Emily Tuong-Vi Nguyen, a Stanford student studying human biology, writes about the Asia Health Policy Program’s international conference on diabetes

The Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center hosted the Net Value in Diabetes Management Workshop in March to discuss progress on an international research collaboration. Research teams from Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States convened at the Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU) in Beijing to work on research that compares utilization and spending patterns on diabetes across different countries and to develop a method for measuring the net value of diabetes internationally, based on previous methods discussed in a Eggleston and Newhouse et al. 2009 study with Mayo Clinic Data for Type 2 diabetes.

The research teams from various Asian countries are attempting to calculate the net value of diabetes in those countries by observing the changes in diabetes value and spending. These calculations include monetizing the value of health benefits of new treatments and improvements in health, as well as avoided spending on treatments when prevention was effective, and associated mortality and probability of survival. Previous models used to measure diabetic values and risks, such as the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS) risk engine that was created from U.K. data and populations, are not very relevant for Asian populations. The goal is to create separate risk models specifically suited for populations from Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Taiwan and South Korea.

During the workshop that spanned two days, the research teams had an opportunity to share updates on their individual projects and to discuss methods and ideas for future collaboration.

On the first day, each research team presented its work, describing data sets and explaining the risk models that were used or developed. Karen Eggleston, director of the Asia Health Policy Program, delivered introductory remarks and shared current progress by the Japan and Netherlands research teams on calculating value and risk for diabetes with data from the Netherlands and Japan. The data sets from those two countries were best estimated by the JJ Risk Engine for the Japan data and the UKPDS model for the Netherlands data.

Chao Quan of the University of Hong Kong presented the risk model used for Hong Kong populations. His work primarily looked at how the UKPDS risk engine predicted risk in Hong Kong populations as compared to a local Hong Kong risk engine and how to best calibrate the Hong Kong risk engine. His next step will be to monetize the value for improved survival in diabetes in Hong Kong. He offered to re-estimate the model using the risk factors available on others’ datasets so that the Hong Kong risk model could potentially be used by other teams as well.

Stefan Ma and Zheng Li Yau of the Ministry of Health of Singapore discussed the 5-year prediction model and statistical methods they used for all-cause mortality of Singaporean individuals with diabetes. Their work is based on Singapore’s extensive administrative and claims data as well as data provided by the national health surveys conducted every six years by the National Health Service of Singapore. The researchers plan to look into how their overall risk model compares with models for specific subpopulations, such as Chinese, Malay and Indian populations in Singapore.

Katherine Hastings from the Stanford University team, led by principal investigator Latha Palaniappan, presented preliminary ideas about measuring cardiovascular risk with the Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease Risk Score in analyses of Stanford health system diabetic patients. The researchers are collaborating with a clinical bioinformatics team at Stanford to use machine learning to expedite the analysis.

Min Yu and Haibin Wu of the Zhejiang Center for Disease Control and Prevention shared results from their analysis of health data collected from community health centers for diabetes management, diabetes surveillance data, cause of death data and insurance claims data that showed relationships between different patient characteristics and insurance types. The researchers then estimated the annual cost of Type 2 diabetes and its complications in Tongxiang province, China.

Hai Fang and Huyang Zhang of Peking University worked with claims data of diabetic patients insured by the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in Beijing, and at the workshop, shared regression analyses on the relationship between outpatient visits and inpatient admissions.

Jianqun Dong of the People’s Republic of China Center for Disease Control and Prevention presented ongoing research about diabetes management in China, including preliminary results of a randomized control trial of diabetes self-management strategies.

Wankyo Chung of Seoul National University shared preliminary estimates of a risk model for mortality among diabetic patients in South Korea and discussed next steps for estimating net value of diabetes management using the detailed clinical and claims data available in South Korea.

On the second day, the workshop concluded with a videoconference between workshop participants in Beijing and collaborators at Stanford Graduate Business School, including Stanford professor Latha Palaniappan and Harvard visiting professor Joseph P. Newhouse, using the Highly Immersive Classroom.

The workshop was a good opportunity for the research teams to discuss preliminary models, to offer each other suggestions regarding research methods, and to discuss the future direction of the international collaboration on the net value of diabetes. All research teams are preparing comparative research papers that will be included in the working paper series of the Asia Health Policy Program. A follow-up event will be held at Stanford in November 2017 in recognition of World Diabetes Day.

End-stage renal disease makes up 7.2 percent of Medicare spending, even though those patients represent less than 1 percent of the Medicare population, according to a database that tracks chronic kidney disease.

Despite the gnashing of teeth about the runaway costs of Medicare spending, the national health-care system for the elderly, younger people with certain disabilities and chronic kidney disease appears to have found one way to lower costs.

Congress established the end-stage renal disease (ESRD) Prospective Payment System in 2008, as part of the Medicare Improvement for Patients and Providers Act. It mandated that ESRD Medicare patients treat themselves at home if able.

The new payment system introduced two incentives to increase home dialysis use: bundling injectable medications into a single payment for treatment and paying for training for patients to give themselves injections and treatment at home.

A new study by Stanford researchers shows home dialysis treatment among Medicare patients increased by 5.8 percent from January 2006 through August 2013. The researchers also found that non-Medicare patients covered by other forms of health insurance also turned to home dialysis by a jump of 4.1 percent.

“These spillover effects suggest that major payment changes in Medicare can affect all patients with end-stage renal disease,” the authors wrote in the study published in the latest edition of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. “One of the stated goals of the PPS payment reform was to incentivize an increase in-home dialysis use, and it appears that it has succeeded in this stated goal.”

Eugene Lin, a postdoctoral fellow in nephrology at the Stanford School of Medicine and lead author of the study, told me that most nephrologists believe the trend toward home dialysis is good for the taxpayers and for the patients.

People going through this phase of chronic kidney disease — when dialysis or a kidney transplant are the only chance of survival  — cost less to take care of at home and have similar outcomes to in-center hemodialysis patients.

“It’s hard to say if one therapy is definitively better than the other,” Lin said, “though home dialysis generally offers patients more independence and potentially better quality of life.”

Lin explained the difference between in-center hemodialysis and home treatment: At a center, blood is filtered through a machine, whereas home dialysis entails either having a hemodialysis machine at home (and having a caregiver help with the treatments) or performing peritoneal dialysis.

The latter is the most commonly used at-home treatment and involves using the abdominal compartment as a filter. The toxins in the blood get filtered through the abdominal membranes into clean fluid, which is then removed and discarded.

Similar drugs are used both in centers and at home, but they’re easier to give in the hemodialysis setting, so had a higher likelihood of overuse prior to payment reform.

“Once they bundled the drug reimbursement with the treatment, we saw dramatic decreases in the use of these drugs and a concurrent increase in home dialysis use,” Lin said.

The researchers, including senior author Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford Health Policy, noted that home dialysis remained stagnant at around 11 percent from 1983 to 1992 and steadily declined until 2008.

“While the cause of this decline is unknown, several policies made home dialysis less favorable than in-center hemodialysis economically,” they wrote.

First, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 1991 revised its reimbursement policy for the erythropoietin-stimulating agent needed for functioning kidneys, making it the most profitable component of in-centers hemodialysis. Then, CMS introduced a tiered fee-for-service physician payment in 2004, providing the potential for enhanced revenues with in-center dialysis.

But the PPS bundling shifted erythropoietin from the profit side to the cost side, so it was no longer advantageous to use high doses common with in-center hemodialysis, Lin said. This paved the way for an increase in home dialysis use, which is less costly to administer.

The Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM) has appointed Stanford Health Policy’s Steve Asch as an editor-in-chief.

JGIM is the highest rated journal for primary care research in the world. It publishes research on health services, implementation science, medical education and the humanities in addition to primary care.

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“Steve is widely known as an outstanding writer and editor, and as having very broad methodological expertise,” said Douglas Owens, director of the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research. “He's a terrific choice to lead JGIM.”

Asch’s work focuses on quality improvement, and he has lead several national projects to develop tools that measure quality of care for veterans, Medicare users and the public. An avid mentor, Asch has trained dozens of physician fellows in health services research at Stanford and the VA system.

“We’re going to try to get research out there where it can make a difference in the world,” said Asch.

The editor team plans to focus more on best practices and implementation science. By combining the efforts of many researchers, they hope to ensure that doctors get the best answers to the big questions in health care.

“I think it’s going to be fun,” said Asch.

He looks forward to mentoring researchers to submit articles to journals like JGIM.

“Primary care is important,” said Asch. “As the health-care system transforms, it will play an increasingly important role, and the journal is very much in the lead in trying to publish new ways of organizing primary care.”

The GOP’s proposed American Health Care Act may have gone down in flames, but health policy experts say there are plenty of other health-care reforms the Trump administration may attempt.

Michelle Mello and David Studdert, both professors at Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford Law School and core faculty members at Stanford Health Policy, say medical malpractice reform, for one, is back on the federal policy agenda.

The two write in this New England Journal of Medicine commentary that Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon and Republican congressman from Georgia before he was appointed to the Trump administration, sponsored several bills aimed at limiting medical liability.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Price have both said medical malpractice is in crisis, with frivolous lawsuits driving up malpractice insurance premiums and forcing physicians out of business. Hospitals and doctors are so afraid of being sued they overprescribe costly tests and treatments, driving up the cost of health care.

But according to a study published last year, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. And those who follow medical malpractice insurance say the industry has stabilized in the last decade.

Mello and Studdert write that medical malpractice reform is worth pursuing. The liability system has a host of well-documented problems and its reform was omitted from the Affordable Care Act.  But, they argue, Republican proposals tilt too far towards protecting physicians, with harmful consequences for patients.

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“Two of the key reforms measures on the Republican agenda — ‘safe harbors’ for physicians who comply with clinical practice guidelines and the adjudication of medical injury disputes by expert panels — are promising ideas that have received a good deal of attention in the academic literature over the last 20 years,” Studdert said.

“However, design details matter,” he said. “The versions currently being considered in Congress are quite unconventional; they look more like physician-protection initiatives than reforms designed to improve safety or protect the interests of patients in other ways.” 

The “safe harbors” from liability for providers who adhere to clinical practice guidelines would involve the establishment of tribunals of medical experts who would decide malpractice claims. Price has also proposed “administrative health-care tribunals” that would be presided over by special judges with health care expertise and would issue binding rulings aided by testimony from independent experts.

One worrisome aspect of the Republican proposals is that they would replace ordinary standards of evidence with a requirement that patients prove “gross negligence.” 

“That means that if your physician was merely careless or unskilled, you’re out of luck as a plaintiff,” Mello explained. “You have to show something akin to willful and wanton misconduct — like the case in Boston where the surgeon left in the middle of an operation to deposit money in his bank.”

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Price has claimed that defensive medicine is responsible for a quarter of U.S. health-care spending, about $650 billion, but the authors’ best estimates are closer to $50 billion.

Yet, in their commentary, the authors say this could be an ideal time to pursue reform, which ordinarily rises on the policy agenda only when a “malpractice crisis” occurs and liability insurance costs spike.  “When acutely stressed providers are clamoring for 
immediate relief, cool-headed policy deliberation rarely ensues,” they wrote. 


But, they add, reforms must be fair to patients as well as providers. They note that Price articulated a vision of health system reform that puts patients’ needs front and center.

“Medical liability reform needs the same vision,” they said.

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Like any energetic 7-year-old, your daughter loves running around outside, playing with her friends and kicking around a soccer ball. So you’re concerned when she starts losing energy. She looks pale and refuses to eat. You take her to the pediatrician, and her test results show the worst: she has leukemia. Once you work through the shock, you do you what any parent would do: find the best possible care to get her through it. But where do you go?

Health care for children is different from care for adults. Treating kids requires doctors who are experienced with their unique needs, and according to Stanford pediatricians Paul Wise and Lisa Chamberlain, this experience is developed and lives in children’s hospitals.

And these facilities are highly dependent on Medicaid.

“Children are the poorest segment of the United States population,” said Wise, a Stanford Health Policy core faculty member.

Nearly one out of every five children lives below the poverty line, according to the United States Census Bureau. Very few children need extensive health care, but of those that do, about 44 percent rely on Medicaid or other public insurance programs.

Because so many of their patients use Medicaid, these children’s hospitals need reimbursements from the program to support their services. Without this income, some might have to downsize or even shut down, and if they do, services would suffer for all children.

“If you want to kill rich kids, cut Medicaid,” said Wise. “If you’re a rich kid with a serious chronic problem, you’re going to want facilities that provide high-quality care. Those facilities are intensely dependent on Medicaid.”

If the American Health Care Act (the Republican replacement for Obamacare) passes Congress, Medicaid will convert to a per capita cap system. Instead of providing coverage to all who meet its criteria — which is primarily based on income and need — the federal government would cap how much money the federal government could provide each person.

Wise and Chamberlain worry that a set amount allocated for states or individuals would not be able to keep up with health industry inflation, causing payments to effectively decrease over time. They are also concerned that children would be particularly affected by these changes because their medical needs are so different from adults’.

“Caring for seriously ill children requires a wide range of services and specialists, from pediatric surgeons to speech therapists to hospital teachers who make sure kids don’t fall behind,” said Chamberlain. “In pediatrics we work as a team — and cutting Medicaid will reduce our ability to do that.”

Not only would the funds available for child health coverage erode, but according to Wise, the focus on adult health concerns in the emerging Medicaid changes could, without immediate attention, undermine 40 years of progress in developing strong, regionalized child health systems.

Providing for children’s needs should be simple because their expenditures are relatively low. Child health care makes up less than nine percent of all federal health expenditures in the United States.

But because the health policy debate in the United States focuses on older populations, children are often left out.

“I think it’s really important that we have these conversations about the unique needs of children,” said Chamberlain.

Wise and Chamberlain hope to alert policy-makers to the fiscal needs of children and how they affect care for all kids.

“Our elected officials have to cope with a wide range of issues, and they welcome engaged professionals exchanging ideas about active legislation,” said Chamberlain. “Those conversations really matter – now is the time to let them hear what we think.”

To hear more from Wise and Chamberlain about child health and Medicaid, listen to their podcast on World Class:

About two-thirds of American patients see doctors who receive payments from drug companies, but almost none of them know it.

In a collaborative study between Drexel, Stanford and Harvard, researchers found that 65 percent of participants had visited a doctor within the last year who had received payments or gifts from pharmaceutical or medical device firms.

Payments to physicians can take the form of meals, travel, gifts, speaking fees and research.

Only 5 percent of participants knew that their doctor had received these payments.

“The concern is that physicians with financial ties to drug and device companies may be more likely to recommend those companies' products to their patients, even when other choices would be better for the patient, or just as good but less costly,” said Michelle Mello, the Stanford author and a professor of law and of health research and policy.

Open Payments, which reports pharmaceutical and device industry payments to physicians, was set up as part of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The website exists to make industry payment information available to the public.

But the study found that only 12 percent of patients knew this information was accessible. The authors stated that the act’s impact is highly dependent on whether patients know about it.

“Transparency can act as a deterrent for doctors to refrain from behaviors that reflect badly on them and are also not good for their patients,” said Genevieve Pham-Kanter, the lead author and an assistant professor at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health.

Drug and device companies tend to target “key opinion leaders” who are likely to influence the choices of other physicians. During the year studied, the average American physician received $193 in payments. However, the median payment for doctors visited by patients in the study was much higher, $510 for the year.

“We may be lulled into thinking this isn’t a big deal because the average payment amount across all doctors is low,” said Pham-Kanter. “But that obscures the fact that most people are seeing doctors who receive the largest payments.”

Payments vary widely across specialties. Among patients surveyed, 85 percent of those who saw an orthopedic surgeon saw a doctor who had received payments. The next highest was obstetrics and gynecology physicians at 77 percent.

“Drug companies have long known that even small gifts to physicians can be influential, and research validates the notion that they tend to induce feelings of reciprocity,” said Mello.

Despite potential changes to the ACA, Mello believes the Sunshine Act is here to stay. The current version of the American Health Care bill, which would repeal and replace the ACA, does not dismantle it.

This leaves the question of how policymakers can make information about payments to physicians more visible to patients. The authors suggested that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) could provide a one-stop shop for patients to view industry payments and other information about their providers online. Mello added that private insurers could make this information available on their “Find a Physician” websites.

“Finding the physician who is right for you depends on a lot of factors,” said Mello. “Whether a physician accepts money from industry may or may not be important to you, but my general view is that the more informed these choices are, the better they will be for patients.”