Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/18/20

As a consultant, you never know what’s going to come your way. Even projects that seem like they’re going to be straightforward might not be, as was the case with something I worked on recently.

I was dealing with a practice that had an issue with a staff member who was allegedly snooping through employee charts. They asked me to take a look at their audit trails and put together documentation so they could confront her. Finding the data in the EHR was easy since it has an activity log for each patient encounter that can be accessed by clicking a link at the end of the visit note. This is front-end visible data, so any user with the right access can look at it. That made me wonder why they needed to hire a consultant in the first place, other than to be able to say that they worked with an expert resource. I was sad that I didn’t even need to access the database.

The next step was cross-referencing the access time stamps with the actual patient visit time stamps, to either rule in or rule out whether the staffer might have rightfully accessed the charts as a part of the clinical encounter. When the charts are being accessed at midnight, it starts pointing towards an unusual pattern of behavior. When the midnights occur while the employee is supposed to be on vacation, you start to know that you have a winner.

Getting confirmation of the employee’s work schedule and days off was one of the biggest challenges since the practice didn’t want people to know they were investigating the employee. I had to talk to the payroll people to confirm the dates. Much of my engagement was being coordinated through an office manager who was relatively new to the practice, so I assumed that either she was just overwhelmed and wanted me to deal with everything or wasn’t sure of all the data points that needed to come together to make the case for inappropriate access.

Once we had the data in hand, the next step was putting together a report of the intrusions into various charts. Excel is my second language, so I had it all documented in a couple of hours and sent it over.

This is where the engagement turns strange. They wanted me to add documentation to each episode of chart access to specify why it was inappropriate. Sure, I said, send me over your employee handbook and I’ll tie each episode back to the relevant parts of your code of conduct and whatnot. I also offered to review their HIPAA training materials and link my findings back to that as well, functionally putting the nail in the coffin of this medical records misadventure. Since I haven’t been working clinically, I was happy to add a couple more hours to the engagement.

I didn’t hear back for a couple of days and the office manager didn’t respond to follow up emails. I escalated to calling (which I rarely do) and didn’t hear back from the voice mail messages I left either. I finally became irritated and reached out to the physician in charge of the practice, figuring that since he signed my engagement agreement, the buck would stop with him. I caught him in the car, and either he was distracted and just started talking off the top of his head or he had forgotten that they had left out a few key points when they hired me to do this work.

The snooping employee in question turns out to be the ex-wife of one of the practice’s physician owners. The situation is not just an employee discipline problem, but is also linked to a spousal support situation, with concerns that if the employee / ex-wife is terminated, the physician owner / former spouse might have to pay more. He doesn’t want her terminated.

Are you kidding me? Is this not something that could have been brought up when the engagement was outlined? I guess I’ll have to add some interrogatory questions around this type of shenanigans to my engagement intake form.

The plot thickened further. It turns out that the practice didn’t send over the employee handbook because they don’t have one. They also have no documentation of its employees having attended HIPAA training except for a log showing the date the employee watched some YouTube video on HIPAA. That video is no longer accessible, so we have no idea what they watched or whether they agree that they watched it. There is no documentation of a post-test or other evidence of mastery, so it’s going to be awfully hard to tie the misbehavior back to clear violations of office policy. The practice is liable for a HIPAA violation, but they can’t claim that the employee should have known better if there’s no documentation that she ever knew what HIPAA was or how it affected her.

Once this mess became apparent, it was clear why they hired a consultant. No one in the practice wanted to deal with the steaming pile of finger-pointing and ex-spousal angst that it was.

A couple of days later (and after a couple of calls with all parties involved on the practice side), the engagement was again expanded, with additional time for the creation of office policies and procedures regarding HIPAA training, chart access, use of practice resources outside working hours, and more. What started as a simple little project became not only a decent amount of work, but a great story for my next healthcare virtual happy hour. You simply cannot make this stuff up.

I have no idea what forces transpire to make a practice think it’s OK to operate this way in the year 2020, but apparently it has been going on for a long time. They were shocked that I also recommended they discuss this with their various liability carriers and their general counsel, to obtain additional advice on what to do next. I love writing policies and procedures, so it was great to settle into the sofa and spend some quality time with my laptop on a long, rainy weekend. I’m presenting their updated training plan to them next week along with their new employee handbook. Although this after-the-fact effort won’t do much to help them with their problem employee / ex-spouse, it will at least put them on a more solid footing moving forward.

How does your practice handle employee medical records violations? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 5/14/20

EHR vendors have officially started canceling their annual user conferences or moving them online, with Cerner receiving coverage in the Kansas City Star. NextGen Healthcare hinted at a move to virtual in their recent earnings call, but I haven’t seen a formal announcement.

I agree that large gatherings, especially those with international attendees, are as Cerner officials noted, “irresponsible and ill-advised.” Epic is still showing their event scheduled for August 24-27 in Verona, with hotel reservations open through June 18. This year’s theme is “The Magnificent Land of Oz,” but I just hope it doesn’t turn into a magnificent viral exposure.

Funds are being granted from the pot spelled out in the CARES Act. The Department of Health and Human Services will distribute $20 million to four telehealth programs for pediatric and maternal care, and two projects focused on increasing the portability of medical licenses across state lines. The grants are being awarded through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), with two grants of $2.5 million flowing from HRSA’s Federal Office of Rural health Policy to the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards. The FSMB launched the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact initiative back in 2017, attempting to make it easier for physicians to become licensed in multiple states. Those of us whose main licenses are in states that don’t participate are out of luck as far as being helped by the Compact.

Although HHS hopes the grant recipients will “work with professional and state licensing boards and national compacts to develop a streamlined process for telehealth clinicians to obtain multi-state licensure,” it begs the question whether this shouldn’t be for all clinicians and not just those practicing telehealth. I would love to be licensed in multiple states and travel more, but maintaining multiple licenses is a pain and a significant expense. I would love to see medical licensure go national since we have to take standardized national board exams anyway. States can still discipline physicians for improper activities that take place within their boundaries, but let’s free up the licensure pathway.

The remaining $15 million was granted through HRSA’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau, with $6 million going to the American Academy of Pediatrics, $4 million each going to the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs and the University Of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Maternal health Care program, and $1 million going to Family Voices, which is a New-Mexico-based program for families of children with special healthcare needs. The grants are aimed at increasing telehealth services for adolescents, young adults, children with special healthcare needs, and pediatric practices that need to develop telehealth capacity for rural and underserved areas. Other offerings include virtual doula care, remote prenatal care, and behavioral health services.

I’ve spent what seems like a lifetime in bad meetings, many of which are not productive because there are no agendas and no designated scribes. It’s hard to follow up on action items when no one documents them. I was excited to hear about Cisco’s Webex Assistant, which claims to be AI_powered and capable of “everything from automatic note-taking and real-time transcription, to identifying meeting highlights and action items.” I watched their very slick video and have to say I’m intrigued. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is actually using it. How does it work in real life? Can it handle speakers with different accents? Is it able to parse medical or technical verbiage? Or does it quickly become like Clippy and you just want it gone?

On the flip side, I was on a great call the other night, having been invited to a virtual happy hour with a group of sassy ladies. I’m glad we didn’t have a virtual assistant capturing our conversation because it was wide-ranging, and at least without a transcript, we have plausible deniability. It did get me thinking, though, that Cisco’s product would be even more compelling if you could put it in “snark mode” and have it capture side bar notes such as “Bob’s dog is barking again” and “We can hear the ice cubes clinking in Dave’s glass. Based on the pitch, it’s half empty. Do you think it’s vodka?”

Speaking of slightly stalker-ish software, my clinical employer (from which I am once again furloughed after working a couple of shifts) is offering social medial monitoring as part of its defined benefits plan. The package promises to deliver “actionable alerts when there are any potentially racist, derogatory, vulgar, or inappropriate comments within your social media posts.” Since I know my employer is already monitoring what we post and occasionally asks us to take things down, I’m not terribly interested in giving them or their affiliates any more personal information than they already have.

An editorial in JAMA Internal Medicine addresses the topic of “Commercial Influences on Electronic Health Records and Adverse Effects on Clinical Decision Making.” They retell the story of the Practice Fusion opioid prescribing debacle in plain terms that might be news to physicians outside the healthcare IT industry — that the pharmaceutical manufacturer’s marketing team contributed to the design of clinical decision support alerts that promoted opioid prescribing practices that deviated from the standard of care.

The authors call on EHR purchasers to “require vendors to attest that no commercial interests improperly influenced clinical decision support design and that all tools are based on unbiased and clinically appropriate standards.” That might work for out-of-the-box code, but I’ve also seen healthcare organizations and providers themselves manipulate clinical decision support tools, including order sets, to preferentially position services with a higher profit margin for the organization. Somehow we’ve got to get past the place where money is a key driver in the delivery of healthcare.

Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite time-wasters, and I’m always intrigued when something medical is mentioned. This entry hit two targets – women in medicine and handicrafts. The pillow sham in question dates to 1896, when a group of graduates of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania embroidered their signatures along with medical symbols such as a doctor’s bag, a thermometer, and a skeleton. My medical school class was the first at my school that had more women than men, and I am in awe of the women who truly pioneered our path during the 1850s.

For trivia buffs, the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania was the alma mater of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” which remains one of my favorite medical TV shows of all time, along with “M*A*S*H,” “Call the Midwife,” “St. Elsewhere,” and “Trapper John, MD.”

What’s on your list of favorite medical movies and TV shows? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/11/20

If you’ve been a longtime reader, you probably know that I’ve done quite a bit of camping. I also usually teach at an outdoor leadership course a couple of times each year, which is good for stories on team dynamics and resilience. Needless to say, COVID-19 has put a bit of a dent in my outdoor activities, canceling three planned local camping trips, the outdoor school, and an outdoorsy trip to Victoria, BC.

This weekend I attended my first virtual campout, where everyone put up their own tents close to home and we got together on a Zoom meeting. As with any adventure, there were some learning opportunities. First, a shortage of my usual extra-wide egg noodles at the supermarket negatively impacted my standard Dutch oven dinner, so if I’m going to do it again, I had better plan in advance so I can avoid the linguine-esque ones we wound up with. The corn bread muffins cooked outdoors in a cardboard box oven, were delightful, however.

Next, I learned that I probably shouldn’t have put the laptop right next to me, since campfire smoke always finds me and therefore my laptop. After a quick run into the house for canned air, we were back on track.

The third thing I learned was that bad skits can be absolutely hilarious when performed on a conference call. I think I’m going to have to consider assigning remote skits for the next consulting gig I get where teambuilding activities are needed.

Last, I had the opportunity to confirm what I already suspected, which is that the people in my immediate household have some pyromaniac tendencies. Fortunately, we kept the inferno confined to the actual fire pit, and no grass was harmed this time. We were rewarded with great weather, so although the overall experience was a little strange, I’m glad we did it.

It was a welcome departure from the chaos that has been the last two months of my professional life. Run around frantically trying to get personal protective equipment so you can fight a pandemic? Check. Figure out how to quarantine yourself away from the others in your house? Check. Get furloughed and wind up with unanticipated free time? Check. Channel that free time into random IT projects? Check.

At the end of each calendar year, I go through a planning exercise and try to forecast what my year will look like based on what I think clients will ask me to do. This year was going to be full of travel, with lots of trade shows, expos, and meetings. We all know how that turned out. However, I was pulled into projects doing things I never thought would be on my plate. Need to set up chatbot-based screening for patients arriving at a drive-through testing clinic for a disease no one had heard of two months ago? Sure! How about using the ZIP code data from the patients to figure out where to put an expansion site for additional testing? Definitely. What about figuring out how to help practices reopen safely, routing patients to different reception areas depending on their symptoms? Of course.

I did more telehealth visits in a couple of weeks than I did all of last year, and even though it has its challenges, I’m fully convinced that it’s a critical part of healthcare strategy for the future. Patients like it, clinicians like it, and with the right supports and an appropriate mix of in-person care, it could really make the difference for some patients. It’s also a way to allow providers who might not be able to practice in a face-to-face setting to continue seeing patients.

A good friend of mine went through chemotherapy last year, and although she felt up to seeing patients, her physician wouldn’t clear her to work in the office. Telehealth would have been ideal for her, but it wasn’t on her health system’s radar at the time. Especially with the shortage of primary care physicians, we don’t want to lose people who are willing and able to care for patients.

There’s also been a fair amount of wackiness the last couple of months, mostly in the form of conspiracy theories and distrust of “the medical establishment.” I never thought I’d have to reassure people that my highly-regarded medical school didn’t offer a course in “Conspiracy 101” and that I don’t actually get paid more for diagnosing patients with COVID-19 than I do if I diagnose them with boring old bronchitis or pneumonia. I also never knew that so many grown adults didn’t wash their hands before all of this happened, or that some of them still think it’s optional. If there’s one good thing that comes out of the pandemic, it’s that maybe we’ll have fewer colds and flu because people have actually learned that washing your hands is important and you should stay home when you’re sick.

As we approach the middle part of the year, I typically do a brief planning check-in to see whether my forecasts are on track and what I think the bottom half of the year will bring. Guess what? All bets are off this time. I think instead of trying to plan, I’m going to just hit the patio with a bottle of wine and spend a couple of hours contemplating what’s blooming in the yard and wondering whether my pampas grass will come back after the household pyros torched it this spring rather than simply cutting it off as usual. (I realize that prairie fires are a thing and are part of a healthy ecosystem, but I don’t think my single clump of grass deserved what it got.)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that although having a plan is generally a good idea, if the universe decides to start throwing flaming meteors at you, all you can do is adapt. For the first time in a long time, I have absolutely no idea what I might be working on in three months, let alone six. I don’t even know if some of my health system clients will be solvent in the bottom half of the year, or whether my small practice clients will ever reopen. It’s pretty clear, though, that we’re going to need plenty of IT solutions to get through some of the challenges that are coming, although they probably won’t be with the traditional vendors we’ve all looked to in the past.

What do you think the bottom half of the year will hold, personally or professionally? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 5/7/20

This week is National Nurses Week. I salute all the nurses who taught me what I really needed to know to be successful on the wards, since most of it wasn’t covered in the formal curriculum presented by the medical school faculty.

I came across this pastry shout-out to nurses from physician Cindy Chen-Smith @artmeetscookie and was blown away by the airbrushing. Whether you’re a superhero in chunky shoes, New Balance sneakers, sassy heels, or tactical boots – I salute you.

I also enjoyed reading the comments on National Nurses Day from Patti Brennan, director of the US National Library of Medicine (and a nurse herself). She notes, “While the Library can’t manufacture more time, fabricate personal protective equipment, or stand beside the bed of a patient in need, we can help nurses find freely accessible literature.” Brennan mentions special search strategies such as LitCovid, which I admit I’d never heard of. It’s a curated hub for tracking the most recent scientific information about our current situation and categories articles by topic and by geographic location.

I enjoy seeing the breadth and depth of the projects my clinical informatics colleagues are working on. This research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine last week looks at “Internet Searches for Unproven COVID-19 Therapies in the United States.” Since we’re looking at a disease with no reliable proven treatments there are plenty of ideas floating around the internet (and directly from political figures) that are catching people’s attention. The authors looked at internet searches that were “indicative of shopping for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine” by monitoring Google searches “originating from the United States that included the terms buy, order, Amazon, eBay, or Walmart” in combination with chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine.”

They cross referenced the data against the dates when Elon Musk and President Trump endorsed the drugs, as well as the date when news reports on treatment-related poisonings were published. The authors found that “queries for purchasing chloroquine were 442% higher following high-profile claims that these drugs were effective COVID-19 therapies.” Searches for buying hydroxychloroquine were 1389% higher. Searches for purchasing the drugs continued to remain high following news reports of their dangers, although at a lower level (212%).

In the discussion, the authors note that “Google responded to COVID-19 by integrating an educational website into search results related to the outbreak, and this could be expanded to searches for unapproved COVID-19 therapies.” I’m sure there will be more research questions to come in this area as the pandemic rages on.

Most of my physician colleagues have been doing at least some level of telehealth, and after a couple of months, some of them swear they don’t want to go back to in-person care at the same levels they practiced previously. Many patients don’t want to go back either, especially in economically depressed areas and among patients who previously had to travel long distances to receive treatment. A Stat news piece looks at patients in coal country, where the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has seen a 3,700% increase in telemedicine visits.

One of the reasons for greater patient satisfaction during telehealth visits was noted by UPMC’s CMIO, who noted that who “doctors are able to type notes while facing the patient, instead of looking over their shoulders.” That seems like an operational / technical issue to me. Perhaps UPMC should look at reconfiguring their exam rooms and employing laptops on carts or a better type of device to make their in-person visits more hospitable. He also notes the struggle with initial visits, with patients succeeding on the second or third attempts.

Although many physicians are assuming that the wild, wild west of telehealth (non-HIPAA-compliant platforms, reduced requirements on service location) will continue, we’ll have to see what the payers decide to do. We’ve already seen many of the cross-state licensure waivers end, and there’s already a lot of financial pressure to return to the status quo. (How do you justify charging a facility fee when neither the provider nor the patient are in the facility? Inquiring minds want to know.)

As hospitals start to pass the peak of COVID-19 and clinical care teams start to learn to breathe again, the folks in finance are continuing to have increased anxiety. They have to figure out what it will take to make their balance sheets positive again, or at least less negative.  A recent article featured Dan Michelson of Strata Decision, who discussed what CFOs will need to weather the long-term changes after the COVID-19 storm. I’ve chatted with Dan a couple of times, and he’s usually spot-on in his observations.

Among the things he recommends: rolling budget forecasting, adherence to coding guidelines for complications and secondary diagnoses, and being able to anticipate patient behavior changes, especially the desire for non-emergency procedures. Organizations will also need to truly understand their costs, including PPE, overtime, and additional supplies in the new world post-COVID. They’ll also need to understand the role of self-pay in their overall financial picture, since many patients have lost the health insurance that was tied to their employers.

Another issue in the “new normal” post-COVID is understanding how we catch up on diagnoses that were missed due to multiple months of delayed preventive services. A report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science looks at trends in the US for five common cancers.  The report estimates that 80,000 cases may be missed across breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancers based on decreased screening volumes in April compared to February.

I’m high risk for two of those conditions and am behind on my regular tests due to the closures, so I can definitely understand concerns about screening delays from the patient perspective. Interestingly, I’ve received no communications from either of the providers involved in my regular screenings, so I suppose I’m left to assume that their strategy for handling patient recalls during the pandemic was to just stop contacting people. That’s not much of a strategy for patients who might not be as compulsive about their health as I am. I’ll just keep bumping my calendar reminders forward a few weeks at a time until I hear the hospital is back in the screening business.

The American Academy of Family Physicians came out with a checklist for reopening practices to non-essential face-to-face visits. Usually their advice is pretty practical, but one bullet caught my eye. They recommend that common areas such as patient waiting rooms and staff break rooms should remain closed if possible. Although they recommend allowing patients to wait in their cars until it’s their turn to be seen, they conveniently avoided any recommendations on where staff should take breaks. In my travels, I’ve seen plenty of people eating in clinical care areas because they don’t have time to take an actual break or the office doesn’t have adequate facilities.

Seeing patients face-to-face in these new conditions is more tiring than before and staff do need a place to take a break (not to mention a safe place to take their mask off so their skin can breathe). They also call for staff to wear face masks, gowns, eye protection, and gloves when caring for suspected COVID-19 patients, We’re still in a shortage of gowns, so that’s just not realistic.

There was a recent story on “Good Morning America” encouraging graduates to donate their unworn gowns for healthcare providers to use as personal protective equipment. Although I appreciate the sentiment, I’m horrified that several months into this situation, we’re still in crisis mode. Will the surgeons be asked to wear hand-me-down graduation gowns to the operating rooms now that they’re starting to book cases?  I think not.

Does your staff get to use the break room, or to do they take their meals in their cars? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/4/20

Many organizations are knee deep in the process of expanding coronavirus testing. Although it has become easier to get test kits, some of us are still eagerly awaiting the rapid kits from Abbott.

One of the challenges though with adding COVID-19 testing to your scope of services is dealing with the reporting aspect. COVID-19 is a reportable disease in all public health jurisdictions. Depending on how large your organization is (and how many counties or states it serves), the reporting aspect can be daunting.

I was excited to attend a webinar last week that was presented by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). They reviewed the “eCR Now” effort to broaden the use of electronic case reporting for COVID-19. From a clinical informaticist’s point of view, it was the most exciting thing I’ve seen in weeks. For those of you who were like me and hadn’t heard of it, I’ll give you the highlight reel.

Electronic Case Reporting (eCR) is the ability to automate generation and transmission of case reports from EHRs to public health agencies so that those agencies can review and act on them. Depending on the jurisdiction, that might include sending a formal quarantine order to an affected patient, performing contact tracing, or enrolling them in a daily disease tracking and/or surveillance program. Public health agencies rely on case reports for numerous diseases and conditions beyond COVID-19, from sexually transmitted infections to dog bites.

The problem for providers is that each public health jurisdiction has its own reporting process, which may range from email to fax to phone calls. Automating this process from data already in the EHR is key, both in reducing the delay in getting information to the agencies as well as receiving information back from the public health agency.

Apparently a pilot for eCR was already in the works well before COVID-19 hit our shoes. Coordinated by a collaborative of healthcare, public health, and health IT industry partners, Digital Bridge came together to solve the problem of data exchange. After some small implementations, the effort began to expand in late 2019, with sites implemented in Texas, Utah, New York, and California, plus 19 other state and local public health agencies.

Once COVID-19 became a thing, they started reporting those codes through the existing infrastructure. By the end of January, 142,000 case reports had been sent from seven implementations. The process uses HL7 standard documents to move information from providers through HIEs or other exchange frameworks to a platform that is supported by the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL). For public health agencies that aren’t completely integrated, the platform can render the files in HTML, which functions a lot like the faxes they previously received.

Most of the current implementers are Epic and Cerner sites, but given the importance of public health reporting for COVID-19, there is a push to move eCR capabilities into more EHRs. They’ve created a program called “eCR Now” that has three main parts:

1. Rapid implementations for cohorts of organizations that have eCR-enabled EHRs.
2. A FHIR app that non-eCR-enabled EHRs can rapidly implement.
3. Extension of the existing eHealth Exchange policy framework through a developing Carequality eCR implementation guide

As far as the accelerated implementation cohorts, what used to take 2-3 months is now taking 3-4 days. In fact, Sutter Health has issued a challenge, promising a bottle of wine for any cohort participant that can beat Sutter’s implementation record.

Organizations whose EHRs don’t support the standard can use the FHIR app, which was due (along with its source code) to be released May 1. There’s a nationwide HL7 FHIR Virtual Connect-a-thon scheduled for May 13-15. EHR vendors that don’t support the standard are being encouraged to develop the ability to trigger report generation and send data based on the standard, and state and local public health agencies are being encouraged to accept eCR instead of requiring manual case reporting. Who doesn’t love getting rid of a clunky manual process?

Needless to say, I immediately took this information to a couple of the organizations I work with, because it’s the kind of project that’s a win-win in a lot of ways. Manual reporting sucks up time that could be spent doing other things, and being able to rapidly process information about COVID-19 diagnoses and lab tests is going to be key to our management of the disease especially without a vaccine or broadly-applicable treatments. Plus, I selfishly want one of my clients to bite on the idea because I love this kind of a project – it takes me back to my first “build from scratch” project more than a decade ago, when we decided to add CCOW functionality between several applications at my health system.

I still remember the calls with Sentillion, when they agreed to give us the software development kit and I had to quickly learn about Vergence and the fact that “the vault” didn’t live in a bank. It was probably my first deep dive into the world of development, and led me to meet all kinds of wild and crazy developers and even build a friendship with my own personal “Citrix Guy.” Sure, there were many late-night testing sessions (since we didn’t have a complete test environment and had to quietly test things in production after the physicians were off the system, but before the backups and billing runs started) and probably too much alcohol, but it was a really fun time that I will always remember.

Technology moves on. Microsoft bought Sentillion, all those developers are now working at other places, and CCOW has mostly gone the way of the dodo as healthcare organizations either move onto monolithic platforms that handle everything or instead move the data around through interfaces.

I’m hoping I get to work on an eCR project and that it continues to grow well beyond COVID-19 and into the realm of all the other reportable diseases that require complicated manual reporting. Many of us believe healthcare is entering into a time of massive transition, and we’re going to need lots of tech to get us through.

Anyone looking for an ex-CCOW expert that likes to play with FHIR? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/30/20

I’ve always enjoyed baking, and once upon a time, I even worked in a bakery. Even with exposure to some truly exceptional baking, I’m very impressed by the Chicago-area physician who is creating cookies to honor key figures in the COVID-19 pandemic. Her designs are hand painted and include tributes to physicians such as Anthony Fauci, Ohio’s Amy Acton, and others. Pediatrician Priscilla Sarmiento-Gupana is truly an artist and I wish her good health, along with many happy hours of baking.

CMS has suspended advance payments to providers and is re-evaluating accelerated payments to hospitals. Over $100 billion in loans has already gone out the door, but many healthcare delivery organizations are still struggling. The payments split 40/60 between Medicare Part B providers and hospitals. Recipients are expected to repay the funds within one year. Reasons for suspending the program include the availability of funds through other programs, such as those in the CARES Act, along with the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act.

Most studies indicate a 60% decline in outpatient visits during March. Factors at play include providers who want to reduce exposure to their staff, along with patients who don’t want to come into contact with COVID patients. Between 30-50% of physicians report using telehealth for at least a portion of visits. Some specialties, such as ophthalmology, have been hit harder than others, primarily due to recommendations from their professional societies about practice closures.

An intrepid reader sent me this ad from SSM Health that promotes telehealth visits. He notes that the clinician is wearing the traditional dress of nurses in the UK’s NHS. Last time I checked, SSM was located in the central US. They recently furloughed over 2,000 employees, and I wonder if eagle-eyed proofreaders were among those let go.

I often see companies using cheesy stock photos without thinking deeply about whether those photos actually convey the culture of their organization or whether they represent their employees and patients. The picture reminded me that I’m two episodes behind on the new season of “Call the Midwife,” so I know what I’ll be doing tonight.

EHR vendors continue to work to make it easier for clinicians to document patient visits. A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association looks at the accuracy of the physician’s note compared with a concealed audio recording obtained from an unannounced encounter with a standardized patient. Standardized patients are typically professionals who compensated for filling the patient role during a mock office visit, where the clinical team’s performance is evaluated.

Researchers looked at 105 encounters across 36 physicians. They found 636 documentation errors, with 181 findings being documented that did not actually occur and 455 findings that occurred but were not documented. Nearly 90% of the notes had at least one error, with 21 of them over-coded and 4 under-coded. Theoretically, technologies such as ambient clinical intelligence could provide a solution to these issues. I look forward to seeing data on how well it delivers on its promises.

I haven’t paid much attention to the attempts at delivering a virtual HIMSS20, but this week an email came through that listed a session I was actually interested in. Unfortunately, going to the site wasn’t fruitful, as I couldn’t find the session I was looking for. The site has filters but not a keyword search, and since I didn’t want to dig through dozens of screens, I gave up. I’m not sure how well-received HIMSS20 Digital has been, but I doubt I’ll be back.

April 30 is the last day to submit MIPS data for 2019. The data submission window closes at 8 p.m. ET. CHS has added flexibilities due to the stresses that COVID-19 has placed on healthcare providers. Individual clinicians who aren’t able to submit MIPS data by April 30 will qualify for the “automatic extreme and uncontrollable circumstances policy” and will receive a neutral payment adjustment for the 2021 MIPS payment year. Groups and virtual groups will have to submit an application for the exception, and those can also be submitted until  8 p.m. ET on April 30.

Speaking of deadlines, May 1 is the deadline for payers to submit proposals for the Primary Care First program. It seems like it’s been a million years since we’ve talked about programs like this, as opposed to emerging infectious diseases. Delivery of primary care services has been significantly changed by COVID-19 and it remains to be seen whether Primary Care First will even get off the ground, let alone have the power to transform care.

I’m a sucker for evidence-based and data-driven approaches, so I enjoyed learning about the new scoring system that is being discussed by the American College of Surgeons to help surgery departments start scheduling medically necessary operations. The system looks at the level of hospital resources needed, the impact of a treatment delay on a patient, and the risk the procedure poses for the surgical team. The Medically Necessary Time-Sensitive (MeNTS) Prioritization process was published ahead of print and is gaining interest among surgeons who are operating under differing guidelines from various subspecialty organizations.

The system has been in use at the University of Chicago for approximately two weeks. They have been able to increase the number of non-emergency surgeries performed to approximately 15 per day. I’m sure that’s a far cry from their usual surgery volume, but hopefully the scoring system will help create a path forward.

Recent updates to Microsoft Word have been driving me crazy. I was glad to have my experience validated by a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine. Millions of typists were taught to place two spaces after a period, while modern keyboarding technique now only includes one space. I’m thinking about trying to teach myself to type with only one space at the end of a sentence. It might be something to challenge my brain since I’m not working clinical shifts. In the mean time, I’ve asked the new editing tool to tolerate my double-spacing.

One space or two? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/27/20

Just when I was getting used to being furloughed from my clinical gig, I was called to action for three days of work that just happened to coincide with the expected peak of COVID in my state. Although I was initially eager to get back in the game, I must admit that 36 hours in the trenches has eliminated any such enthusiasm.

After my initial shock over a couple of things, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and try not to draw any conclusions until I had worked at three sites with three teams. Now, with those shifts in my rear-view mirror, I have to say that some of my first impressions were correct. Here’s what I learned.

I’m probably more likely to be exposed to the novel coronavirus by my colleagues than by the general public. Our team is generally young and healthy, mostly EMTs and paramedics. Many of them are super fit, with extensive workout and nutrition routines. Several of them questioned why I was wearing my N95 mask all day, even for patients who didn’t have respiratory symptoms. It’s clear that our internal education has not met the mark as far as their understanding the idea of asymptomatic spreaders or the need to treat everyone with universal precautions since you can’t tell from looking who might be a carrier.

Most of them were donning and doffing various masks (alternating between N95 and standard surgical masks) and setting them on the workstation counter in between patients. Only two of us had a dedicated “drop zone” for our masks (a.k.a. paper towels with our names on them). Others were lowering their masks under their chin in between patients, which is a less-than-great infection control procedure. The good thing is that most of them responded well to a little in-person education and started doing better with mask hygiene.

Leadership note: just because you send out memos and instructions, it doesn’t mean people get it and are following the instructions. Sometimes you need the face-to-face contact to get the message across. It’s an expensive kind of communication, but it’s worth it.

Speaking of masks, the general public isn’t doing a great job of wearing them even when they have the good ones. I saw too many people with masks covering the mouth but not the nose, and too many whose nose pieces weren’t pinched to fit well around the nose. People whose glasses are fogging up due to their masks are incredibly grateful when you teach them how to pinch the nose of the mask. We as healthcare providers take it for granted that people know how to use them correctly.

I saw everything from top-of-the-line 3M models to simple bandanas. The best one was a homemade model on a patient whose wife is a professional seamstress. As someone who does a little sewing myself, the craftsmanship was something to behold. I told him to be sure to let her know that the doctor noticed her attention to detail and excellent topstitching.

I also learned that a good part of our surge was made up of people coming in for non-emergent conditions. People certainly aren’t afraid to venture out for minor things such as having wax removed from their ears even though they don’t have symptoms. Multiple people were there for medication refills since they either couldn’t get in touch with their physicians or were having trouble getting refills in a timely manner, and I was happy to help them.

We did see our share of urgent and emergent conditions as well, including multiple cooking-related lacerations among people who don’t usually cook, along with several home improvement injuries. Patient education note: working on an aluminum ladder while barefoot is not a good idea. We also diagnosed and treated multiple sexually transmitted infections, so some people’s ideas of stay-at-home might be a little different than others.

I ordered my fair share of COVID-19 testing swabs, and now I get to play the waiting game to see how long it takes the results to return so I can start my own “known exposure” countdown. I don’t know when I’ll be asked to work again, but I’ll definitely be staying close to home until the results turn up. I’m grateful we have testing capabilities and can at least collect the samples in the office without having to send patients elsewhere or fight the health department for approval like I had to a little more than a month ago.

My employer is keeping a close count on the testing swabs since they aren’t sure when we can get additional supplies. We’re a long way from testing everyone who wants to be, as we were promised once upon a time.

After my first day of patient care, I pretty much fell into my bed. As I tried to fall asleep, I wondered how long it would take the tingling in my face to go away. If you wear them properly, the N95 masks are pretty tight, and I was glad that my face was back to normal by the morning. However, after three days in a row, my face feels like it’s been in a vise and I have a splitting headache that I can’t get to go away.

I cannot even fathom what it must be like for the healthcare workers who are on dedicated COVID units or who have been working like this for weeks on end. I’m hoping to cruise some forums for tips on pressure reduction before I go back again. Hopefully, my face will bounce back overnight since I’m supposed to film some EHR training videos for one of my clients.

I’m glad I could pitch in, but I feel guilty for having been parked at home while my colleagues have been working. It’s definitely more mentally and emotionally exhausting than the work we were doing before, even in the middle of flu season. I never thought I would wish to go back to the Flumageddon season of 2017-18, but I do, to some degree. At least back then we knew what we were dealing with, we could test for it, and we had a hope of treatment. With this situation, we’re often flying blind and looking for outlier symptoms, such as loss of smell or “COVID toes.”

I noticed that our EHR vendor has added quite a bit of telehealth-specific content. Even though we’re not using it, I was glad to be able to check it out. It prompted a good conversation with my scribe, who was also seeing it for the first time. She didn’t know I worked in telehealth. She recently wrote a paper about telehealth for an undergrad class. It was good to have a bright moment like that in the middle of a very tiring day, and hopefully she learned something beyond what her research had shown her.

She also offered me the tip of putting Preparation H on my face if the redness doesn’t go away. Apparently, she learned it “on the pageant circuit,” but I’m too tired to even remotely consider masking up and going to the store.

Have any tips for dealing with the squeeze of a badly fitting mask when there aren’t any other mask options? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/23/20

Telehealth is a hot topic in the virtual physician lounge, with various specialty organizations providing cheat sheets and other reference materials to help practices figure out how to get paid. The American Academy of Family Physicians put together a nice table and flow chart identifying the appropriate E&M codes to use for various clinical and technology scenarios.

As the coronavirus response shifts, some states are allowing their emergency licensing waivers, which allowed many of us to see telehealth patients across state lines without separate licenses in those states, to expire. The recent expansion of telehealth coverage by the US Department of Health and Human Services also allowed providers to avoid HIPAA penalties for the good-faith provision of telehealth during a public health emergency, which led to a boom in use of things like Skype, FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, and other non-secure platforms. It’s unclear exactly how long the “public health emergency” status will last and how much warning we’ll have before the original rules return in force.

Although many healthcare delivery organizations are strapped for cash due to declines in elective procedure revenue, it’s time for them to start thinking about how they’ll transition to a HIPAA-compliant solution. In addition to the HIPAA angle, providers deserve better than using consumer apps. To have the best efficiency and patient safety features, telehealth platforms should integrate with the EHR and scheduling system for streamlined documentation and follow up.

I’ve heard of a couple of health systems looking at telehealth as a way to reduce their physical footprint and get out of costly leases. One executive I talked to spoke of turning some of their offices into the medical equivalent of WeWork sites, where providers could purchase just the time and space they need for face-to-face visits, which may fall below 25% in some specialties.

Stories about providers having their hours cut are everywhere, along with recent reports that healthcare staffing giant Envision Healthcare might be preparing to file for bankruptcy. The company has over $7 billion of debt. The entry of private equity into healthcare in recent years has sucked money out of the system at an alarming rate. Perhaps its time for hospitals to go back to employing physicians and treating them like valued members of the community instead of commodities.

Several physicians have asked me if I had read the statements from the Office of the National Coordinator regarding flexibility with the Interoperability Rule, and I had to admit that I hadn’t. The bottom line is the ONC and CMS, along with the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG – just wanted to see how many abbreviations I could string together) announced “a policy of enforcement discretion to allow compliance flexibilities regarding the implementation of the interoperability final rules announced on March 9th.” They went on to say that this “flexibility” is specifically due to the COVID-19 public health emergency. The discretionary period will run for three months past the original compliance dates, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being extended.

I was initially excited to see an email from Provation offering a “free COVID-19 order set and care plan” in order to “keep all our healthcare heroes equipped with the latest evidence-based order set and care plan content available for COVID-19.” Unfortunately, it requires provision of your email address and company info prior to access, followed by acceptance of terms of agreement that say you can download a single PDF copy “solely for evaluation purposes.” Given the lack of proven treatment for COVID-proper, there wasn’t anything too earth shaking in it.

I was pleased to see the American Academy of Family Physicians come out with a forceful statement about the lack of evidence for off-label use of medications for COVID. Physicians are getting numerous requests for unproven drugs, and those who give in to the badgering are inadvertently causing shortages for people that need the drugs for their actual approved use.

A colleague clued me in to a Miami organization that mailed her mother a bottle of hydroxychloroquine without her requesting it, along with information stating that patients were being placed on it as a preventive. I was happy to see that references to that activity have been sanitized from its website, although the South Florida Sun Sentinel preserved the CEO’s statements and advocacy for the drug for posterity. I hope regulators and license officials take the time to investigate any shenanigans that have already occurred.

I was also happy to see the announcement of an AMIA webinar next week focusing on Electronic Case Reporting. This is a problem I’ve been trying to solve for a client. Due to geographic spread, they have to report COVID-positive cases to dozens of public health authorities, all of whom have different forms. Required transmission modalities include phone, fax, email, web forms, and snail mail. The client has largely given up on reporting, preferring to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Hopefully the pros on the call will have some ideas to help so I can stop tearing my hair out. If any readers have inside scoop, please share with the rest of the class.

I was less happy to see the CMS document detailing strategies on how to reopen healthcare delivery in the US. First off, its title “Opening Up America Again” is a little too close to a political slogan than should be permissible with an official CMS document. I detest the use of the word “America” as a synonym for “the US” because it makes us appear ignorant of the fact that “the Americas” are a big place inhabited by lots of people other than us.

In short, the document recommends that organizations use telehealth when they can, but in-person care can resume in areas that have “the resources to provide such care and the ability to quickly respond to a surge in COVID-19 cases, if necessary.” Consideration should be given to facilities, workforce, testing, and supplies.

However, the CMS statement on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is weak. Basically they are recommending only surgical facemasks for healthcare workers unless high-risk procedures are being performed, and “patient should wear a cloth face covering that can be bought or made at home if they do not already possess surgical masks.” No mention was given to the relative ineffectiveness of cloth face coverings or the lack of science supporting their use, nor of the studies that show that in some circumstances cloth face masks can actually increase transmission of infection.

On the delivery side, the plan is to “conserve PPE,” which basically means healthcare organizations can require their employees to use items in ways that contradict documented approved uses and increase risk to staff. I fully understand that we can’t just use new masks for every patient like we used to, but I would love to see Seema Verma have a conversation with my friend Lil, a pediatric OR nurse who was denied a new mask by an OR supervisor despite her mask being soaked with sweat (and likely ineffective, since you’re not supposed to wear them if they’re saturated).

The document also calls for routine screening of workers and designation of “COVID-19 Care zones” and “Non-COVID Care” (NCC) zones, with separate buildings or separate entrances in the same building and with staff not crossing from zone to zone. It goes on to say that “all patients must be screened for potential symptoms of COVID-19 prior to entering the NCC facility, and staff must be routinely screened for potential symptoms as noted above. When adequate testing capability is established, patients should be screened by laboratory testing before care, and staff working in these facilities should be regularly screened by laboratory test as well.” I’d love for someone to sit down and explain how that should work in the average primary care office or urgent care, because it doesn’t feel like CMS is thinking beyond the hospital walls.

What do you think about the plan to reopen healthcare in the US? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/16/20

HIMSS could learn a lesson from the American Academy of Family Physicians, which is offering a “worry-free registration” guarantee for its annual conference that is scheduled for October 2020 in Chicago. Attendees can cancel their registrations at any time, for any reason, up to the day before the meeting and will receive a full refund. Bookings prior to April 30 can also receive an additional $100 discount in honor of National Doctors Day. AAFP’s hotel policy is deposit-free and rooms can be canceled within 72 hours of the meeting without penalty. Cancelations within the 72-hour window will incur a one-night charge. It’s unclear if the world will be ready for major conferences by that point, but at least they’ve come up with a good solution to try to make a go of it.

There has been a lot of chatter in the virtual physician lounge around plans for testing and contact tracing in preparation for the end of stay-at-home orders. Excitement about the point-of-care ID Now COVID-19 test from Abbott Labs has been building, as many practices already own the machines that are needed to run them. The company has shipped 560,000 test cartridges across the US, but I haven’t heard of anyone in my area receiving them despite having placed orders as soon as the company started taking them. An article says that the majority have been sent to “outbreak hotspots,” with a request for customers to prioritize testing for frontline healthcare workers and first responders. They are manufacturing 50,000 tests per day and plan to increase the capacity to two million tests per month by June.

Rapid testing is key to strategies for reopening the US economy, along with robust contact tracing. Even though San Francisco is located in a tech hotbed, they are going somewhat back to basics with their approach to contact tracing. They’re putting together a task force to interview patients and trace their interactions, building their team from 40 people to as many as 150. They are engaging researchers, medical students, and staff from the University of California, San Francisco.

Even though major parts of the process will be manual, the group will use online and phone-based tracking tools to follow up with exposed persons and assess them for symptoms. The team will also seek permission to review phone location data for additional tracking.

Where other countries are mandating use of state-developed apps to track movements and trace contacts, many people in the US would fight any mandatory sharing of data, despite the fact that they willingly give it up every day to random apps that sell their data and aren’t trying to keep people from dying.

Testing and contact tracing efforts are going to be expensive and will further stress an already burdened healthcare system. Nearly every facility has a story of salary cuts and hiring freezes along with layoffs and furloughs. Hospitals are still struggling, even those who are not yet in the midst of the surge. They’re paying inordinate amounts for personal protective equipment and still can’t get enough of what they need to function under anything but crisis standards of care.

Next time you read an article about COVID response, look at the pictures. Are the clinicians wearing consistent PPE, or is it a hodgepodge of gear, some brought from home? Do people have head coverings, masks, gowns, and face shields? Do they have masks that fit? Are all clinicians protected, or just those performing the highest risk procedures?

It saddens me to know that I had better PPE when I played the Quipstar game show in Medicomp’s HIMSS booth than some of my colleagues now have. Once we reach the point where healthcare workers have enough PPE that they can use in the way it was designed, not in a way that is modified for scarcity, then we’ll know that we are moving in the right direction.

Greenway health did a great job with their recent blog helping practices understand how the CARES Act may impact them. I’m on a number of vendor email lists and Greenway consistently sharesg relevant information without being too salesy. This particular piece included brief descriptions of the different types of loans and funds available to practices. It may help a practice who don’t know their options for weathering this storm.

If you’re on the team maintains your facility’s charge master or load contracts, make sure you’re keeping up with all the changes CMS is throwing your way. Today’s update was an increase in the payment Medicare is making for certain high-volume coronavirus lab tests. This payment of $100 covers “COVID-19 clinical diagnostic lab tests making use of high-throughput technologies developed by the private sector that allow for increased testing capacity, faster results, and more efficient means of combating the spread of the virus.” High-throughput systems are defined as those that can process more than 200 specimens in a day. Medicare will also be paying new specimen collection fees for homebound patients and those who can’t travel, like nursing home patients.

Road warriors of the US, rejoice. DoubleTree by Hilton has released the official bake-at-home recipe for their signature chocolate chip cookies. As a consultant who has opted to drive an extra hour each day from my hotel to the client site so that (a) I didn’t have to stay somewhere sketchy, and (b) I could have these cookies waiting for me, I am thrilled. I haven’t made them yet, but I am intrigued by the inclusion of lemon juice in the recipe. Apparently more than 30 million cookies are baked every year, and the cookie was the first food to be baked in orbit on the International Space Station a few months ago. It took two full hours for the cookie to bake in microgravity, although the experiment log documented the smell of cookies at 75 minutes. The official DoubleTree statement says, “A warm chocolate chip cookie can’t solve everything, but it can bring a moment of comfort and happiness.”

I bake an inordinate amount of cookies every year with my dad, so I couldn’t agree more. (The picture above is just a fraction of our 2019 effort). My local market is finally back in stock with flour, so these are on the schedule for the weekend.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/13/20

Despite my clinical employer’s failure to get on board with telehealth, many organizations are embracing it. The American Medical Association released a Telehealth Playbook last week. It has a lot of good information for people who might not be sure how to approach the process. It’s a bit lengthy at 128 pages, but don’t let that dissuade you, because the last 40 or so pages are worksheets.

The AMA did a good job gathering information from people who have figured this out in the past, when they weren’t in a rush as people are now. Situations are a little different when you are trying to ramp something up quickly or are using solutions that are unproven, though. Your mileage may vary to some degree, depending on how nimble your organization is and what your tolerance is for just getting something live without achieving perfection.

Not all organizations have done well with trying to manage patients remotely or making sure that the needs of patients with chronic issues are met. I have heard from multiple friends and neighbors who have visits scheduled during the next two weeks (while our state is still under a stay-at-home order) and they have received zero communication from their physicians on whether the visits will happen or how they might be executed. I’m sure some of them might be waiting to see how things unfold since they seem to change from day to day, but especially given the availability of patient portals and texting solutions to communicate with patients, it’s surprising that the practices are running silent.

There’s also an error component as practices shift visits. I have already had one pharmacy error when my primary physician canceled my annual visit. They usually send a year’s worth of refills to Express Scripts when I appear in person. This time they sent an order for a 90-day supply to tide me over until I have a visit, and Express Scripts promptly misprocessed it and sent me 30 pills. Four phone calls later, I still don’t have what I need. Fortunately I’m a bit of a pharmacy hoarder and always stay a month ahead on my refills, and it’s not something that will cause grave harm if I miss it for a few days, but I’m sure patients in those situations are experiencing similar confusion and delay.

The AMA playbook divides the process of implementing telehealth into 12 steps, with the first six being planning. Those steps typically include needs analysis, building a team, defining success, evaluating vendors, gaining buy-in, and contracting. In many organizations, these steps can take 12-18 months, and practices are now trying to do it in a matter of weeks (if not days). The playbook includes a concise “Warmup” section that talks about telehealth and provides some basic definitions, helping people understand synchronous versus asynchronous technologies and how they might benefit organizations. It glosses over some of the barriers to telehealth, though, listing them but not really explaining how much of a showstopper they can be for organizations.

Licensure issues are big, especially for organizations that are on state borders and see patients from multiple states. Although there has been some relaxation of interstate licensure during the COVID crisis, some states have their own regulations around it, where others are a bit more of a free-for-all. Even the big telehealth companies have handled temporary licensure waivers differently. One is requiring physicians to opt in to see patients in states where they are not licensed, while another is just assuming that its providers want to see patients from all states where there are waivers. Some of the waivers are already expiring, causing dramatic shifts in how many patient visits are available for physicians to staff.

Privacy and security issues are also paramount, especially given the recent federal relaxation in the level of security needed for billable visits. Providers can use commercial platforms that weren’t specifically designed for patient care, which may increase access, but also increase the risk of exploitation. Another concern is whether telehealth visits can deliver the same level of care as in-person visits with the same outcomes. Having worked for a telehealth organization that has a strong quality program, and where the antibiotic metrics are higher quality than those I saw in my brick and mortar practice, I have to say it’s more about the organization and its culture than it is about the delivery platform.

Funding a telehealth program is also a big issue. The playbook puts it squarely back on the practice to figure out, although it does define a few examples. Organizations will have to work with their payers to understand how visits might be covered and how they might impact other aspects or practice, including Accountable Care Organization cost and quality attribution. The document makes it clear that practices that go down this road will need to have dedicated resources to stay up to date on the constantly shifting landscape with payers, rules, and regulations.

Several of the steps they identify are being largely skipped over as organizations race to get telehealth solutions live. Some of them include getting feedback from staff on pain points and figuring out how different telehealth solutions might solve those issues, along with evaluating the organization’s readiness for telehealth solutions. It’s clear that whether organizations are ready or not, here it comes, so that definitely shifts the dynamic. Budgeting and identification of funding sources are also being skipped as organizations view telehealth as a way to try to preserve care delivery (and financial margins) versus just closing to patient traffic in the face of an outbreak.

Other pieces that are being skipped over include gaining stakeholder buy-in and identifying success metrics. From a vendor analysis perspective, it seems like many organizations are trying to go with solutions that might be already integrated with their EHR or otherwise using commercial solutions. There are multiple third parties that are offering no-risk or low-cost agreements for 90 days during the crisis, so that’s a good thing for practices who might just want a quick solution without significant commitment.

It’s a risk for vendors to take this approach, but if they have a solid offering and treat their clients well, it’s a great way to prove their capabilities. The contracting piece of the document made some great points about ensuring that clients understand who is going to have access to their patients’ data and ensuring scalability.

Steps 7-12 fall into the “Game Time” portion of the document. Some of these steps — like workflow design, prepping the team, and partnering with the patient — are being done in a matter of days in real life. Many of my colleagues are embracing telehealth. It will be difficult to convince them that they need to return to face-to-face visits for many of the issues they are treating. Patients are also happy with the convenience factor, so I don’t see it going away any time soon.

I’d be interested to hear from people who have rapidly executed a telehealth strategy. What worked and what didn’t? Are patients accepting it? Have you had claims come back and are there issues, or are you still waiting for the other shoe to drop? What would you warn someone who is farther back in the process? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/9/20

I’ve been reading tons of scientific papers this week, trying to keep up with recent research on COVID-19 while alternating other things I have put off, such as finishing my tax return. I know the deadline has been pushed, but I’m expecting a refund this year so wanted to get things moving.

I enjoyed coming across this decidedly non-COVID article discussing the “Association between lottery prize size and self-reported health habits in Swedish lottery players.” That’s a decidedly niche research set, for sure. In case you’re curious, the question they were seeking to answer was this: “Is unearned wealth from lottery winnings associated with more healthy habits and better overall health?” Looking at over 3,300 individuals up to 22 years after their lottery win, they found no statistically significant differences in long-term health behaviors.

I also took some time for personal healthy behaviors, such as continuing to binge watch “Poldark” and also watching the first two episodes of the new season of “Call the Midwife.” I enjoy its gritty portrayal of nurses in London during the 1950s and 1960s. Although it makes me grateful for the medical technology we have today, it also makes me wonder how things would be if we had a similar national focus on neighborhood-based care, including home outreach. If there’s any good to come out of this pandemic, perhaps it’s a re-evaluation of how we deliver care around the world.

Speaking of remote care options, one of the things I wanted to see at HIMSS was the GlobalMed Transportable Exam Backpack. I was impressed by their exam cameras last year. They have integrated those plus a few more tricks into this bag, including EKG and ultrasound. Apparently its predecessor was a ruggedized briefcase that was used in various capacities, including treating Secret Service agents detailed abroad and enabling communication with physicians in the US. The images obtained with their cameras are better than what I sometimes see with my own eyes in the office, which makes me wonder about using solutions like theirs to augment in-office workflows as well as those in remote locales.

April 12-18 is STD Awareness Week, and a recent writeup made me wonder whether social distancing will have much of an impact on sexually transmitted diseases. I live in one of the US cities with the highest rates of STDs, so a reduction in illness would certainly be welcomed. The article notes that the event used to be the full month of April, but even with the condensed timeframe, the goals are the same — raising awareness, providing education, encouraging testing, and reducing stigma, fear, and discrimination. Stay healthy, folks!

When patients test positive for sexually transmitted diseases, public health agencies have to perform contact tracing. That kind of work has come into the spotlight with COVID-19. I’m hoping some of those technologies can be later adapted for routine use. A group of innovators from MIT and other organizations has created a solution that not only helps with tracking, but also helps maintain privacy for individuals who allow it to use their location tracking data. Patients’ memories aren’t always reliable over time and other countries have made great use of location data, not only for contact tracing, but to enable a return to a more normal level of human interactions.

I was glad to see CMS applying its Extreme and Uncontrollable Circumstances policy for clinicians who aren’t able to submit their Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) data by the recently extended April 30 deadline. The policy will be automatically applied to those who don’t submit – clinicians will be flagged and receive a neutral payment adjustment for the 2021 MIPS payment year. For those organizations who started data submission but aren’t able to complete it, a separate non-automatic application can also be completed.

For those of you who spend most of the winter checking this graphic from week to week, I think we can safely say goodbye to flu season. Many of my coworkers would give anything to go back to even a bad flu season rather than what we’re dealing with now.

It’s a safe bet that most medical school graduates from the Class of 2020 will receive their diplomas in the mail. My alma mater canceled its commencement exercises weeks ago, even before the first states started going on lockdown. They realized that people were already making travel arrangements and wanted to send a message for folks to stay home. It’s the first time the university has ever cancelled commencement, even with world wars and other conflicts.

They sent out an alumni blast today asking us to send messages to the newest graduates as they carry their brand new MDs into a world that none of us envisioned. Here’s to all the new physicians, nurses, therapists, and other healthcare providers heading into this brave new world. My virtual hat is off to you.

From HIT Girl: “Re: specialists. I am not a clinician, so this might be a doofus question, but how easy or difficult is it for a specialist to work as a generalist? Doctors and nurses are getting sick, getting exhausted, and visibly suffering moral distress. Can specialists be rotated in to take over and let people take some time off to regenerate (or recuperate, if sick)?” This is the approach many healthcare systems are taking, although they are trying to find synergies in what kinds of resources can do which kinds of work. For many subspecialists, such as cardiology and gastroenterology, their underlying training is in internal medicine and they have a lot of knowledge that can be brought to bear in the hospital setting. They might not do as well in the outpatient setting, where we see a broader spectrum of chronic care than what they are used to encountering.

Many physicians are taking online refresher courses to get up to speed before they’re redeployed to other clinical areas. My experience, in delivering urgent care and primary care at the World Scout Jamboree, is that a lot depends on the individual clinician and their training. The subspecialty surgeon with whom I worked had a terrible time treating basic primary care issues such as strep throat, and his continued frustration with the EHR added to his inflexibility and unwillingness to learn. Conversely, the pediatric rheumatologist slid right into adult-ish medicine without blinking and even made a couple of great saves.

Bottom line: your mileage may vary when redeploying physicians. There are some procedures I haven’t done in decades and wouldn’t have any business attempting them regardless of how many videos I watch.

Thank you to all the readers who sent me words of encouragement in response to my recent underemployment. I’m trying to pick up telehealth visits where I can, although the big surge seems to have passed in those as companies have onboarded new physicians in droves.

Several wrote with their own physician stories that could form an administrative hall of shame. One busy primary care doc who expertly transitioned to telehealth saw her schedule reallocated to her partners who weren’t as busy. Others were told to use vacation time to make up for closed clinic hours even though they were willing to see patients virtually. Another office is requiring all the providers to come to the office to deliver telehealth services, citing HIPAA and “place of service issues” as the reason providers can’t operate from their homes. The common theme was poor communication – major changes in how physicians operate probably shouldn’t be delivered via impersonal group text messages.

I appreciate each of your stories about your personal “new normal.” Please keep them coming.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/6/20

I was awakened this morning by a call from my clinical employer. Usually those early morning calls are along the lines of someone being sick and asking if I can cover a shift, or it’s one of my partners asking follow-up questions on a patient visit from the night before.

This morning’s call was absolutely surreal. They were notifying me that they’re taking me off the schedule for the rest of the month.

It would have been one thing had they just laid it out cleanly and said it was a low census issue. Instead, the person calling (who probably hadn’t discussed the word track with HR) went on and on about needing to have physicians “give up their shifts” because of other providers who have student loans to pay or whose spouses have been laid off from their jobs. I suppose they assume that physicians of a certain age don’t have student loans or other critical deb, and whatever other assumptions they made about my finances made me less needy of work than others.

I was frankly shocked that they would approach it in the way that they did. It is certainly not something I would handle with an early morning phone call.

A quick check of the “under revision” schedule shows that the majority of shifts being moved around were indeed those belonging to physicians, while keeping the physician assistants and nurse practitioners working. As it is in so many things, it appears to be about the money, because it certainly doesn’t look like it’s about having the most experienced clinicians available to treat patients who might have complex presentations. And it’s definitely not about presenting such a drastic change in a way that might be palatable to those affected.

They went on to babble about needing me to provide coverage “when the surge comes, whenever that is” as if we’re supposed to just pick up extra shifts at their beck and call. Mind you, this is an organization that declined my offer to help them stand up a telehealth program at the beginning of the COVID crisis. Where other similar clinics are using technology to deliver care and allay patient concerns in a way that makes patients (and staff) feel safe, we’ve entrenched and have watched the world pass us by.

I’m certainly not alone, as plenty of hospitals and practices have furloughed physicians in various subspecialties due to lack of demand. My ophthalmologist friends have been largely benched since they spent the majority of their time performing surgeries that are now classified as elective.

As someone who is used to manning the front door of the healthcare system, I didn’t think it would be me. It certainly doesn’t scream job security to know that when the going gets tough, decisions aren’t going to be made on quality of care, patient satisfaction scores, or the ability to treat patients quickly and thoroughly (since I’m an A+ performer in those areas).

Needless to say, I’ll be doubling down on the informatics work and telehealth visits for a while. Frankly, I wish they would have just pink-slipped me, because I’ve definitely lost that loving feeling.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/2/20

Monday was Doctors’ Day. I had pretty much forgotten until I looked in my non-work email account and saw this greeting from Cerner. Specifically, it was from their Jamboree Team that supported us at the World Scout Jamboree last summer in West Virginia. It was a nice reminder of better times, when I was able to watch 40,000 people from around the world work together and get to know each other.

Our current situation is a reminder of just how global we really are. Since that Cerner team is used to supporting an international clientele, I wonder if any of them will be deployed to support the Cerner Millennium implementation at London’s 4,000-bed Nightingale Hospital?

This is going to be a rough year (or two) for doctors. I’m glad to see that professional organizations are stepping up. Whether it’s statements about the rights of healthcare providers to wear their own personal protective equipment if their employers cannot provide it or extensions for continuing education requirements, it’s appreciated. I have several friends in private practice who have taken out personal lines of credit to try to pay their staff members and who are forgoing their own salaries indefinitely. I suspect this might be the death knell for many independent practices, depending on how solvent they were prior to the crisis.

Vice President Mike Pence sent a letter to hospital administrators this week requesting that they report data in connection with coronavirus testing along with data on bed capacity. The data is to be reported in a de-identified fashion to ensure patient privacy. In a nod to 1990, all data is to be reported based on a spreadsheet, which is due every day at 5 p.m. ET for the period ending the previous midnight. Hospitals will be submitting this critical data to a FEMA email address. Since everyone likes a redundant process, hospitals must also report daily data to the National Healthcare Safety Network’s COVID-19 module, which went live March 27.

Unbelievable, but in cybersecurity news, hackers have targeted the World Health Organization in the midst of this crisis. Tactics include creating a fake website that poses as a WHO email login portal to try to obtain passwords. Hackers had previously tried to spoof the WHO in an attempt to get money and private details from unsuspecting users. I hope what goes around comes around for these scoundrels.

A great piece in Kaiser Health News last week illustrates what it’s really like to be in an ambulatory setting and trying to confront COVID-19. This mimics what I’m hearing across the country. Although some organizations have stopped routine visits, others are forging ahead at full speed. Practices that can are pushing telehealth, but safety net organizations and others that are unable to limit in-person visits are having to rapidly redesign processes.

There are challenges in making sure exam rooms are clean in between patients. My own practice had to do an air handling study to figure out how long it would take to circulate the air out of our largest exam rooms should a high-risk patient be treated in them.

Many practices are doing “at the door” screening and triage, which often takes the form of a clipboard. Others are turning to novel solutions using chatbots and algorithm-based screeners.

Although adaptations are being made for telehealth payments, the article notes that some states are slow to get to speed with transitioning their Medicaid programs to a new payment model. It also notes the phenomenon of patients who “misrepresented their COVID-19 risks in order to get past screening.” We’re experiencing that in our environment as well, with patients desperate to be seen. Unfortunately, we have little to offer those we genuinely suspect of having the illness since care is largely supportive. Patients have latched onto media coverage of unapproved drugs and are requesting them. I’d love to be able to put a sign on the door that says simply, “No, you cannot have a Z-pack.”

From Other Duties as Assigned: “Re: from the front lines. I spent two shifts this week as a screener for all employees, clinicians, patients, family, and vendors. I’m usually a tech guy. It was a bit harrowing. In my state, we are hard pressed to maintain our PPE supplies and are repurposing surgical units to COVID. Our revenue will drop by 40% if this continues up the curve.” The writer wanted to remain anonymous, which is not difficult since this scenario is playing out at hospitals across the country. Kudos for stepping out of your comfort zone and giving it your all. Fighting this pandemic is definitely a team sport, whether you are supporting interfaces or enforcing the use of hand sanitizer at the door.

Lots of companies are throwing out cool COVID-related dashboards, showing various things such as hospital bed capacity (Definitive Healthcare) and effectiveness at social distancing (Unacast). Some of them are pretty fascinating, but it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of interesting data and fail to do actual work. I’m limiting my COVID-related web surfing in an effort to actually remain productive.

I’m normally not a huge fan of Eric Topol, but I did enjoy his recent piece on how the “US Betrays Healthcare Workers in Coronavirus Disaster.” I think “betrayal” is the word that many healthcare workers are feeling right now, whether you’re a physician, nurse, therapist, tech, dietary worker, housekeeper, facilities engineer, security staffer, transporter, phlebotomist, or just about any role in the healthcare ecosystem. Many of us have spent our careers in service to others, but are having difficulty coping with the fact that when the going gets tough, our employers abandon us with salary cuts and furloughs. Their ultra-lean “just in time” inventories have left millions of workers without the basic protections of a safe workplace as defined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

My clinical employer is still working hard to get us PPE, but it’s an uphill battle. A shipment of 500 gowns doesn’t do much for an organization that executes over 1,500 patient visits a day. We still don’t have company-supplied N95 masks, but we do have lab goggles for everyone. I’m eternally grateful to friends and family that dug through their basements or hit stores that were rumored to have legitimate masks, because I’m now covered with a set of masks I can rotate as I work. We’ll see how they hold up since they’re supposed to be single use and I’ll be wearing them up to 14 hours a day, but at least I have them, and the generosity of my support system allowed me to provide a few to colleagues as well.

Tonight’s dinner table conversation included such topics as “remember when we used to go out to eat” and “who wants to call the elders to make sure they’re actually at home,” along with something from a college math class that I’m sure I knew once upon a time. I’ve mostly adapted from my lack of travel, although the occasional tiny bottle of hotel shampoo brightens my mood. I have thousands of dollars in airline credits just waiting until the skies are safe again, so I’m making my post-2020 bucket list.

A friend sent me this photo, allegedly from a restaurant in Ohio. I’m not sure what all is going on with this concoction, but I do want to experience it in the future. If you know where I can find it, leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/30/20

I’m still getting tone-deaf emails from HIMSS touting the value of Virtual HIMSS. They are also pitching a white paper that I can download to “understand in real time how your patients experience every interaction along the continuum of care; make patient feedback quick, meaningful, and actionable; and protect and improve your market share.” Honestly, with what is coming, I don’t think health systems are worried about protecting their market share. They are either knee-deep in COVID-19 or trying to prepare for it.

The hospitals in my area are busy giving very carefully worded interviews to the press about their stock of personal protective equipment. They usually go like this: “As of today, March 29, we have enough.” Reports from friends who work at those facilities are pretty bleak and we’re not even in a hot zone.

I also heard report that HIMSS isn’t wasting any time invoicing corporate members for their annual renewals, which has to sting for vendors who recently ponied up a good chunk of change to exhibit at a conference that didn’t happen.

I tend to skewer many different parts of the industry, so I don’t want to miss the opportunity to highlight physicians who are behaving badly. States are coping with a burst of prescriptions for drugs that are being used to combat coronavirus, often being written by physicians for themselves or their families. In response, states are requiring physicians to include a diagnosis code on every prescription for the suspect drugs, one of which is azithromycin.

Although including a diagnosis code on prescriptions is a best practice for medication safety, the reality is that many physicians don’t do this unless their EHR is set to require it. Those physicians just going about their business treating strep throat in penicillin-allergic patients are getting pharmacy callbacks, which clogs up the system. Some organizations have flipped the switch to require a diagnosis code for all prescriptions, which is making everyone unhappy.

Bottom line, folks: prescribing unproven drugs for your family in a situation like this one is unethical. If you are doing it, shame on you.

On the positive side, AMIA has announced that its Clinical Informatics Conference scheduled for May 19-21 will now be virtual. The CIC is a must-attend conference for many clinical informaticists who are in the trenches with hospitals and health systems versus being in academic settings. In addition to occurring on its scheduled dates, organizers will share the content with registrants using a learning platform. The CIC has grown tremendously since its inception, roughly doubling in size every two years. I wish AMIA the best in trying to make this new format happen.

Recently my clinical practice has hit a lull as we wait for the surge of coronavirus patients to hit. I’ve gone from delivering medically focused care to delivering care with a more psychological focus. A good number of patients in both my in-person and telehealth practices just want advice and aren’t able to get it from their primary physicians, or don’t have primary physicians to reach out to.

I’m also giving a fair amount of public health advice both in my practice and on various Facebook groups and community forums. Medical misinformation abounds these days, and people are coping with requests to stay at home with some unhealthy behaviors.

Our local high school had to recently close its athletic fields because one of the club football teams called a practice despite a stay-at-home order being in place. Parents drove their middle school children to participate in contact football, which baffles me. Other people are getting together in groups to have social distance tailgating parties, where the six feet of social distancing is just an illusion. Another group of moms got together and backed their minivans up facing each other, then crawled into the back end and drank Starbucks. People are asking me what I think about these practices, and sometimes I struggle to find the right response.

We live in the most connected time in human history. The technology to bring people together while they are apart is amazing. Most of us in the US have ready access to free video calling, conference calls, unlimited long distance, and more. However, people are struggling to feel “close” to people unless they are within a certain physical proximity. Have we lost the ability to have relationships with people unless we are literally face-to-face with them?

Some of my best friends live across the country and around the world, but I can “talk” to them within moments through texting or online messaging. They are literally at my fingertips through the magic of the cell phone. For those people who psychologically must have face-to-face contact, I’m recommending they do it with a single friend and from a distance, rather than mimicking one of the group distancing solutions I’m seeing.

People who are getting together in these groups are missing part of the point about healthcare providers wanting or needing them to stay home. When you’re on the road, you put yourself at risk for accidents, which puts first responders at risk, and possibly healthcare providers. It also puts you at risk – you can give the virus to them, and they can give it to you, since many of us don’t have adequate personal protective equipment.

It’s one thing to go out to get essentials. It’s another thing to go meet up with friends because you’re bored. I strongly encourage people to rethink what they’re doing, especially if they’re under a stay-at-home or shelter-in-place order.

For those of you who might be struggling with this, I have some tips to share from retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. As someone who spent her formative years wanting to be an astronaut (specifically, the first doctor in space, but I didn’t quite hit the mark), I have tremendous respect for those who journey to the ultimate frontier. As he says in the piece, “Flying in space is probably the only job you absolutely cannot quit.” Some highlights from his recommendations: follow a schedule, but pace yourself; go outside (safely and prudently); find a hobby; keep a journal; listen to experts; and take time to connect.

As an anonymous blogger, the last one is important to me. I correspond frequently with a few regular readers, and it’s good to have kindred spirits. If you’re not sure who to reach out to, check on a neighbor, reach out to an elderly person in your religious organization, or consider reaching out to someone from work who you typically see in passing but don’t get to talk to regularly. We can all make new connections as well as our existing ones, and you might just find yourself brightening someone’s day in this challenging time.

Those of you who have been reading my work for a while know I’m an avid baker, and one of my favorite prescriptions is for pastry therapy. I didn’t write myself a script for a Z-pack to fight coronavirus, but I did treat myself to a new cast iron skillet complete with Rosie the Riveter. She reminds me that we can do this, and like our parents and grandparents during major world upheavals, it’s going to take all of us to get this done. Thank you to my friends at Lodge for keeping the foundry going and the online orders shipping.

To the rest of you, I leave you with tonight’s pastry therapy offering: the Chocolate Chip Skillet Cookie. I promise it bakes up much better in the 10-inch Rosie the Riveter skillet than it ever did in my trusty 12-inch one. Bon appetit!

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 3/26/20

A great piece appeared in Forbes this week about why doctors don’t perform well when they’re afraid. I would extrapolate that to, “humans don’t perform well when they are afraid.” They especially don’t perform well when they are afraid and they are receiving mixed messages from the World Health Organization, the Centers from Disease Control, and their own hospitals or employers.

People are sending me copies of documents from their employers that show policies that are directly divergent from WHO and CDC recommendations. Especially for people who have devoted their careers to scientific inquiry and the application of research to the point of care, this understandably doesn’t go over well.

The author notes that feeling under threat creates an attentional bias, where physicians’ thoughts are more focused on the threat than on caring for the patient. Lack of personal safety also reduces cognitive flexibility, which impairs problem solving and decision making. She also notes that being worried keeps us from learning from our experiences and our mistakes.

The reality is that workers are already becoming exhausted and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s to come in the US. Organizations are at a loss as to how to best support their workforce. One of the physicians in the article states, “I think the system is failing us. There’s so much talk of wellness and we are given more modules on wellness. The reality is this is just giving me more work. So how about you take those funds and redirect them?”

The funny thing about the article was when it rendered on my screen, an ad for St. George’s University School of Medicine appeared alongside it. I’ve been to St. George’s – it’s in Grenada and it’s a lovely place, with the anatomy lab only steps from the beach. It also has the distinction of having had the United States Marine Corps rescue its students during the 1983 invasion.

I wonder how many people who previously wanted careers in health care will still want them after all this. It’s not just the clinical teams who are being beaten up, but everyone on the front lines, from dietary to engineering to custodial to IT and so on. The physicians I’ve spoken with that are the most distressed are those who have administrative teams that are working from home since they are non-essential. That’s shocking to me, especially compared to facilities with administrators who are rolling up their sleeves and getting in there.

A friend of mine from high school lives in Taiwan. We were chatting the other night about what life looks like for them. When we spoke on February 2, his city was on partial lockdown, with schools closed through the end of the month. At this point, he reports that since the majority of new cases are coming from foreign travelers, they have shut down the airports for the next two weeks.

He notes several other differences: “We’ve got temperature and sanitizing stations everywhere. We set rations early for medical supplies, tied to nationwide health cards so people don’t get more than they’re allotted per week. Home quarantine is digitally tracked with phone and wristband – if people aren’t where they’re supposed to be, the police show up.” There’s no way that would fly in the US, but it’s an interesting view of how other countries are handling this challenge.

He sent me this piece from NBC News that explains it based on the fact that “Taiwan put lessons it learned from the 2003 SARS outbreak to good use, and this time its government and people were prepared.” Taiwan’s actions:

• Aggressive testing and contact tracing, with swift isolation of infected patients.
• Temperature monitors were already in place at airports to look for passengers with fever.
• Individuals with positive contacts but who test negative are tested repeatedly to determine if they become positive.
• Masks were rationed, but were given to lay people, which helped people feel safe and avoided panic behaviors.
• Soldiers were sent to staff mask factories, increasing production.
• TV and radio stations broadcast hourly public service announcements on hygiene.

Can you even imagine that in the US, where we’re still hearing in some channels that this is all a hoax?

There are other good strategies in the article, including parents monitoring children’s temperature at home and not sending them to school when febrile, which I know is not always the case in the US. We often see parents who load their children with ibuprofen and acetaminophen and send them to school sick because they can’t take off work. Once the children are sent home from school, they come to urgent care.

There’s also a plug for Taiwan’s nearly universal healthcare system, which “lets everyone not be afraid to go to the hospital. If you suspect you have coronavirus, you won’t have to worry that you can’t afford the hospital visit to get tested… you can get a free test, and if you’re forced to be isolated, during the 14 days, we pay for your food, lodging, and medical care. So no one would avoid seeing the doctor because they can’t pay for healthcare.” That’s a different world, indeed.

I was able to do some actual informatics work this week, as I helped a couple of organizations set up their COVID response plans, including messaging campaigns and drive-through screenings. There are plenty of companies standing up solutions specific to the current crisis and I’ve heard some comments dismissing them as capitalizing on the emergency. Still, some vendors are offering some pretty cool solutions for free and I was happy to take advantage of a couple of them this week (as were my clients).

Smaller companies can be a lot more nimble. I watched a patient outreach solution go up in less than 12 hours and a drive-through screening management system go up in less than two days. It’s been fun to watch innovation at work.

I finally left the house, though, when I received the call that a colleague had an N95 mask for me. I felt like a transplant patient must feel when they get the page that an organ might be on its way. My hopes were dampened a bit after I heard the story of where it came from – it’s likely to be a counterfeit. Once it makes it out of the quarantine area in my house, I’ll check out its particulars and see if it’s the real deal. A good friend of mine might also have one in his basement, which I’ll definitely take advantage of if this one looks sketchy.

There are a lot of scams out there, “friend of a friend” kind of situations where people promise to get a high volume (and high dollar) order through when traditional supply chains have failed. Even hospitals are not immune to the scams.

Stay safe out there, and stay sane. It’s going to be a long, bumpy ride.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/23/20

Another crazy week in the trenches, and the “organizational behavior” consultant part of me wishes I could get some of my clients to listen to reality and take solid advice. Everyone is completely stressed, and justifiably so, but we need to figure out how to get through this.

This morning, I had a very painful conversation with a client who asked me to update him on what other similar organizations are doing with their outpatient clinics. Are they closing, running modified hours, consolidating by patient needs, etc. I put together a careful analysis with summaries and walked through them.

The client proceeded to yell at me and explain why each option wouldn’t work for their organization. I tried to gently remind him that his “ask” was for me to answer the question of “what are similar organizations doing in this situation” as opposed to “how should we handle this?” Because frankly, if he had asked the latter question, I’d have been likely to tell him it’s time to just pack it up and go home, because their lack of understanding of this pandemic and failure to follow CDC and OSHA guidance is putting their staff and patients at risk.

The bright spot of the week was a patient who asked me how I was doing as a person and how my family was holding up with me being on the front lines. He was sincere and caring. It was a welcome change from having to deal with the previous patient, who was self-absorbed and flatly refused to quarantine himself “because it’s boring and I can’t stand it any more” despite his fever of 102 and symptoms that were consistent with COVID.

Like just about every healthcare worker in the US at this point, I’ve been exposed to multiple positive patients, and without the recommended gold-standard N95 mask. Still, I can control the environment in the office and can wash my hands immediately after every single interaction, which is a lot better than what happens when you make a furtive trip to the grocery store. Plenty of people are still picking up items, looking at them, and putting them back, which is less than ideal during a pandemic. Our local grocer installed handwashing stations outside the front door, but I’d give myself even odds of being infected at work versus by the general public.

Our non-clinical staff members are having the hardest time with the situation. They are not trained for it and really didn’t know what they were getting into compared to the clinical workers. They’re constantly on edge, and one of them was crying in the break room during my last shift. Talking to physician colleagues across the country, they’re seeing the same thing.

We’re all supposed to act tough and not afraid, but as people, we want to validate our staff’s concerns and let them know that we share some of the same feelings. Unfortunately, some administrators across the country see such empathy as akin to “feeding into fear mongering.” I have two friends who received verbal counseling about the conversations they had with staff because they didn’t toe the corporate sunshine and lollipops line. When the CDC is telling healthcare workers to tie a bandana on their face if they don’t have appropriate personal protective equipment, we’re well past the sunshine zone.

Friday, March 20 was Match Day for fourth-year medical students across the country, many of whom have had their classes canceled and rotations ended for the rest of the year. Graduations have been canceled as well. Instead of learning their fate in an auditorium with friends, they learned it online. Good luck to each and every one of them. I remember what that day was like and can’t imagine how surreal it must feel to the class of 2020.

Speaking of surreal, I urge all organizations to go through any automated or pre-scheduled communications and make sure they make sense given the current situation. When the schools are closed and parents receive a notice about the 7 a.m. ACT prep session, that’s not a confidence builder.

Similarly, when vendors send out tone-deaf emails about patient loyalty or market share to health systems that have publicly announced that they will run out hospital beds within 10 days, that’s not a winning marketing strategy.

I’ve received several emails from HIMSS that are utterly devoid of acknowledgement of the present situation. Given that HIMSS might not survive after the loss of revenue from HIMSS20, I would urge them to not aggravate people. Their constant blasts about Virtual HIMSS are bordering on the absurd for people who are knee deep managing issues at their hospitals and health systems as the new normal.

On the flip side, I received a call from my bank, which is checking in with their small business banking customers to see if they can help with anything. The business they were calling about is my side hustle that I’m cultivating for retirement, so it’s not a major source of income. Still, it was a nice gesture.

Last week, on March 18, CMS announced that all elective surgeries and non-essential medical, surgical, and dental procedures should be delayed during the COVID outbreak. This is not only to preserve hospital capacity (some of those elective patients have poor outcomes and wind up in the ICU), but also to conserve personal protective equipment. Many outpatient offices have canceled well visits unless they include vaccinations.

My primary physician and ophthalmologist canceled all their annual visits and offered refills for the next six months, so thank you. Unfortunately, some major players in the healthcare industry are behaving badly and refusing to follow this directive. You know who you are, and shame on you. Please get with the program, I’m betting you’ll wish later you had all those masks and gowns back. If you’re organization is still doing elective procedures, this piece from a Seattle vascular surgeon is a great read.

I’m keeping this brief so I can go back to the telehealth front lines. I haven’t been able to exercise my newly granted ability to see patients in states where I don’t have a license since there are so many patients to be seen in my home state. To all of you on the in-person front lines, stay safe, stay sane, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 3/19/20

I was back in the clinical trenches today. At least in the urgent care world, it was eerily calm at times, although we did see some big rushes at the beginning of the day. People are getting the message to stay home, although some ventured out.

I want to offer some advice for those of you who need to seek medical care. First, this is not a time to take the family. If you need someone to drive you, great, but have them wait outside and not enter the facility. I saw two families today with multiple children in tow, but multiple parents. It would have been better if the second parent, who didn’t participate in the visit at all, remained in the car with the siblings.

Second, look out for your healthcare workers. If you see that something has gone wrong with their personal protective equipment, say something. Although I’m sure the worker in the picture above knows that their forearms are exposed, therefore defeating the point of a gown, maybe they would have done something different if a patient or co-worker had said something.

Third, please do not question why your provider is wearing a mask. We have our reasons, and some are personal health issues. We might also be protecting you from our cough or sneezing since it’s also allergy season. We are healthcare providers and you need to trust us to make decisions for our health and yours. I have had colleagues at other facilities that have been told they can’t wear masks because they’re “panic-inducing” for patients.

Many of your healthcare workers are terrified. If they wear the one crummy mask they have access to and have been wearing every day for a week, give them a break. Maybe they’re just scared because physicians in our area have already been infected.

Last, please think before you complain about wait times. You never know when the team is tied up transferring a critical patient to the hospital or doing another critical task, like starting the autoclave so we can get more instruments sterilized. For those patients who are coming in apologizing for being sick, it’s OK and you don’t need to apologize. That’s what we’re here for.

I was excited to hear announcements that licensure requirements for telehealth are going to be relaxed. The reality, though, is that it is on a state-by-state basis, and not all the states are playing along. I can see patients in Florida and North Carolina as well as the states where I have licenses, but we’re a long way from letting available physicians flex to cover the areas with the most need.

Most of the telehealth visits I’ve done in my off hours have been for routine things. Patients either don’t want to risk going to a physician’s office or the offices are overwhelmed and not keeping up with phone volumes. I handled some medication refills along with sinus infections, urinary tract infections, and pinkeye. These are routine things in primary care and I’m glad to be part of the solution as clinics struggle to cope with their new normal.

CMS has also relaxed telehealth rules for Medicare and Medicaid as far as which visits providers can bill. Medicaid is still subject to state regulation, so that might take time, just as with the state license issue. New federal policies also let clinicians use technology beyond established telehealth platforms, such as Apple’s FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Skype, and more .

Speaking of virtual care, I practiced some virtual self-care this week as my cello instructor moved my lessons online. I had to run a cable from my laptop to the router to make it work and we experienced some distortion of the sound when I was too close to the microphone, but it worked out well. I only started playing last summer, so I smiled when I saw this article about two young cellists who played a socially distant concert on the porch of their elderly neighbor. The article mentions that their repertoire included Suzuki Book 1 and Book 2. I’m just finishing the latter, so perhaps it’s time for a concert.

From Cultural Afficionado: “Re: Google Arts & Culture. I was led there by an article about virtual tours of museums around the world for folks who are self-quarantining (is that a proper verb?) While looking over the rest of the site, I found a ‘Spotlight on Shoes’ section that included this story, ‘Amazing Shoes of Turin.’ Enjoy, and thanks for your contributions to HIStalk!” I’ve been enjoying all kinds of virtual adventures as I force myself to take frequent breaks away from scientific articles and other reports about COVID-19. My favorite video is the one of the penguins at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, who were allowed to roam the building after it closed to visitors. We need a little levity in times like these, and penguins always get the job done.

From Homeward Bound: “Re: telecommuting. I work for a health plan with about 2,000 employees. The organization had very little telecommuting before this outbreak. This crisis has forced a huge amount of scrambling to get hardware to people who need it, and more importantly, get management to figure out how to manage people they don’t see on a daily basis. It will be very bumpy for the time that everyone is working remotely. Work will get done, but not as much as usual. It will be interesting to see whether the old-school leadership tries to put the genie back in the bottle once we don’t all have to be remote. The lack of telecommuting has been a real negative for recruiting for a long time.” I hope managers are keeping an eye on productivity because they might be surprised. Of course it varies from employee to employee, but some of us get much more done in a non face-to-face situation. I’m sure others have trouble focusing or maintaining the self-discipline needed to work remotely. Lack of childcare is another factor in this situation compared to other work from home efforts, so if productivity dips, I hope they don’t judge too harshly.

It’s time to announce the results of my virtual Shoe-A-Palooza and Sock-It-To-Me competitions. A single champion dominated in both categories — Dr. Nick van Terheyden. In his submission, he notes: “My Scottish Leather Ghillie Brogues. Not for the whole show, but for my now-cancelled Whisky Tasting at the NextGate booth on Tuesday.”

There’s a potential 18-month trajectory for the COVID-19 crisis, so let’s hope we get to see that ensemble at HIMSS21.

Email Dr. Jayne.