on the chart and to ensure that there is a follow-up instruction noted for each and every one.

We can talk about patient engagement, quality transparency, and cost comparisons all we like, but in reality, all of that goes out the window when you require emergency care. This patient didn’t have the opportunity to shop around, to vet the qualifications of those that might be treating them or see what the cost might be for what is clearly going to be an out-of-network visit. They were prudently taken to the nearest emergency facility, which is the right thing to do when you’ve experienced head trauma, loss of consciousness, and blunt chest trauma. Unfortunately, what we call our healthcare system let them down, and without advice from their friend who happens to be a physician, they (like many patients) might be unsure of what should be done next.

The lack of follow-up is particularly concerning, especially since the patient was far from home, had fractures requiring follow-up, and the emergency physician provided less than two days’ worth of prescription pain medication. This kind of thing often leads to patients taking massive quantities of over-the-counter medications as a result and isn’t ideal in a patient with elevated blood pressures. Even if the Emergency Department had a policy to only give a set quantity of pain medications, there was no option given for local follow-up either. The patient is lucky they didn’t have complications, but their pain was poorly managed and I can’t imagine traveling in that state.

I’ve thought a lot about this situation the last few days, and particularly about the health system involved. Although the hospital was somewhat remote, the health system isn’t, and frankly I expect a little better from an organization whose core values include compassion and accountability, and whose website talks about advocating for each patient it serves. I’m glad I can help the patient navigate this situation, but the need to embrace a BYOD strategy (Bring Your Own Doctor rather than Device in this case) is a sad commentary on how patients experience healthcare more often than we think. I hope some hospital administrator reads this and questions whether this might have gone on in their organization, because based on my experience as a consultant, this situation is far from unique.

What has been your worst experience as a patient? How did you manage it? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 9/22/22

Plenty of people have returned to a level of comfort with business travel and it seems like they’re flocking to conferences. Redox is promoting their Connect Customer Conference to be held in Philadelphia on October 18. The one-day conference is priced at $99, although current customers can get a discount code through their account manager. The fee includes breakfast, lunch, snacks, and admission to a reception at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The conference itself will be held at the Philadelphia Masonic Temple, so props to Redox for scheduling what might be the most architecturally interesting conference of the year.

I had to renew my Drug Enforcement Administration registration this week, and the $888 fee always hurts. Most mainstream telehealth-only physicians aren’t allowed to prescribe controlled substances, but we’re required to maintain a DEA registration to serve as a proxy for proof that we haven’t done anything shady. The DEA, similar to multiple state-level controlled substance agencies, has yet to come to terms with the reality of telehealth. They still want you to list a physical address at which patient care occurs, which some of us don’t have. I hate having to use my home address, but it’s the only way to register. Let’s hope that agencies will evolve to recognize that some of us may never see patients in person again.

I appreciated the “Renewal Application Quality Assurance Survey” that appeared after finishing my registration. The questions included some commentary that falls into the “things we wish we could say” category. For example, the first question asked for feedback on the overall experience, noting “Please be aware that some common complaints describe aspects of the application that are operating as intended” including the fact that failed logins don’t explain why (so fraudsters can’t exploit that data point) and that the burden of information needed for login is intentional. In addition to rating the login experience, users are asked to rate the usefulness of help/error messages and overall application ease of use.

My readers know that I’m a sucker for a compelling headline, and the hint of research that would explain “Why Hard Thinking Makes You Tired” certainly grabbed me. The theory is that intense mental activity causes a buildup of substances in the brain. Specifically, the chemical glutamate builds up in the brain’s decision center, leading to alterations with thought processes and the progression of mental fatigue. The authors used magnetic resonance spectroscopy to evaluate changes in the brain during the workday. Glutamate is processed during sleep, so the bottom line is that it’s probably a good idea to avoid critical decisions while tired.

I’m a big fan of patient portals and giving patients the ability to schedule their own appointments, testing, and diagnostics if it’s something they want to do. Of course, not every patient is going to be able to do that, or wants to do that, but for those that do, it can take the load off of office staff and call centers. A recent article looked at whether self-scheduling of diagnostic imaging studies had an impact on health disparities. The authors looked at outcomes of a process using the patient portal at the University of California San Francisco and a subset of diagnostic imaging studies that were flagged as eligible for self-scheduling. The portal-based scheduling process was only available in English and allowed for scheduling of a subset of MRI and ultrasound tests as well as CTs, bone density scans, and mammograms as long as a provider had placed an order accompanied by a “ticket” that would help the patient schedule the correct test type, location, and date. The time period analyzed was January 1 to September 1, 2021.

The authors found that subsets of active patient portal users were less likely to take advantage of self-scheduling, including Latinx, black / African American, and non-English speaking patients. Additionally, those with Medicaid or Medicare coverage were less likely to schedule online versus those with commercial insurance coverage. There’s always a chance that patients won’t self-schedule, and backup processes need to be in place to ensure that no one falls through the cracks. Still, more than 18,000 tests were self-scheduled during an eight-month time period, which is nothing to sneeze at. The authors did note a couple of study limitations, including inability to determine whether the patient actually scheduled the test on their own or whether they had assistance from a family member or caregiver.

Looking at the design of this study, the patient stratification piece was likely fairly straightforward because organizations have been required to collect this specific demographic data for quite a while. As researchers look to further understand patient behavior, it will be more important to understand other data covering social determinants of health. Another article that came out this week looked specifically at clinician awareness of their EHR’s ability to capture that kind of information. The authors looked at data from the National Electronic Health Records Survey and analyzed it based on physician, practice, and EHR characteristics. They found that physicians who practice in community health centers were more likely to document these factors than those practicing in other locations. Similarly, physicians involved in payment models that included social care initiatives were more likely to document. Regardless of practice site, physicians who were more aware of advanced EHR capabilities, such as patient engagement or population management features, were more likely to document social factors.

The authors recommend that organizations develop strategies to increase provider awareness of documentation capabilities, especially in practice settings where they are less likely to be aware. I was surprised that payer-owned clinics were found to have lower awareness of documentation capabilities for social determinants, so there’s certainly room for improvement in that environment. The authors also call for policy efforts to expand the use of clinical quality measure that look at social risk screening.

I agree that promoting lesser-used features of the EHR should be part of ongoing optimization efforts, whether they are related to social determinants, provider efficiency, or something else. Unfortunately, many organizations have cut budgets for optimization efforts and ongoing EHR training.

What is your organization doing to improve documentation standards and to get the most return on its EHR investment? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/19/22

One of the more thought-provoking articles I’ve read this week was in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Of course, the title caught my eye: “Do electronic health record systems ‘dumb down’ clinicians?” The abstract was compelling as well, although I was able to read it only after entirely too many clicks were needed despite my AMIA membership.

The abstract discusses a panel that was held at the 2021 AMIA Symposium and sponsored by the American College of Medical Informatics. The panel sought to answer the title question, looking at how the incorporation of EHRs might be negatively impacting care delivery. Discussions centered on how less-than-optimal EHR workflows might impact clinician efficiency, thought processes, and knowledge both during system use and during the longer term.

In broader coverage of the topic, the journal goes beyond the panel discussion, starting with the evolution of EHRs including both homegrown and commercially developed products. It notes that although early EHRs improved safety and efficiency compared to paper-based systems, “several critical perspectives were lost.”

The authors note that data showing impacts on patient outcomes were lacking and that most studies have focused on the processes involved in delivering care. Since early systems were concentrated among a small number of academic medical centers, there wasn’t much portability across institutions. They go on to explain how the Meaningful Use program and the HITECH Act of 2009 incentivized provider organizations to not only expand EHR use in the marketplace. but also to focus on a core set of functions that would lay the groundwork for broader improvements in care.

Having been part of an organization that was already knee-deep in EHR implementation and adoption before Meaningful Use came along, I can attest that it actually slowed us down, because we had to focus on ensuring that prescribed workflows were followed versus being able to customize or configure workflows that worked best for our clinicians. It’s validating that the article notes some of the same negatives that were created in the name of progress.

A series of great quotes are included in the piece. They’re attributed to a New England Journal of Medicine article that was penned by John Halamka and Micky Tripathi in 2017. They are quoted as saying that the HITECH Act had some less-than-ideal consequences. “We lost the hearts and minds of clinicians … We tried to drive cultural change with legislation. In a sense, we gave clinicians suboptimal cars, didn’t build roads, and then blamed them for not driving.” One of my favorite family physicians and clinical informaticists, Jan Lee MD, used to refer to this as “paving the cow paths” when physicians actually needed high-speed roads with no obstacles.

The article goes on to discuss in detail how EHRs might impair clinicians in the short term. Although there are many beneficial features in modern systems, including allergy checking, order sets, and often a treasure trove of patient information, there are also interruptive alerts and distractions. Sometimes users are unwilling to question information supplied by the EHR, and alert fatigue can cause users to ignore warnings and alerts that might in fact be useful. The article gave specific examples, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of interruptive alerts where only a fraction (2-4%) were accepted. The way that EHR notes are organized can obscure the details of a patient’s situation. The use of copy-and-paste functionality in progress notes was specifically called out as potentially misleading and dangerous.

As far as long-term impacts of EHR use, the authors noted that standardization of EHR documentation has led to less-granular terms being used during the creation of History and Physical documents. At one institution, EHR templates reduced the possible descriptors from 1,800 to 360, meaning that some clinician documentation might be hidden from view by other clinicians. An unintended consequence of this might be the shrinking of clinical vocabularies used by medical trainees. As those trainees become faculty, and older faculty members retire, the broader vocabularies are ultimately lost, and notes become less optimal. Additionally, after using templates to order certain treatments, such as total parenteral nutrition, clinicians lost the ability to order these treatments manually. The authors note that this can be dangerous during system outages or when clinicians move to a less-automated environment.

The panel also discussed solutions, which fell into four general categories: institutional and end-user readiness and competency; EHR design and capabilities; regulatory policies and healthcare system-vendor partnerships; and decoupling clinical documentation from billing and regulatory requirements so that clinical notes contain only that information necessary to care for the patient.

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a clinician in the US that wasn’t in support of the latter suggestion. Technology could be a great booster of the latter as well. I’d much rather have a photo of a rash in a chart than a rambling description of someone’s idea of a “lace-like reticular rash with mild to moderate erythema and occasional popular features.” Unfortunately, in many situations, the words will get you paid, but a photo will not.

As far as the other categories, the panel called for improved EHR training, expanded downtime simulations, and greater incorporation of learning about EHRs during undergraduate and post-graduate medical education. Medical students and residents need to understand the “why” behind various parts of the EHR as much as they understand the data that they’re keying in. They call for greater clinician involvement in the design and validation of EHR systems and improvements to alert messages to ensure that such interruptions are clinically important and obtain enough clinically relevant information for clinicians to take action.

It will be interesting to see how EHRs evolve over the next five to seven years. More interesting will be assessing the approaches taken by health systems in how they implement and optimize EHRs. I still see far too many organizations that think that installing an EHR is some kind of “set it and forget it” process.

Physicians constantly complain about the impact of EHR upgrades, but in the last conversation I was in about that topic, not a single physician admitted to having seen any kind of upgrade documentation or educational materials that told them what to expect or what benefits might arise. It feels like those kinds of communications might be casualties of the rampant understaffing I see in many organizations. Gone are the days when we used to send a member of the EHR implementation to every office to make sure clinicians knew what to expect and that their questions were answered. I’m sure the materials are probably out there on some intranet site that physicians have long forgotten how to access.

On the whole, I don’t agree with the premise that EHRs have made us dumber, but I do think they have impacted our workflows tremendously, and not always for the better. There certainly is room for improvement and evolution of technology, but everything comes at a cost. When hospitals are trying to figure out how to keep beds staffed, they are less concerned about things like EHR adoption or end-user satisfaction.

Do you think EHRs have dumbed-down clinical practice? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 9/15/22

A colleague recently asked me what I thought about “quiet quitting” and the attention that the concept has been getting recently in the mainstream media. There has been quite a bit of discussion around it in physician-specific social media groups, alongside discussion of burnout and the role of self-care in a post-COVID workplace.

Many workers in healthcare are still being asked to come in to work when they are sick, despite the fact that they have designated sick days allocated for such a thing. They are pressured that if they call off sick, they’ll be burdening their teammates. Others are told that they can only call off if they find a replacement, which really shouldn’t be the employee’s job.

By most definitions, quiet quitting is the idea that a worker only does what is required of them based on their job description. This means no extra work, no volunteering for additional projects, and in the case of many clinical workers, no picking up of extra shifts. Hospitals have been short staffed for years and the COVID pandemic only exacerbated a problem that was already there. During the first year, everyone was motivated by a sense of needing to pull together, to help humankind, and to be there for their co-workers, but after two and a half years in the grind with ever decreasing support and appreciation, people are simply done with it.

Hospitals (and medical practices, and other clinical organizations) have always had the ability to create safety nets for their workers. It’s easy to come up with excuses not to. I remember trying to implement a “float pool” for our medical group’s ambulatory practices more than a decade ago, similar to what hospitals had in place at the time. Staff could volunteer to be part of the pool on their days off and they would be paid a small amount to remain on call in the event they were needed to cover a shift. If they worked, they would receive their usual rate of pay. Instead, the group’s leadership balked at paying people “for doing nothing.” They failed to understand that it wasn’t about what the float pool member was doing, it was about what they were not doing on their day off in exchange for being on call.

The administrators decided instead to ask for people to volunteer to pick up extra shifts if there were shortages, and then if they had no takers, they offered various hourly incentives. Guess what? Staff learned not to pick up extra shifts until the incentives reached a certain level, which ultimately cost more than what someone would have been paid to be on call. Once a clinical staffing pool reaches a certain size, it’s a virtual guarantee that someone will be out sick on any given day, so the economics would have favored the float pool approach. Additionally, creating a float pool would have ensured people were ready to work on a given day rather than offices having to hope and pray that someone would volunteer, and then to cope with the scrambling that inevitably ensued when someone rolled in an hour or more after the practice opened.

These types of bad decisions have only been magnified in the last two years. Just look at travel nursing during COVID surges. A major driver behind that was the unwillingness of hospitals to appropriately compensate existing staff nurses. I had friends who quit their medical / surgical nursing jobs and then worked as “travel nurses” in a hospital less than five miles away for a significant salary bump. Hospitals went way over budget paying traveling and locum staff, when they could have avoided having those nurses quit if they addressed underlying drivers of low employee satisfaction. Those nurses who stayed put are now increasingly burned out and quiet quitting is the order of the day.

The other reality in our post-COVID world is that people’s priorities simply have changed. If they’re struggling with childcare, they’re not going to volunteer to work extra hours. Families with two wage earners where one has a significantly higher earning potential have redone the math and determined that it doesn’t make sense for both partners to work when there are children requiring care. People seem to be retaining some of the hobbies that they cultivated during the early days of the pandemic and want to ensure they’re spending time on activities that make them feel good and in which they find value.

It will be interesting to see how organizations respond to the shifts in productivity that will result from quiet quitting. Some high-profile companies have already signaled that they’ll just fire people, which doesn’t seem like the way to become employer of choice.

I had some travel this week, which always makes for good people watching. For the first time since spring of 2020, I actually had difficulty getting a space at my favorite airport parking garage. The airport was hopping, although many of the stores remain closed during peak times. I’ve learned to pack a lunch if I have any hopes of eating something that is healthy and convenient. I would estimate that 80% of the people waiting in the gate areas are on either laptops or phones, so I wonder what they would think about this study that looks at the relationship between chronic blue light exposure and accelerated aging.

Researchers at Oregon State University looked at the impact of such exposure on fruit flies. Where previous studies had looked at the consequences of light-related stress on retinal cells, newer studies have examined whether exposure to blue light caused reduced lifespan and degeneration of organs such as the brain. The authors looked at flies that were genetically altered to not have eyes, in an effort to study metabolism and cellular pathways. Some flies were kept in constant darkness and others in constant blue light, for varying durations. The authors noted that those kept in blue light for longer durations had changes in metabolism including impairments in cellular energy production. There was also neurodegeneration in the blue light group, with decreased levels of certain chemical transmitters in the brain.

The study found that if the impacted flies were placed in darkness, their lifespan could be brought back to normal. Reading the paper sent me straight back to my freshman year in college, where the fruit fly lab convinced me that I no longer wanted to be a biology major even though that was what pre-meds were expected to do. Even though I never want to see another diagram of a metabolic pathway, it was interesting to see how much research has evolved over the intervening years. The next step in research of this type would be to look at the impact of blue light on cultured human cells, which have similar metabolites.

Only time will tell the fullness of consequences that we’ll experience from prolonged screen time. I’m perfectly happy to spend my free minutes in the outdoors, reading an actual paper book, or doing some retro hobbies. I’m taking a stained-glass class next weekend, so we’ll have to see how that goes.

Do you have a pandemic hobby that you’ve kept? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/12/22

I was glad that Mr. H mentioned Friday’s opinion piece by former VA Secretary David Shulkin MD. With a title like “State lines should no longer be barriers to health care,” I was hooked.

Going through medical school, I had a passing exposure to the idea that one would need a state-specific license when they went into practice. Mostly this exposure came by watching the anguish that your supervising residents went through as they tried to obtain licenses so that they could earn extra money by moonlighting at rural emergency departments or by covering nights or weekends on the medical center’s newly created hospitalist service. The medical center had a variety of services to support the application process, including access to fingerprinting courtesy of campus police and notary services from the medical school office of student affairs.

Once out in practice, that process becomes more difficult. Especially in a post-COVID world, the process may require making various appointments in person and during normal business hours, which isn’t terribly helpful if you’re a busy physician. Although some states are members of the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact which can expedite this process, a significant number of states have yet to opt in. This can mean going through the licensure process from scratch – providing various transcripts, reports of test scores, copies of certificates, and more.

One state where I applied demanded a copy of my high school transcript, which didn’t seem terribly relevant for someone with a medical degree and a couple of decades experience under her belt. I had a very interesting conversation with the registrar at my high school who eventually found it on microfilm. It looked like something that couldn’t possibly be a legitimate document, with each semester’s results being contained on an address label-like sticker that was applied to a single sheet of copier paper that had my name handwritten on the top. But it had the all-important embossed school seal, so I guess that made it official.

Still, and especially since this was a state that bordered my own, I thought it should be easier since the same standards of care that apply on one side of the line apply to the other. They are called “community standards of care,” not “state-specific standards of care.”

I had been practicing telehealth part time when COVID hit, and the relaxation in licensure requirements boosted my volumes. Almost overnight, I could see patients from 17 states, and as more states relaxed their rules, our wait times for on-demand telehealth visits decreased dramatically. As the pandemic eased, however, many states ended these programs, thereby limiting their residents to a smaller pool of clinicians.

One of the reasons that was cited by multiple states was the concern that easier access to telehealth would result in higher healthcare expenditures and the states didn’t want to be on the hook for that. States were also lobbied by their own state medical boards, in the context of the boards wanting to be able to ensure quality care and discipline physicians. Those boards also receive licensing fees from the physicians who want to practice in a given state, so I’m sure that was a factor.

We knew it would take time to see whether patients would return to in-person care or if they’d continue flocking to telehealth visits. Although many of us have witnessed changes in our volumes, the evidence was largely anecdotal. This week also brought us some research, as the journal NPJ Digital Medicine published a study looking at “The impact of expanded telehealth availability on primary care utilization.” The authors looked at 4 million primary care encounters from 939,000 unique patients from three health systems during the period between 2019 and 2021. They found little change in overall primary care utilization as telehealth services became more broadly used. They noted that “our results suggest the availability of telehealth is not resulting in additional primary care visits, rather, telehealth is serving as a substitute for certain in-person encounters resulting in no overall increase in primary care utilization. Further, it seems telehealth was mostly utilized for patients whose medical needs required multiple primary care visits during each year, suggesting that these telehealth encounters enabled follow-up for patients with chronic illness.”

They noted that additional studies are needed to determine the impact of expanded primary care access on other types of visits, such as urgent care or emergency visits. The authors also noted some limitations to the study, including the inability to determine if patients received additional primary care services from other facilities outside the study dataset. They also could not assess the quality of telehealth encounters compared to in-person visits.

I would also note that although the study looks at visit volume, it doesn’t take into account the differences in the costs of different types of visits. I’ve seen lots of institutional data that shows that telehealth urgent care visits are extremely cost effective, with one organization reporting a savings of nearly $150 for each patient encounter that was handled virtually versus at one of their brick-and-mortar urgent care clinics.

Now that states are cracking down on licensure, it makes it difficult for organizations to maintain the flexibility they need to care for patients. I can barely practice telehealth urgent care now because I’m not licensed in enough states. As an independent contractor, I’m not about to shell about big bucks, and a bigger amount of my time, to obtain additional licenses, so I’m effectively a wasted resource in the primary care / urgent care space.

David Shulkin calls for the states to adopt a model that stretches the boundaries of care, much like the Veterans Administration has done. Many organizations continue to lobby state legislatures to allow continued licensure flexibility, and some states have created lower-cost, telehealth-specific licenses that allow continued practice with more acceptable overhead. Shulkin uses motor vehicle driver licensure as an example, with operators being obligated to follow the laws of the state they’re in regardless of where their license was issued. In that kind of model, physicians would agree to abide by the laws of the patient’s state.

Such flexibility would not only help telehealth programs, but would also help in-person care. Organizations that require support from locum tenens physicians would have access to larger pools of physician candidates and would experience fewer delays in a physician arriving onsite. Ultimately patients would win, which should be the goal of 99% of what we do in healthcare. This would be administrative simplification at its finest.

Unfortunately, I know how state medical boards think, and I don’t see them running to jump on this particular bandwagon. Still, a girl can hope. Maybe some day I’ll be able to see more than two patients a day again.

What do you think about cross-state licensure? Will we see improvement in this decade? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.