Clayton Christensen famously coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe “simple business applications that relentlessly move up market, eventually displacing established competitors.” Disruption is not just change; it is change that gores somebody’s ox. There has never been a year like 2013 for disruptive writing about health care. Here are five “oxen” gored by the best of that writing.
Gored Ox One: The Idea That Someone Else Pays The Bills
The first salvo of the year was David Goldhill’s highly controversial book, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father – and How We Can Fix It. Goldhill had the audacity to question an assumption accepted as a truism by both proponents and opponents of Obamacare: the notion that Americans can’t pay for their own health care without some kind of health coverage. Goldhill suggests that our nation’s reliance on third-party payors like health plans, Medicare and Medicaid has created – not alleviated – the burdensome problems of cost and bad quality that plague health care, and that we could run a better health care system without them. (Disclosure: Goldhill sits on the voluntary board of my nonprofit, The Leapfrog Group, though Leapfrog isn’t associated with his book).
Goldhill wasn’t the only one asking the impertinent question, “What if you paid your own medical bills directly?” Time published a powerful story by Steven Brill, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us, which points out the bizarre oddities of what goes on behind the scenes when the checks are written to pay for patient care. Bills for the same procedure vary tenfold, but few health plans actually pay the full bill. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s reporting in the New York Times pointed out the same bizarre pricing phenomena in her remarkable series on the varying charges hospitals record for their services.
The business community took note of these questions about who pays the bills, since they traditionally pay most of them. A study by S. Eappen and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that commercially insured patients were charged an extra $39,000 every time they suffered a surgical site infection at one hospital system. Employers wondered how they missed this enormous surcharge they paid for an undesired outcome.
Where were their health plans and consultants to alert them to this waste? They were AWOL, say Tom Emerick and Al Lewis in their brilliant book, Cracking Health Costs, which all employers seem to have on their desks these days.
The book is getting attention for its strategies on how to bypass health plans and consultants and disrupt health benefits purchasing.
Gored Ox Two: Keepers Of Secrets
The health care industry has long been shielded from the candor other industries live by. Writers this year went beyond complaining about the lack of transparency in health care — now, they are successfully calling out those who want to maintain it. Respected nurse-leader Kathleen Bartholomew writes in a piece in the Seattle Times that the lack of transparency in health care is simply unethical, and she points some fingers. In a blog for the influential policy journal Health Affairs, business leader Francois de Brantes argues that our nation’s remarkable lack of progress on quality and costs is a consequence of having no feedback loops — candid information on performance that provides continuous pressure for improvement. He calls for upending the incentives that keep health care opaque and dysfunctional. A breakthrough piece reported by Charles R. Babcock in Bloomberg News exposed the political underpinnings of why we still don’t have national data on many of the most common errors, accidents and injuries happening every day in hospitals — and he discusses the ongoing movement to preserve what little data we have. Author Rosemary Gibson, one of the decade’s most influential health care writers, writes in a memorable Huffington Post blog, “The military counts its dead and wounded even though politicians would prefer to hide the truth.” When we count the dead from medical errors, she says, we could fill Arlington National Cemetery in nine months.
One writer did try to quantify the problem – John T. James, a father and NASA toxicologist who tragically lost his son to medical errors. In a widely discussed piece published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Patient Safety, he used a scientific method developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to estimate how many people die each year from hospital errors. The dismaying answer: anywhere from 200,000 to 420,000 – in other words, as many people as the population of Miami.
Gored Ox Three: The Passive Patient
The Hollywood-inspired idea of the patient as quiet recipient of physician infallibility is officially over. Patients don’t just do what they are told; they expect to make choices. Beth Howard’s cover story in AARP The Magazine – the most widely read publication in the United States – launched a firestorm with its advice for patients on protecting yourself during a hospital stay, including which hospitals are safest and what to look for in a hospital room.
Crystallizing this era of the disruptive new patient is its leading sage, Dave deBronkart, coauthor of Let Patients Help! Survivor of Stage 4 kidney cancer, deBronkart has a popular TED talk and delivers speeches throughout the world arguing that patients should serve as active members of the team delivering care, a job that includes supplying the wisdom and knowledge physicians and nurses don’t have. The emergence of this new patient cannot come soon enough, as evidenced in a widely discussed report published by the nonprofit Childbirth Connection, Listening to Mothers III: Pregnancy and Birth. The report shows the results of a Gallup survey of women who had recently given birth and reveals a stunning number of maternity patients whose wishes were ignored or manipulated, to the detriment of the women and their babies.
Among the most disruptive writers of 2013 are physicians who found themselves – or their families – on the wrong side of the hospital bed. Dr. Bob Wachter told a fascinating story of his mother’s stay in his own hospital (The University of California San Francisco Medical Center), candidly weighing some of the positive aspects of the care she received with the negatives that caused his family distress. Dr. Ashish Jha talked movingly about his father’s hospital stay, recounting with alarm three errors averted only because Jha happened to be in the room.
Gored Oxen Four: Conventional Wisdom About Delivering Care
The role of the patient has changed and so has the practice of medicine and nursing. Hollywood took note of one passionate nurse writer, Sandy Summers, and her colleagues, whose blog on the fascinating website http://www.truthaboutnursing.org analyzes media portrayals of nursing practice. Summers points out how TV depicts physicians performing tasks nurses actually do in real practice and generally portrays nurses as incompetent, unprofessional and/or none-too-bright. This hurts patients, she says, since the vast majority of care patients receive comes from nurses, and we need the best people on the job. Her passion had a direct impact this year, influencing advertiser choices and prompting talks with producers of problematic programs.
Physicians, too, are raising eyebrows by asking impolite questions about their practice. Atul Gawande’s article in the New Yorker asked why providers don’t always do the right thing in their day-to-day practice. It’s not malice, he says; it’s human nature. The piece explores lessons from international public health on a specific peer-education strategy that works to change practice patterns.
Another piece of conventional wisdom stood on its head in 2013 came from the University of Michigan’s John Birkmeyer and his colleagues, concerning surgical skill and its implications for patients. The study in The New England Journal of Medicine prompted tumultuous debate in the surgical suite when it demonstrated widespread variation in the skill of surgeons performing the same surgery. The study also suggested that skill level correlated with complication rates, raising significant new questions about what surgeons and hospitals can do to improve outcomes in health care.
But it’s not enough to identify and test new innovations for delivering care better; if they work, they must be hard-wired into practice, says Paul Plsek in his book, Accelerating Health Care Transformation with Lean and Innovation: The Virginia Mason Experience. He describes how the Virginia Mason Medical Center applied principles of lean manufacturing to balance the seemingly contradictory objectives of expanding innovation and improving adherence to the routine.
Gored Ox Five: Sacred Cows Of Public Health
Almost everyone agrees that the best strategy for improving Americans’ health would be to prevent people from needing health care in the first place. But as these writers demonstrated in their powerful arguments, beware the easy answers.
Does more health coverage mean better health? Not necessarily. A study of the impact of Medicaid in Oregon found that coverage had no impact on emergency room visits or health status (though it did relieve financial stress, an important advantage).
Does employee wellness save money? Not really. That was the reluctant conclusion of Rand researchers in a shocking study: Employee wellness programs did not appear to save money nor measurably improve health status. For more thoughts on the topic, The Health Care Blog’s series by Al Lewis and Vik Khanna is also worth following. The blog posts have prompted employee backlash and even a call for revocation of the C. Everett Koop award for a wellness program with questionable outcomes.
Should we cut the fat to fight obesity? Maybe not. A summary in the British Medical Journal of the research on obesity is prodding the nutrition science community in new directions. The exhaustive research overview by science journalist Gary Taubes found that most of the assumptions and guidelines we rely on are not supported by research, and policymakers ought to rethink our approach to the problem from the bottom up. Among the surprising observations: There’s no evidence that saturated fat is the culprit, and attempts to eliminate it from the diet may have accelerated the obesity epidemic.
Optimism For The New Year
I am confident that health care is headed in the right direction as we welcome 2014, thanks in no small part to the courage and eloquence of these disruptive writers.
This post first appeared on Forbes.com.
