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It is Harder to Run a Small Public Hospital System than California? - Deep Seated Myths and Logical Fallacies Underpinning Health Care Executive Compensation

Hospital executive compensation, the gift that keeps on giving...  A Public Hospital CEO's Current Compensation A recent, somewhat obscure news article shows how deeply rooted is the current practice of paying top hired managers of health care organizations amounts that seem outlandish given the context. The <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22593751/fremont-hospital-ceo-gets-six-figure-bonus-after">article</a>, in the Argus - San Jose (CA) Mercury News, discussed the compensation given the CEO of a small public hospital district.  It opened with, <blockquote class="tr_bq"> Amid a budget crunch that has forced sweeping cutbacks at its medical facilities, the Washington Township Health Care District board of directors on Wednesday awarded its CEO $162,783 in incentive pay that raises her total annual compensation and contract perks this year to more than $800,000. The bonus pushes Farber's total 2012-13 compensation past $813,915, less than the $936,349 she made in 2011 or her $912,519 pay in 2010, when she was among the top five paid government employees statewide in a survey by the state controller's office. </blockquote> Note first that Washington Township Health Care District is a public health district.  As an <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22451747/nurses-medical-director-among-jobs-cut-at-washington">article</a> from January, 2013 in The Argus - San Jose Mercury News explained, <blockquote class="tr_bq">The Washington Township Health Care District is a public agency in southern Alameda County and receives tax money from 320,000 district residents under voter-approved bond measures. </blockquote> The District is also under financial stress.  As the earlier Argus - Mercury News article stated, <blockquote class="tr_bq"> <div class="bodytext">Physician assistants, nurses and medical directors were among the 200 jobs recently eliminated by the Washington Township Health Care District to cut costs, according to new information released by the district.</div><div class="bodytext"> </div>In response to a request under the California Public Records Act, the district provided a list this week of the 75 job titles included in the approximately 132 vacant and 68 filled positions eliminated in recent months as part of a 13 percent workforce reduction. </blockquote> Furthermore, as the newer Argus - Mercury News article noted, <blockquote class="tr_bq"> Farber was overseeing a 13 percent workforce reduction that eliminated 200 mostly vacant jobs. The district had seen operating profits plummet tens of millions of dollars last year from recent years.</blockquote> So Ms Farber got a large salary plus bonus at a time when hospital "profits" were declining and many employees, including health care professionals with direct patient care responsibilities were being laid off.  A Long History of Outsize Compensation Note that this small public hospital system actually has a long history of paying its CEO a lot. In 2003, the (Fremont-Newark, CA) Argus <a href="http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=CFAB&p_theme=cfab&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0FC40B8E714414E9&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM">editorialized</a> (the full article requires payment), <blockquote class="tr_bq"> HOW MUCH is too much? We don't know the answer to that, but we're pretty sure $479,600 a year qualifies. That's how much Washington Hospital is paying CEO Nancy Farber. Farber will make a base salary of $406,000 during the 2003-04 fiscal year, a 10 percent raise from her 2002-03 salary of $368,000, plus she is getting a $73,000 bonus.</blockquote> That editorial did not seem to prevent Farber from getting raise after raise in the subsequent years. In 2011, the Los Angeles Times published an <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/29/local/la-me-0329-top-compensation-20110329">article</a> with the headline, "Hospital executives occupy top tier of California's public workers."  It said this about the pay given Nancy Farber, still the CEO of Washington Township Health Care District, <blockquote class="tr_bq">The hospital's chief executive, Nancy Farber, is the second-highest-paid official covered in Chiang's database [of pay to public officials] so far. She was paid about $874,000 in 2009.</blockquote> So Ms Farber's compensation has about doubled in the last 10 years, during which US cost of living has increased about 24% (look <a href="http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Consumer_Price_Index/HistoricalCPI.aspx?reloaded=true">here)</a>.  And at least one local editorialist thought she was paid too much in 2003. Justifying Large Payments with the Usual Talking Points So why should the pay of the CEO of a relatively small public hospital system keep rising so fast, despite criticism.  To some extent in 2011, and quite clearly in 2013, her supporters trotted out the usual suspect arguments. We previously have described (most recently <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/02/carolinas-healthcare-system-pays.html">here</a>) how whenever anyone bothers to try to justify extravagant executive compensation at hospitals, and for that matter, most other health care organizations throughout the US, they seem to repeat the same set of talking points.    We first listed the talking points <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/09/talking-points-sans-original-thought-to.html">here</a>, and then provided additional examples of their use <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/09/more-repeats-of-talking-points.html">here</a>, <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/03/example-of-how-complex-takes-control.html">here</a> and <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/12/health-care-hired-managers-not-playing.html">here</a>.   The talking points are: -  we pay what everyone else pays -  CEOs work hard and are brilliant, and so deserve high pay -  high pay is needed to attract and retain competent, if not brilliant people. In 2011, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/29/local/la-me-0329-top-compensation-20110329">per the Los Angeles Times</a>, "officials" of the health district combined all three in a single sentence, : <blockquote class="tr_bq">Officials at the Washington Township Health Care District in Fremont, Calif., also argued that they needed to pay 'market rate' to obtain top-quality staff.</blockquote> In 2013,  the Argus - Mercury News <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22593751/fremont-hospital-ceo-gets-six-figure-bonus-after">described</a> how Ms Farber's defenders used them all at length.  CEOs Work Hard and are Brilliant <blockquote class="tr_bq">Board member Bernard Stewart, a local dentist who has served for more than a decade on Washington's board, said the salary comparison with other public employees was unfair. 'It's a temptation for all of us to compare the CEOs salary with other elected officials or other public officials, but I can't stress in the strongest means possible, that is an absolute error,' Stewart said. 'We in this hospital are a public hospital. We are a publicly elected board, but we are engaged in an incredibly competitive and difficult business and we are different from any other public organization in that regard.'</blockquote> So one board member explicitly argued that being the CEO of a small public hospital system is much harder than any other kind of state government leadership position. Since the article also included a comparison of Ms Farber's pay with that of the Governor of California, <blockquote class="tr_bq">By comparison, Gov. Jerry Brown will make just over $165,000 this year.</blockquote> the board member implied that it is much harder to run a small public hospital district than the whole state.  That is breathtaking. The board also more generally praised the CEO,  <blockquote class="tr_bq"> Ahead of the vote for the bonus Wednesday, all five board members praised Farber's leadership and said that, because of the difficulties facing the hospital, experienced leadership was needed.</blockquote> In addition, note that hospital district board members suggested specific aspects of Ms Farber's performance worthy of high remuneration. <blockquote class="tr_bq">Board members credited Farber with implementing a new electronic records system, the construction of the district's new center for joint replacement on time and on budget, and for various accolades the district received last year. Among them, the district was ranked the fourth best hospital in the Bay Area by U.S. News & World Report and among the top 10 in the state for joint replacements by HealthGrades, a designation received for the last seven years. Board members said Farber's decision to reduce the workforce was evidence of her exemplary leadership. 'Making the decision to downsize, or right-size, when necessary, is as much a part of being a responsible administrator as is building, growing and improving the health care system,' Nicholson said. Board member Michael Wallace said Farber, 'has made tough and unpopular choices. The easy thing would have been to kick the can down the road, which is what we see happening all the time in Washington, but she didn't do that,'....</blockquote> So we see here that the CEO is given personal credit for all good things, even good things that obviously required considerable work by other people.  I am certain that the CEO did not personally implement the EHR, did not construct the joint replacement center, and did not directly care for patients.   All the other employees who contributed to these apparent successes implicitly got no credit, and it is likely that some employees who actually contributed were laid off. Furthermore, note that the board somehow believed that laying off employees in a time of financial stress, a hardly original business strategy in this day and age, and one presumably only undertaken due to a crisis, was somehow a sign of brilliant leadership.  Again, this is breathtaking.   I would argue that asserting the CEO has a harder job than the state governor, giving the CEO credit for numerous activities that obviously required the work of many others, while denying her responsibility for financial distress amount to a prolonged logical fallacy, a prolonged <a href="http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html">appeal to authority</a>.  The argument that whatever the CEO does MUST be brilliant, and its assessment should not be the subject of critical thought. We Pay What Everyone Else Pays High Pay is Needed for Recruitment and Retention Admittedly, Ms Farber's defenders did not belabor these points as much, but, board member Michael Wallace said <blockquote class="tr_bq">'I don't want our leadership and management team wooed away by those monolithic systems willing to pay market compensation, which is a risk if we are not willing to do so.'</blockquote>  He provided no evidence that this supposedly brilliant group of hired managers was in any danger of being recruited elsewhere.  As we have <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/02/non-profit-hospital-executive-salaries.html">noted before,</a> the evidence suggests that most top executives are recruited from within the organization, and hence this assertion is at best another kind of logical fallacy, an appeal to common practice.   The Myth of the Divine Right of CEOs We have seen again and again how top executives of health care organization, particularly CEOs, are given credit for everything good that happens, while avoiding responsibility for everything bad, and have the ability to continually enrich themselves regardless of the evidence about their personal performance, or about the context in which they work.   Thus they are treated by those around them as some sort of aristocracy,  just short of omnipotent, minor deities.  In fact, as we wrote <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/03/golden-calf-explains-how-economism-lead.html">here</a>, there is reason to think that some trends in economic thinking, combined, as we wrote <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-health-care-leaders-remain.html">here</a>, with some trends in religious, or pseudo-religious thinking, have combined to promote something akin to the "divine right" of CEOs. Yet CEOs and other health care executives are demonstrably human, and hence flawed.  Furthermore, shielding them from all accountability is a tremendous perverse incentive that is likely to lead to ever more incompetent, self-interested, mission-hostile, and even corrupt leadership.   Somehow we need to start combating the talking points used to justify the lack of accountability and self-interest of top health care organizational leadership, and ultimately the whole notion of hired managers and executives as super human.  As a society we need to wake up from our dazed acquiescence to ideas that border on crazy.  We need to challenge rote justifications and talking points for that which makes no sense, but serve to make the powerful more powerful.

It is Harder to Run a Small Public Hospital System than California? - Deep Seated Myths and Logical Fallacies Underpinning Health Care Executive Compensation

Hospital executive compensation, the gift that keeps on giving... A Public Hospital CEO's Current Compensation A recent, somewhat obscu...

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New York Times: "A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry"

The New York Times has published an article today by Julie Creswell entitled "A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry."  It is available <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/a-digital-shift-on-health-data-swells-profits.html" target="_blank">at this link</a>. <blockquote class="tr_bq"><div itemprop="articleBody">... While proponents say new record-keeping technologies will one day reduce costs and improve care [only when today's bad health IT is abolished - see <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/" target="_blank">here</a> - ed.], profits and sales are soaring now across the records industry. At Allscripts, annual sales have more than doubled from $548 million in 2009 to an estimated $1.44 billion last year, partly reflecting daring acquisitions made on the bet that the legislation would be a boon for the industry. At the <a class="meta-org" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/cerner-corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More information about Cerner Corporation">Cerner Corporation</a> of Kansas City, Mo., sales rose 60 percent during that period. With money pouring in, top executives are enjoying Wall Street-style paydays. </div><div itemprop="articleBody"> </div><div itemprop="articleBody">None of that would have happened without the health records legislation that was included in the 2009 economic stimulus bill — and the lobbying that helped produce it. Along the way, the records industry made hundreds of thousands of dollars of political contributions to both Democrats and Republicans. In some cases, the ties went deeper. Glen E. Tullman, until recently the chief executive of Allscripts, was health technology adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. As C.E.O. of Allscripts, he visited the White House no fewer than seven times after President Obama took office in 2009, according to White House records. </div></blockquote> The article does not reveal anything that readers of this blog did not know already. The push for the financial incentives and profits were also written about at the The Huffington Post Investigative Fund by investigative reporter Fred Schulte, now at the Center for Public Integrity ("<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/stimulus-fuels-gold-rush_n_347311.html" target="_blank">Stimulus Fuels Gold Rush For Electronic Health Systems</a>"), and in the Washington Post by Robert O'Harrow Jr. (which I wrote about at this post:  <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/05/machinery-behind-healthcare-reform-how.html" target="_blank">The Machinery Behind Healthcare Reform: How the HIT Lobby is Pushing Experimental and Unsafe Technology on Unconsented Patients and Clinicians</a>). Rather than re-hash the issues, I wanted to focus on some of the current NYT reader comments: <blockquote class="tr_bq">... After a visit to a Florida hospital for suspicion of heart attack, I asked for a copy of my records to give my home (IL) physician. I was shocked to read that I had had "anal surgery." When I reviewed these records with my doctor, she told me that I had probably told the admitting ER nurse I had recently had a colonoscopy, so the closest coding information their electronic system allowed was anal surgery. So, how can these inaccuracies which will live on forever electronically be helpful toward patient care? The old acronym GIGO certainly applies here--garbage in; garbage out. ... This article highlights only one aspect of the "Failed Promise of Electronic Health Records". Through lobbying but also supported by a study from the RAND organization, the three final 2008 presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama outbid each other with promises to spend billions to entice doctors to use electronic record systems. Unfortunately, because of unsolved documentation problems, such systems are often disliked and slow the process. Instead of creating interoperability, electronic medical record systems (EMRs) with limited functionality and benefits were created. In particular, true interoperability has been neglected and attempts to create it through networks in the form of CHINs, RHIOs, and HIEs have failed. ... Mr. Tullman's comment is priceless. “I think it’s very common with every administration that when they want to talk about the automotive industry, they convene automotive executives, and when they want to talk about the Internet, they convene Internet executives." Of course, when "they" want to radically alter the way doctors do their jobs, "they" talk to academics, lawyers, publicly traded insurance CEOs and internet executives. Today's diatribe about quality care being more important than quantity care is laugh out loud funny. Unless you're a physician. Only in America does getting paid less and less, with more clerical data entry record-keeping at every step just to get paid and protect against lawsuit, translate into an incentive to provide quality care. Somebody prescribe a dose of common sense. Oops. Too late. ... Every person needs a national health ID with up to date health information. To say that the current EMR systems are problematic would be an understatement. They take away face time with patients, the M.D.'s talents and time are wasted doing data entry and worst of all ,they are potentially dangerously flawed. An example is a recent patient I saw who was treated by a number of physicians. His medications had required significant changes which were done by 2 different M.D.'s from his main doctor. Both gave him computer generated lists from the same system. Both had a mixture of unmatching generic and proprietary names, the patient's actual medicines from the pharmacy had a mixture and different doses from the Dr.'s orders. He was trying to set up his week's supply. But didn't know which proprietary name went with which medicine. These systems should have been tried out on a small scale and approved by M.D.'s before this became law. The VA system which is time tested, physician friendly and free only the VA is using. These other systems are set up to maximize profits for the IT companies, cost the physicians huge amounts to install, cost the hospitals huge amounts esp when they are changing from one system to another due to problems when they were advertised to maximize hospital billing. This another example of our distorted legislative process where profits and politics take precedence over people. ... I am a dermatologist in private practice who teaches at a local medical school part time. Electronic records are problematic. Every doctor I know feels they take time away from being a doctor. I literally don't know a single colleague who feels their benefits are worth the extra time involved. In medical school, we learned how to record notes in medical records so that patient care is improved from visit to visit. In short, we use notes from the previous visits to assist in our decisions in subsequent examinations. In today's digital world, most doctors I know are forced to change their notation style to justify payments from insurance companies. The more detailed the note in the medical record, the lower the chance that an insurance company downgrades the fee charged to the patient. Thus, notes are now longer and more detailed than they were ten years ago. The problem with such notes is that they are filled with detritus geared to prevent payment reduction rather than aimed at improving continuity of patient care from visit to visit. The impact of this adoption of electronic medical records is that insurance company computer systems can easily sift through notes to reduce compensation to doctors who spend more time with patients and who write cleaner, more efficient notes. ... I still use pen and paper.  One requirement would fix this mess: interoperability No, NOT the "industry supported" standard. Thats a joke. Industry wants NO inter-operability because they want to lock us in to a an individual product, The government has a great EMR (the VA system). All commercial ones should be forced to be able to export data in a way that is 100% compatible with that. As such, they would then be 100% compatible with each other. Some of my colleagues are now on their third EMR product in 7 years. Why? Big company buys company B and then stops supporting it. The doctor is forced to switch to Big Company's new product. Of course the data does not transfer over so the doctor has to go through the crude data-entry mess all over. ... The folly of relying only on digital records. Without constant and costly software and hardware upgrades, your digital medical records will be rendered obsolete. Could be a matter of years or decades, but it will happen. Not only that, digital proprietary systems are at huge risk if the private for-profit company goes bankrupt. Paper records can last 1000 years. ... Another scam. Very expensive and involved for end user:ie doctor. Have had to hire an IT company to assist, have to pay annually for service contract, upgrades and what the article didn't mention was the "meaningful use" criteria that all doctors have to comply with in order to pass government inspection for a rebate. The software vendors, labs, and others are charging doctors extra for software upgrades and abilities to comply with each "meaningful use" component . This is already costing more money and aggravation than the worth of the government rebate. Who will subsidize this? Doctors are starting to lose interest. We know this is another corrupt government sponsored ploy and only the tip of the iceberg. If the government were to have spent the 19 billion with a consortium of vendors such as google apple and microsoft, the goal of free software provision capable of interexchangeable data would likely have been completed with all providers on board. ... Common sense can tell you that the real value of these systems is marginal. Much of medical treatment is "incident specific" where history is not necessary. Most PCP's already have a system that works. In larger systems and for complex diseases, perhaps EMR are beneficial but not for routine care. As has been noted, all sorts of problems arise with EMR's: destruction of MD-pt relationship, incorrect data being entered and never removed, cumbersome and expensive requirements of instituting and maintaining the system, etc. It is awful that physicians and patients are "used" in the service of politicians and EMR execs. ... As a practicing physician I have to struggle everyday with the Citrix and Quickbase electronic records. The Electronics Medical Records industry has been getting the gold promised by the government in exchange of a very poor and deficient product. The EMR industry has been selling to the healthcare providers, in need of electronic records, the equivalent of the Formaldehyde-contaminated trailer homes sold to FEMA for the Katrina homeless.</blockquote> These are just from the first page of comments.  Read the article and the comments at the link above. My observation is that it seems that as transparency increases, the public "gets it" that these systems are not the panacea the industry wants us to believe, and may impede the clinicians trying to treat them. Now, when will the government "get it" that they've been had? -- SS Addendum:  another "anecdote" just caught my eye because it sings an unfortunate familiar tune to me: <blockquote class="tr_bq">So much data, so little knowledge. My best friend's father just died because none of his who-knows-how-many physicians took the time to actually read and anaylze the reams of info they were dutifully inputting. They killed him with an overdose of one drug and not enough of another.  Useful data collection and analysis is one thing, but what we seem to have now is just institutionalized hoarding. More data doesn't make anyone safer (except the data companies), just like stacks of old magazines or cans of beans makes one safer. More is NOT better; it is just more. More time and more expense wasted on stuff and less spent on actual health care. You've got to USE anything or it is just more useless and potentially dangerous stuff. </blockquote> -- SS

New York Times: "A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry"

The New York Times has published an article today by Julie Creswell entitled " A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Indu...

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Are the health IT hyper-enthusiasts inept, or merely insane?

From a psychiatrist, partially in response to the <a href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/February/18/Scot-Silverstein-health-information-technology.aspx" target="_blank">article about me in Kaiser Health News</a>, on the travails of health IT. They write: <blockquote class="tr_bq">... In psychiatry we screen for certain medication side effects using a tool called "DISCUS."  [Dyskinesia Identification System Condensed User Scale - ed.] In a paper and pen world, we (1) reviewed a single page; (2) circled a score; (3) signed and (4) dated. In [redacted] EHR, we need to do the following to complete one DISCUS…      DISCUS Completion in [redacted] EHR: <ul><li>1.  Log in;</li><li>2.  Acknowledge to do items by choosing “ok”;</li><li>3.  Go to “my to do list.”</li></ul>Then: <ul><li>4.  Double click specific date of to do items to complete (this reveals the specific to do items)</li><li>5.  Right click specific patient’s name</li><li>6.  Choose “enter option”</li><li>7.  Review all 3 pages under “assessment” tab (click through each page)</li><li>8.  Then choose “evaluation” tab</li><li>9.  Review “evaluation” (keeping in mind the total score from last page of “assessment”)</li><li>10.  Choose your “conclusion” in item 5</li><li>11.  Add “comments” as indicated (item 6)</li><li>12.  Under “name/ID number” type in the first characters of your last name (or your ID number)</li><li>13.  Select your name</li><li>14.  Go to the bottom under “select physician to notify” and UNcheck your name</li><li>15.  Click “yes” under “is evaluation section complete and ready to be locked?”</li><li>16.  Confirm above choice by choosing “ok”</li><li>17.  Press “submit” button across the top</li><li>18.  Now go back to “my to do list” and you’ll see that the item you just processed above is still there -- double click the same to do item that you just finalized (and processed in item 5 above)</li><li>19.  Then check “reviewed”</li><li>20.  Then press “submit”</li><li>21.  Then press “refresh” and the item will be completed (refresh does not need to be done after each DISCUS)</li></ul>Finally: <ul><li>22.  For processing of additional DISCUS for a given “sign on," go back to step 3, 4 or 5 (as needed), and repeat. </li></ul></blockquote> And this is just the easy stuff. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I can opine with confidence that anyone who expects human-computer interaction such as this to "revolutionize medicine" is insane. Perhaps this helps explain city-wide debacles such as <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/11/avatar-fails-no-not-cameron-movie-but.html" target="_blank">this</a> in San Francisco. -- SS

Are the health IT hyper-enthusiasts inept, or merely insane?

From a psychiatrist, partially in response to the article about me in Kaiser Health News , on the travails of health IT. They write: ... In ...

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Another Revolving Door Variant: From Academia with Millions in Medtronic Royalties, to the White House, to the Health Care Service Corp

The revolving door spins, and where it will stop, nobody knows... In October, 2010, we noted questions about how Dr Stephen Ondra got to be a <a href="https://www.va.gov/opa/bios/docs/ondra.pdf">Senior Policy Adviser for the US Department of Veterans Affairs</a>. A veteran who was a neurosurgery professor at Northwestern University, Dr Ondra had received millions of dollars in royalties from device manufacturer Medtronic, whose CEO supported his appointment to the government position  (see this <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/10/toxic-and-dangerous-watchdog-vs.html">post</a>).  As soon as he was appointed, he publicly opposed a nominee for US Surgeon General who had been critical of the medical device industry, and its financial ties to doctors. After going to Washington, Dr Ondra apparently also served in the Executive Office of the President, in the White House, but <a href="http://triblocal.com/lake-forest/community/stories/2012/04/northwestern-memorial-hospital-names-stephen-l-ondra-chief-medical-officer/">returned</a> to Northwestern University in 2012.  However, he did not stay there for long. This month, a <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2013/02/07/obama-advisor-ondra-hired-as-top-doc-at-blue-cross-plan/">post</a> on Forbes indicated he is moving on again, and back to the corporate side of health care. <blockquote class="tr_bq">the nation’s fourth-largest health insurance company is naming a key former health advisor to President Obama as its top doctor. Dr. Stephen Ondra, will become senior vice president and chief medical officer at Health Care Service Corp., the Chicago-based parent company of Blue Cross plans in Illinois, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The plan has more than 13 million health plan members and is looking to grow even more, announcing last year a proposed partnership with the Blue Cross plan in Montana.</blockquote> Health Care Service Corp is a mutual insurance company, that is, a company owned by its policy-holders rather than stock holders.  However, that does apparently not make it any more ascetic than a typical for-profit insurance company, at least in terms of generosity towards its top hired executives.  As Crain's Chicago Business <a href="http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120515/NEWS03/120519922/blue-cross-parents-ceo-pay-climbs-to-12-9-million">reported</a> in 2012, <blockquote class="tr_bq">New federal regulations intended to force health insurers to spend less on administration didn't keep the parent of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois from paying CEO Patricia Hemingway Hall more than $12.9 million in 2011, a 61 percent raise. The Health Care Service Corp. chief executive's total compensation last year dwarfed the $8 million she received in 2010, according to a filing with the Illinois Department of Insurance. The 2011 increase was fueled by an $11.8 million bonus, which was 69 percent above her 2010 bonus of $7 million. Ms. Hall wasn't alone in getting a big raise at Health Care Service, whose insurance business booked net income of more than $1 billion in 2011, for the second straight year. The 10 highest-paid executives at the Chicago-based mutual company — which operates Blue Cross plans in Illinois and three other states — earned a collective $41.7 million, 65 percent more than the $25.3 million they were paid in 2010.</blockquote>  If Dr Ondra's new position puts him among the latter group of executives, he too stands to make millions a year.  So to recap Dr Ondra's career so far, in 2010 he was a medical school professor who had earned millions in royalties from Medtronic.  He then went to top leadership positions in the US Veterans Department and Executive Office of the President.  He returned briefly to Northwestern University, only to leave again for a top executive position in for-profit insurance company Health Care Service Corp, where he is likely to make millions more. Thus Dr Ondra is our latest interesting example of the "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/revolving%20doors">revolving door</a>" phenomenon in health care.  He started as an erstwhile academic physician but with a very major financial relationship with a medical device company.  He then went through the door the first time into the US government, and then a second time from the government to a for-profit insurance company, with just a brief stop-over in academia. By the way, it appears that all of this is quite legal.  It does again raise questions about whether health care leaders in government with previous relationships with industry might still feel undue sympathy to the interests of industry, as might government leaders who can expect future jobs in industry. Moreover, this case, like previous cases we have discussed,  indicates how leadership in academic health care, corporate health care, and the government tend to blend together.  Leaders of one type of organization have more and more in common with leaders of the other types of organizations than they do with their lesser ranked colleagues, and certainly than with other health care constituencies.  So the more the revolving door revolves, the more we wonder about the <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/corporatism">corporatism</a> of health care, about how health care seems to be increasingly run by an amorphous group of academic/ corporate/ government leaders whose loyalties may be more to each other than to academic and professional values, patients' and the public's health, and government of, by and for the people.

Another Revolving Door Variant: From Academia with Millions in Medtronic Royalties, to the White House, to the Health Care Service Corp

The revolving door spins, and where it will stop, nobody knows... In October, 2010, we noted questions about how Dr Stephen Ondra got to be ...

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Kaiser Health News/Philadelphia Inquirer on InformaticsMD: "The flaws of electronic records"

At my Dec. 2012 post "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/12/upcoming-profile-of-informaticsmd-in.html" target="_blank">How an interview for Kaiser Health News rekindled memories of health IT dysfunction in the 90's that persist in the 10's</a>" I mentioned an interview by a reporter from the Kaiser Health Foundation regarding health IT flaws. His article appeared in both the <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20130218_The_flaws_of_electronic_records.html" target="_blank">Philadelphia Inquirer</a> and <a href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/February/18/Scot-Silverstein-health-information-technology.aspx" target="_blank">Kaiser Health News</a> today under the title "The flaws of electronic records": <blockquote class="tr_bq">Philadelphia Inquirer / Kaiser Health News Feb. 18, 2013 <h5 class="byline">Jay Hancock, KAISER HEALTH NEWS</h5><a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20130218_The_flaws_of_electronic_records.html" target="_blank">The flaws of electronic records</a> Drexel University's Scot Silverstein is a leading critic of the rapid switch to computerized medical charts, saying the notion that they prevent more mistakes than they cause is not proven.   <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_8NHZXfqJrMOagNsDryhPIBfqkCL6Fpg0AV_7cXGpvSysrGf5LNS4vuXZ7bHr0FvlxiN9_8QDMVh7JtYnhDxeQ9XkUACF_VE4yC5XetVqe3I7aWif1W7wxpor32l3xF1SPfZxrg-mSG9S/s1600/silverstein_fixing_computer.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_8NHZXfqJrMOagNsDryhPIBfqkCL6Fpg0AV_7cXGpvSysrGf5LNS4vuXZ7bHr0FvlxiN9_8QDMVh7JtYnhDxeQ9XkUACF_VE4yC5XetVqe3I7aWif1W7wxpor32l3xF1SPfZxrg-mSG9S/s1600/silverstein_fixing_computer.JPG" width="320" /></a></div> Scot Silverstein of Lansdale, one of the most ardent critics of electronic medical records, works on an antique computer. A growing collection of evidence suggests poorly designed medical software can obscure clinical data, generate incorrect treatment orders, and cause other problems. <div class="photo_area" style="width: 600px;"><div class="photocaption"> RON TARVER /Staff Photogapher </div></div> Jay Hancock, KAISER HEALTH NEWS Posted: Monday, February 18, 2013, 3:01 AM Computer mistakes like the one that produced incorrect prescriptions for thousands of Rhode Island patients are probably far more common and dangerous than proponents of electronic medical records believe, says Drexel University's Scot Silverstein. Flawed software at Lifespan hospital group printed orders for low-dose, short-acting pills when patients should have been taking stronger, time-release ones, the Providence-based system disclosed in 2011. Lifespan says nobody was harmed. But Silverstein, a physician and adjunct professor of health-care informatics who is making a name for himself as a strident critic of electronic health records, says the Lifespan breakdown is part of a much larger problem. "We're in the midst of a mania right now" as traditional patient charts are switched to computers, he said in an interview in his Lansdale home. "We know it causes harm, and we don't even know the level of magnitude. That statement alone should be the basis for the greatest of caution and slowing down."</blockquote> In an ethical world, it would be.  Medicine, though, is in the throes of a loss of ethics, as many stories at this site and many others attest to. <blockquote class="tr_bq">Use of electronic medical records is speeding up, thanks to $10 billion and counting in bounties the federal government is paying to caregivers who adopt them. The consensus among government officials and researchers is that computers will cut mistakes and promote efficiency. So 4,000 hospitals have installed or are installing digital records, the Department of Health and Human Services said last month. Seventy percent of doctors surveyed in September by research firm CapSite said they had switched to digital data. But the notion that electronic charts prevent more mistakes than they cause just isn't proven, Silverstein says. Government doesn't require caregivers to report problems, he points out, so many computer-induced mistakes may never surface.</blockquote> The recent ECRI "deep dive" study of "EHR events" (<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/02/ecri-institute-pso-uncovers-health.html" target="_blank">link</a>) is just the latest to raise red flags on that point. Even Dr. David Blumenthal, former chair of the Office of the National Health IT Coordinator (ONC) in HHS seems to have <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/05/david-blumenthal-on-health-it-safety.html" target="_blank">changed his message</a> about reporting of medical problems. From a Feb. 16, 2013 New York Times article "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/sunday-review/the-hip-replacement-case-shows-why-doctors-often-remain-silent.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Doctors Who Don’t Speak Out</a>": <blockquote class="tr_bq">....  TRADITIONALLY, doctors have brought problems to the attention of colleagues by conducting research and publishing their findings in a medical journal. The advantage of that system helps ensure the credibility of study data and protects a researcher from random attack, said Dr. David Blumenthal, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a group that studies health policy issues. But getting a study published can take a year or two; some Johnson & Johnson consultants did publish studies about the hip’s flaws, but they largely appeared after it had been recalled. Dr. Blumenthal said there was probably a need for more immediate ways for doctors to share their concerns, like forums supported by professional medical organizations. </blockquote> Back to the Inquirer article: <blockquote class="tr_bq">He doesn't discount the potential of digital records to eliminate duplicate scans and alert doctors to drug interactions and unsuspected dangers. But the rush to implementation has produced badly designed products that may be more likely to confound doctors than enlighten them, he says. Electronic health records, Silverstein believes, should be rigorously tested under government supervision before being used in life-and-death situations, much like medical hardware or airplanes.</blockquote> In fact, arguments otherwise are specious.  "Harm to innovation" is the one I've heard most often.  Yet, those proffering such claims cannot point out what aspect of regulation - adherence to GMP's (good manufacturing processes), pre-market safety and quality testing, post-market surveillance, etc. - will "harm innovation."  Indeed, they opine as if innovation in medicine without objective safety and quality checks is a virtue, rather than a potential vice. <blockquote class="tr_bq">Silverstein "is an essential critic of the field," said physician George Lundberg, editor at large for MedPage Today and former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "It's too easy for those of us in medicine to get excessively enthusiastic about things that look like they're going to work out really well. Sometimes we go too far and don't see the downside of things."</blockquote> (Dr. Lundberg mentioned me in Nov. 2011 at MedPage today in a piece entitled "Health IT: Garbage In, Garbage Out" as <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/11/george-lundberg-promise-of-health-it.html" target="_blank">here</a>.) The patients - including ourselves and our own family members, I might add - are the ones who pay the price of our hyper-enthusiasm. <blockquote class="tr_bq">... The FDA's Jeffrey Shuren, a neurologist, has said such cases "likely reflect a small percentage of the actual events that do occur."</blockquote> "Tip of the iceberg" were his exact words (<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/02/fda-on-health-it-adverse-consequences.html" target="_blank">link</a>). <blockquote class="tr_bq">... At conferences and working from home on the "Health Care Renewal" blog, Silverstein chronicles digital failures and criticizes hospitals in the same dogged way he applied himself to building the 1970s-era Heathkit computers [and amateur radio equipment - ed.] he still keeps in his home, say people who know him. "His message has been consistent": Health IT "provides far less benefit than is claimed by its proponents and opens new, sometimes potent, routes to failure," said Richard I. Cook, a medical error expert at the University of Chicago who sat on a panel examining electronic record safety at the authoritative Institute of Medicine. "No one wants him to be visible. But his message and tone have not wavered."</blockquote> Dr. Cook wrote the lone dissent to milquetoast IOM recommendations on health IT risk - the magnitude of which IOM itself admitted is unknown - in their 2012 report "Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care" available <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/Patient%20Safety%20and%20Health%20IT%20prepub.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.  See Appendix E. The last scientific conference at which I chronicled these failures was at the Health Informatics Society of Australia's HIC2012, as a keynote speaker on health IT trust (<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-presentation-to-health-informatics.html" target="_blank">link</a>).  I would have been at HIC2011, to which I had been originally invited, but was helping care for a relative injured by bad health IT at that time.  Her death freed me to travel Down Under in 2012. I have presented at a number of plaintiff attorney's meetings since then, however, such as the American Association for Justice Winter Convention (AAJ, formerly the Trial Lawyer's Association) just last week (<a href="http://www.justicewinterconvention.org/" target="_blank">link</a>).  Trial lawyers don't seem to mind a very direct approach to the issues, unlike many so-called scientists who, as author Michael Crichton once warned (<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344539-i-want-to-pause-here-and-talk-about-this-notion" target="_blank">link</a>), seem to believe in "consensus" rather than science. <blockquote class="tr_bq"> The HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association, an industry group, declined to comment on Silverstein. A spokesman for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the administration's proponent of digital records, said: "It's important to listen to all the voices" in the discussion of the subject.  </blockquote> Some voices, unfortunately, are louder than others and backed by lobbyists and big money.  See, for instance, the May 2009 Washington Post article by Robert O'Harrow Jr. "The Machinery Behind Health-Care Reform: How an Industry Lobby Scored a Swift, Unexpected Victory by Channeling Billions to Electronic Records" (link to the article and my essay about it is <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/05/machinery-behind-healthcare-reform-how.html" target="_blank">here</a>). I do point out, however, for the benefit of those at HIMSS and ONC, that knowing of risks, while doing nothing substantive while "listening to all voices in the discussion" can be seen as gross negligence. <blockquote class="tr_bq">Trained as an internist and in medical information technology [Medical Informatics- ed.] as a Yale University postdoc, Silverstein, 55, served as Merck & Co.'s director of scientific information in the early 2000s and then as a full-time Drexel professor, shifting in recent years to part-time teaching and working on medical liability cases for plaintiff attorneys. His insistent warnings about digital health risks over more than a decade have effectively barred him from a lucrative career at a hospital or software vendor.</blockquote> Perverse as that reality may be, it's also the reverse:  I would not want to work for a hospital or software vendor in 2013, where effecting change to protect patients from bad health IT is hard if not impossible, e.g., as at <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/?loc=cases&sloc=lawsuit" target="_blank">link</a>, <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/?loc=cases&sloc=clinical%20computing%20problems%20in%20ICU" target="_blank">link</a>, and <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/?loc=cases&sloc=Cardiology%20story" target="_blank">link</a>, and at the other case examples at that site.  I find it a far more effective use of my time to help enact change from the outside - and avoiding the pathological individuals who make such scenarios possible. <blockquote class="tr_bq">"I'm sure Scot would be better off by keeping his mouth shut and getting a job with a hospital that's just put in a big . . . system," said Matthew Holt, a Silverstein critic and cochairman of Health 2.0, which organizes health technology conferences.</blockquote> I note that the raison d'être for this blog is the impact of many people doing just that sort of thing - "keeping their mouth shut" and making money, no matter what the ethical implications.  (The patients killed by such behaviors are, unfortunately, unavailable for comment.) <blockquote class="tr_bq"> Many say he comes on too strong. Even admirers cringed when he began blogging about the 2011 death of his mother, which he blames in a lawsuit on a computer error that allegedly caused Abington Memorial Hospital to overlook a key medication. (Both he and the hospital said they couldn't comment on a pending suit.) Personalizing his campaign, some thought, made him seem less objective.</blockquote> I'm at a loss here.  "Too strong" - on matters of life and death that affect everyone?  A proficient writer, who had been writing about health IT problems since 1998, should have kept silent about a first hand story of HIT harm in 2010 of potential great relevance towards public safety?  Writing about the incident 'lessens objectivity'?  That makes little sense, and is perverse.  Those who opined as such have their priorities in serious disarray. Such personalized accounts are common and have caused great change.  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Zion_law" target="_blank">Libby Zion's death</a> due to hospital neglect, and her father's making the issues quite public, comes to mind, as do the many laws enacted that are named after people who've gone public after personal tragedy: <blockquote class="tr_bq">... Grieving the loss of their child, Zion's parents became convinced that their daughter's death was due to inadequate staffing at the teaching hospital.  Sidney Zion questioned the staff's competence for two reasons. The first was the administration of meperidine, known to cause fatal interactions with phenelzine, the antidepressant that Libby Zion was taking. The second issue was the use of restraints and emergency psychiatric medication. Sidney's aggrieved words were: "They gave her a drug that was destined to kill her, then ignored her except to tie her down like a dog." To the distress of the doctors, Zion began to refer to his daughter's death as a "murder." Sidney also questioned the long hours that residents worked at the time. In a New York Times op-ed piece he wrote: "You don't need kindergarten to know that a resident working a 36-hour shift is in no condition to make any kind of judgment call—forget about life-and-death." The case eventually became a protracted high-profile legal battle, with multiple abrupt reversals; case reports about it appeared in major medical journals.</blockquote> An alternate explanation is that, lacking other credible means, this is an ad hominem reaction (of those "some") seeking an angle to attack the message ... and the messenger ... or is simply a reaction of, to put it bluntly, castrati who are more at home in a country club than in the world of ideas. For a bona fide example of "coming on too strong", there's this: <div class="PlainText">In the NEJM article "The 'Meaningful Use' Regulation for Electronic Health Records", David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P. (ONC Chair) and Marilyn Tavenner, R.N., M.H.A. (10.1056/NEJMp1006114, July 13, 2010) available <a href="http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=3732&query=home">at this link</a>, the opening statement is (emphases mine): </div><blockquote dir="ltr" style="margin-right: 0px;"><div class="PlainText">The widespread use of electronic health records (EHRs) in the United States is inevitable. EHRs will improve caregivers’ decisions and patients’ outcomes. Once patients experience the benefits of this technology, they will demand nothing less from their providers. Hundreds of thousands of physicians have already seen these benefits in their clinical practice.</div></blockquote><div class="PlainText"> I think it fair to say those are grandiose statements and predictions presented with a tone of utmost certainty in one of the world's most respected scientific medical journals.  Even though it is a "perspectives" article, I once long ago learned that in writing in esteemed scientific journals of worldwide impact, statements of certainty were at best avoided, or if made should be exceptionally well referenced. I note the lack of footnotes showing the source(s) of these statements. Another bona fide example of "coming on too strong": <blockquote class="tr_bq">“We have the capacity to transform health with one thunderous click of a mouse after another,” said (former) HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt - <a href="http://www.himss.org/ASP/ContentRedirector.asp?ContentId=65039&type=HIMSSNewsItem">2005 HIMSS Summit</a> </blockquote> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi81rMzS-WFiPrb91_Guccc9_kcbOUplIvRl6eAqyOYRwvsQoibE1PA5rhERJ-q54ZC1TCcdeuJH1o7Ecm_5F5wI4yqIzw4j7xvllLz7pS9-fYIc6we-mJokTLmpLZsggAjGOMJS-veYpb3/s1600/lightning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi81rMzS-WFiPrb91_Guccc9_kcbOUplIvRl6eAqyOYRwvsQoibE1PA5rhERJ-q54ZC1TCcdeuJH1o7Ecm_5F5wI4yqIzw4j7xvllLz7pS9-fYIc6we-mJokTLmpLZsggAjGOMJS-veYpb3/s1600/lightning.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We shall transform health (into what, exactly, is not specified) one thunderous mouse click after another!</td></tr></tbody></table></div> It doesn't get any stronger than that, unless, perhaps, the thunderous wrath of God is invoked. Back to the Inquirer once again: <blockquote class="tr_bq">"His refusal to temper his message makes it sometimes difficult to hear," said Ross Koppel, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist and digital health record skeptic.</blockquote> As per a recent article by Joe Conn in Modern Healthcare entitled "Health IT Iconoclasts" (<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/02/modern-healthcare-health-it-iconoclasts.html" target="_blank">link</a>), which wrote of Dr. Koppel, Deborah Peel, Lawrence Weed and me, Dr. Koppel has firsthand experience at his message being found "difficult to hear" by the hyper-enthusiasts: <blockquote class="tr_bq">... Researcher Ross Koppel started an uproar in 2005 when he and a colleague coauthored an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found a first-generation computerized physician order entry system (CPOE) at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was simultaneously creating new errors even as it reduced others. Koppel’s bombshell—he’s now an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania— brought down the wrath of information technology boosters. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, a health IT trade group, challenged the study’s “methodology and its subsequent outcomes,” and criticized its authors for their “limited view” and not “looking at the big picture.”  [Others wrote that his work was 'disingenuous', although it had similar findings to my own observation of the very same CPOE system at Yale-New Haven Hospital ... in 1992 - ed.] ... In 2009, he revealed in another JAMA article that health IT vendors’ contracts included “hold harmless” clauses that shielded software developers from legal liability for medical errors their systems caused, even if the developers had been warned about the defects. “That got me major upheaval,” the worst of his career, Koppel recalls.</blockquote> Koppel, a sociologist, has probably done more for health IT transparency and safety than the physicians of the entire academic medical and medical informatics community combined. <blockquote class="tr_bq">... But Silverstein says his position today is the same as it has always been. He believes in the potential power of electronic records for good, he says. But any doctor who feels bound by the Hippocratic oath's injunction to "first, do no harm," he adds, should balk at what's going on. "Patients are being harmed and killed as a result of disruptions to care caused by bad health IT," he said. "I'm skeptical of the manner and pace" of implementation, "not of the technology itself. . . . My only bias is against bad medicine. And my bias is against people with complacent attitudes about bad medicine."</blockquote> The issues are actually relatively simple, using terminology coined by <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGiHKiF08nosKVU7uTAYFAuZg0tzy09D_tVjFrfb2sJmv6LrJlm_Pv-vazJeH5joFN8HbBEAGFJRgS9EIIr5grSxultREvX8Uycje6Tgf0cYzN6BfLqgbHbKFxor9o14guSy_qimQdUwou/s1600/jon_IMG_1038a.jpg" target="_blank">Dr. Jon Patrick of U. Sydney</a> at the aforementioned HIC2012 meeting in Australia during our discussions.  Bad health IT must be removed from the market, and good health IT must replace it. <blockquote class="tr_bq">Good Health IT ("GHIT") is defined as IT that provides a good user experience, enhances cognitive function, puts essential information as effortlessly as possible into the physician’s hands, keeps eHealth information secure, protects patient privacy and facilitates better practice of medicine and better outcomes. Bad Health IT ("BHIT") is defined as IT that is ill-suited to purpose, hard to use, unreliable, loses data or provides incorrect data, causes cognitive overload, slows rather than facilitates users, lacks appropriate alerts, creates the need for hypervigilance (i.e., towards avoiding IT-related mishaps) that increases stress, is lacking in security, compromises patient privacy or otherwise demonstrates suboptimal design and/or implementation.   </blockquote>   It is this author's opinion that this change will not happen by "going along to get along" or "listening to all the voices in the discussion of the subject" (especially those with Big Money and Big Lobbyists behind them) while doing nothing. I also note that "complacent attitudes about bad medicine" are not the sole province of IT personnel or healthcare management.  Physicians and nurses who acquiesce to bad health IT are part of the problem. -- SS

Kaiser Health News/Philadelphia Inquirer on InformaticsMD: "The flaws of electronic records"

At my Dec. 2012 post " How an interview for Kaiser Health News rekindled memories of health IT dysfunction in the 90's that persist...

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A Right Royal Mess: EHRs and Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust

Almost every theme I've written about for the past 15 years, at this blog and at my teaching site (<a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/" target="_blank">link</a>) regarding health IT mismanagement is present here: <blockquote class="tr_bq"><a href="http://www.ehi.co.uk/insight/analysis/1033/a-right-royal-mess" target="_blank">A Right Royal Mess</a>      ehealth INSIDER 12 February 2013 Newly released reports on Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust’s implementation of Cerner Millennium show that many crucial issues were not addressed prior to go-live; and that the trust is continuing to face considerable operational and financial issues because of the system. Rebecca Todd reports.</blockquote> Read it at the link above. I feel this scenario is being repeated in many countries, including the U.S., with many different vendor products.  The industry's pathologies and self-serving memes are difficult to overcome. As Orwell said:  "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." But don't worry...you're perfectly safe.  Computers, after all, improve healthcare and are entirely beneficent, according to the pundits.  Every untoward event is a mere "anecdote." -- SS Addendum 2/15/13:  just to illustrate my point, there's also this: <blockquote class="tr_bq"><a href="http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/8392/monitor-blasts-rotherham%27s-epr-programme" target="_blank">Monitor blasts Rotherham's EPR programme</a> ehealth INSIDER 15 February 2013 Lis Evenstad  The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust has been found in significant breach of its terms of authorisation by Monitor, with its electronic patient record implementation identified as a key issue. The trust this month admitted it was facing "persistant serious issues" with the deployment of its Meditech EPR including "clinician and staff acceptance and usability" ... “The trust has not managed EPR implementation in an effective way and significant operational and financial risks will remain until the trust has a robust and operationally effective EPR system." ... “It is unclear whether the trust has sufficient visibility over operational performance and quality issues, including incidents of patient harm,” it adds.</blockquote> -- SS

A Right Royal Mess: EHRs and Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust

Almost every theme I've written about for the past 15 years, at this blog and at my teaching site ( link ) regarding health IT mismanage...

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A Sewage-Laden Cruise Ship, Burning Aircraft Batteries, Neo-Nazi Factory Security - Will Jaw Dropping Cases Prompt the Public to Demand Better Leadership?

The dysfunction of modern health care likely arises from larger trends within the economy and the society.  We frequently discuss how poor leadership and governance within health care and other organizations exist in a context of <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/04/health-care-dysfunction-explained-by.html">focus on short-term revenue</a> above all else (<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/financialization">financialization</a>); <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/perverse%20incentives">perverse incentives,</a> particularly leading to <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/executive%20compensation">excess executive compensation</a> unrelated to leaders' actions or performance; <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/deception">deception</a>, especially in <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/marketing">marketing</a> and <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/public%20relations">public relations</a> coupled to suppression of internal <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/free%20speech">dissent </a>and <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/whistle-blowers">whistle blowing</a>;  <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/legal%20settlements">lax regulation and law enforcement</a>, in a climate of <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/regulatory%20capture">regulatory capture </a>and by governments afflicted with the <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/revolving%20doors">revolving door</a> allowing <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/conflicts%20of%20interest">conflicts of interest</a> and <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/health%20care%20corruption">corruption</a>, etc, etc. I was thinking of this last weekend while like many Rhode Islanders we were shivering in an unheated house.  A big but not unprecedented snow storm had apparently caused the failure of multiple high-voltage electrical transmission lines and substations, which should be designed to resist such conditions.  (<a href="http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2013/02/national-grid-says-cause-still-unknown-for-failure-of-high-voltage-lines-se.html">National Grid says cause still unknown for failure of high-voltage lines serving East Bay, Aquidneck Island.</a>) Poor leadership and governance under these circumstances likely lead to threats to public health and safety.  Focus on cost-cutting and current revenue to drive executive compensation may lead to bad design, manufacture, and maintenance of critical systems.  So maybe we should not be surprised at a recent barrage of cases involving threats to health and safety by well-known corporations: <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/9821366/Walmart-in-supply-chain-crackdown-after-Bangladesh-factory-fire.html">Walmart in Supply Chain Crackdown after Bangladesh Factory Fire </a> <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268210/Apple-vows-eradicate-child-labour-workforce-increased-audits-following-suicide-report-reveal-problem-persists.html">Apple Vows to Eradicate Child Labour from Workforce</a> <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/taibbi_hsbc_got_away_with_murder/singleton/">HSBC Got Away with Murder: the Bank Laundered Money for Drug Traffickers and Terrorist Groups... </a> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324624404578253010041254492.html">Probe of Boeing 787 Battery Fire Expands</a> <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/passengers-crippled-cruise-ship-face-long-bus-rides-article-1.1264072">Sewage-laden Carnival Cruise Ship Docks in Mobile, Alabama: Passengers Finally Disembark from Vacation Vehicle Turned Smelly Nightmare</a> <a href="http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/amazon-used-neonazi-guards-to-keep-immigrant-workforce-under-control-in-germany-29070825.html">Amazon 'used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control' in Germany</a> Those were just the cases I could easily recall.  Readers are invited to add more to the comments section. At least, I don't think I can blame poor leadership and governance for a huge exploding meteor: <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/90Omh7_I8vI" width="560"></iframe> But maybe a society less dominated by top insiders skimming off more and more money would be better prepared for the next meteor strike. One can only hope that this onslaught of increasingly jaw-dropping cases that threaten health and safety that would have been unimaginable a short time ago might lead the public to demand accountable, transparent, mission-focused, honest leadership of the big organizations, for-profit, non-profit and governmental, that now control our lives.

A Sewage-Laden Cruise Ship, Burning Aircraft Batteries, Neo-Nazi Factory Security - Will Jaw Dropping Cases Prompt the Public to Demand Better Leadership?

The dysfunction of modern health care likely arises from larger trends within the economy and the society. We frequently discuss how poor l...

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