geriatrics

This week’s JAMA issue is titled “Critical Issues in US Healthcare” and wow, it is a goldmine of good reading for those interested in the state of healthcare today.

So far I’ve read two particularly outstanding articles that I want to recommend. (If you don’t have personal or institutional access to JAMA, apparently you can access JAMA “free for a limited time” by signing up for their JAMA Network Reader.) They are “Reliable and Sustainable Comprehensive Care for Frail Elderly People,” by geriatrician Joanne Lynn, and “The Anatomy of Healthcare in the United States,” by Dr. Hamilton Moses et al.

“Reliable and Sustainable Comprehensive Care for Frail Elderly People.” 

In this article, Dr. Lynn begins by describing some sobering realities:

“As the incidence of sudden and premature deaths has declined in the United States, the last part of most individuals’ lives has come to be marked by progressive chronic illnesses and diminishing physical reserves that engender self-care disabilities and frailty. Those who live past age 65 years now average 3 years of self-care disability at the end of life, needing long-term services and supports (LTSS). For those living past 85 years old, nearly half will have serious cognitive decline.”

The problem, as Dr. Lynn points out, is that our fragmented, specialty-driven, acute-care-focused healthcare system is poorly set up to help people during this phase of life, during which frail elders need comprehensive coordinated care that helps them maintain function and quality of life. Furthermore, much of what people need in the last phase of life is not covered by Medicare, e.g. supportive services that help older adults with their living needs.

Instead, Dr. Lynn notes that these needs have been treated as something that individuals should save for, and that families should step up to address. But this is a huge burden for people and families to shoulder, and will be even harder to maintain as the population skews older over the next few decades. (The ratio of working people to dependent and disabled older adults, which was 5:1 in 2011, is expected to  decline to 3:1 by 2029.)

Fortunately, Dr. Lynn has some solutions for us to collectively consider. She begins by urging society to recognize that “frail elderly people have different priorities and needs than they had earlier in life, and their care system must reflect those priorities.” She notes that discussions about living with frailty are largely absent from popular media and public conversation, and calls for “vigorous discussion about how people live well with frailty and how best to die.”

She then goes on to advocate for a number of sensible changes, including individualized medical planning, multidisciplinary assessment and management, new metrics of healthcare quality for this population, and redesign of healthcare delivery models.

Most importantly, she advocates for healthcare services and long-term services and supports to be considered equally important, and ideally integrated:

“A balanced system would give integrated multidisciplinary teams the tools and authority to match services with each frail person’s priority needs. Food, housing, transportation, and direct personal services are often more important than diabetes management or chemotherapy. Elderly people and their families often choose comfort, function, and familiar environments and relationships over small chances for cure or longer survival. Medicare’s open-ended entitlement to medical interventions contrasts with the limited and often inadequate safety-net programs to support personal needs, and this mismatch complicates development of a coherent and efficient service delivery system.”

The issue, of course, would be how to fund and finance such a program. Dr. Lynn doesn’t go into great detail in this article (her prior work has addressed this in the past), although she mentions the possibility of a “MediCaring” ACO taking this on. She also notes that we currently have some models, such as PACE (Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) and the VA’s Home-Based Primary Care, that we might learn from.

Obviously, this article doesn’t have all the answers for those of us who want better care for an aging America. Still, I like the way Dr. Lynn frames the needs that people have during this last fragile stage of life, and her description of how our current system is really a terrible match. I also agree that we need to have more conversations about those last frail years that many people will undergo.

Will we soon be moving towards a system of integrated healthcare and long-term care for frailer elders? Only if the public demands it, I think…which hopefully they will.

“The Anatomy of Healthcare in the United States“

This is a much longer article, combining very interesting summaries of healthcare data with thoughtful reporting on core trends in healthcare, and insightful commentary on some of the thorny tensions that really might rip the healthcare system apart if we don’t find ways to resolve them.

The juiciest data items are summarized in the abstract:

“The findings from this analysis contradict several common assumptions. Since 2000, (1) price (especially of hospital charges [+4.2%/y], professional services [3.6%/y], drugs and devices [+4.0%/y], and administrative costs [+5.6%/y]), not demand for services or aging of the population, produced 91% of cost increases; (2) personal out-of-pocket spending on insurance premiums and co-payments have declined from 23% to 11%; and (3) chronic illnesses account for 84% of costs overall among the entire population, not only of the elderly.”

In short, we healthcare providers have been charging more and more, and administrative costs have been going up. Out-of-pocket spending stinks for patients but so far apparently hasn’t been rocketing up in the same way.

And surprise surprise, chronic illnesses are driving most of the cost. (Cue the crowd that loves to promote prevention as the main way we should manage the chronic disease.) To my surprise, this analysis found that 67% of the costs of chronic illness are in people younger than 65, but still, I expect that management of chronic disease will be very important to Medicare over the next 10-20 years.

My next favorite part is also nicely summarized in the abstract:

“Three factors have produced the most change: (1) consolidation, with fewer general hospitals and more single-specialty hospitals and physician groups, producing financial concentration in health systems, insurers, pharmacies, and benefit managers; (2) information technology, in which investment has occurred but value is elusive; and (3) the patient as consumer, whereby influence is sought outside traditional channels, using social media, informal networks, new public sources of information, and self-management software.” [Emphasis mine.]

And then there’s the highlighting of problematic tensions currently affecting healthcare. I will again quote the abstract:

“These forces create tension among patient aims for choice, personal care, and attention; physician aims for professionalism and autonomy; and public and private payer aims for aggregate economic value across large populations. Measurements of cost and outcome (applied to groups) are supplanting individuals’ preferences. Clinicians increasingly are expected to substitute social and economic goals for the needs of a single patient. These contradictory forces are difficult to reconcile, creating risk of growing instability and political tensions. A national conversation, guided by the best data and information, aimed at explicit understanding of choices, tradeoffs, and expectations, using broader definitions of health and value, is needed.”

Wow. It really is not often that I come across an article that clearly calls out several big problems and how they are intertwined. (Most articles just hack at one specific part of the problem…kind of the way specialists hack at one specific organ while no one summarizes the key overall problems for the patient.)

The article itself is long and a bit wonky, but overall much more readable than many health policy articles. There’s a very good section summarizing the changing role of patients and consumers in healthcare, and also an interesting section referring to direct-pay and “concierge” medicine.

Regarding team-based care and reallocating healthcare work among professionals, the authors make the following observation:

“…given the shift in orientation to measurement of success with populations rather than individuals, there is a struggle between efforts to manage professionals systematically and efficiently and traditional structures that reflect preference for autonomy, hierarchy, and historically based professional values. These factors, along with increasing patient assertiveness, create the primary management challenge of this era.” [Emphasis mine.]

So true, and what we are going to do about it I really don’t know. In general the strength of this article is in describing the situation and some very important conflicting forces that are keeping healthcare mired in dysfunction; solutions are obviously another (much more difficult) story.

I especially enjoyed the description of an “iron triangle” of conflicting forces:

• Patient expectations for individual care and personal attention; 
• Physician autonomy; 
• Value as defined by policy makers using health status of large groups and aggregate measures of cost.