RoS: Review of Systems

This week, we are joined by Dave Chokshi. Dave is the Chief Population Health Officer of OneCity Health and Senior Assistant Vice President at New York City Health + Hospitals—the largest public health care system in the U.S. He practices primary care at Bellevue Hospital and is a Clinical Associate Professor of Population Health and Medicine at the NYU School of Medicine. We talk about what population health is, how it is distinct from public health, and what value it adds to our healthcare system. We also talk about how in some ways it might contribute to the erosion of relationships between primary care providers and patients, how that can be remedied, and how the small 1 or 2 doctor practice may fit into a population health management vision. We talk about a piece he wrote with Neil Calman and Diane Hauser about what they call the “expanded denominator,” and how that may further goals of public health and accountable care. Lastly, we talk about population health approaches in urban and rural settings, and how we should think about the opioid epidemic from a population health vantage point. We reference a few articles throughout our conversation: Christine Sinsky’s already classic Annals paper detailing that physicians spend two hours on administrative tasks for every hour they see patients, and our journal club on that paper. Robin Williams’ and colleagues Health Affairs blog on utilizing the HIV cascade of care to battle the opioid epidemic, and Lawrence Casalino and colleagues work calculating what we spend measuring the care we provide. In addition, we reference the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s landmark report on addiction. A quick note about a word we use frequently but didn’t pause to define for listeners – attribution. Attribution is the assignment of a specific patient to a specific primary care physician in a health system. Once a patient is attributed to a PCP or health system, that PCP and health system is held accountable for the patient’s quality measures and healthcare costs within ACOs or other alternative payment contracts. This still applies patients who do not frequently access the healthcare system through traditional channels or most frequently see specialists, who perhaps have never seen the assigned PCP, and is therefore at times controversial. A little more background on Dr. Dave Chokshi: He was Assistant Vice President of Ambulatory Care Transformation at NYC Health + Hospitals and director of Population Health Improvement at NYU School of Medicine. In 2012-13, he served as a White House Fellow at the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs, where he was the principal health advisor in the Office of the Secre...

This week, we are joined by Danielle Ofri. Danielle is a primary care physician at Bellevue Hospital and a prolific essayist and author. We start out talking about her most recent book, What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear. We talk about communication between patients and doctors and why it can be so challenging, and how physician communication can be evaluated and more effectively taught to trainees. Danielle talks about the power dynamics of the medical interview and how it can be uncomfortable for us as physicians to have the tables turned when the patient is more empowered in the conversation. We also talk about the campaign that Danielle has spearheaded to get physicians and other medical professionals involved in the health care reform efforts of the last few months in Washington DC with her House Calls Campaign. Danielle is a physician at Bellevue Hospital and associate professor of medicine at NYU. She writes about medicine and the doctor-patient connection for the New York Times, Slate Magazine, and other publications. Danielle is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, the first literary journal to arise from a medical setting. She is the author of a collection of books about the world of medicine. She’s given TED Talks on Deconstructing Perfection and  When Doctors Face Fear, and has performed at The Moth. If you enjoy the show, please rate and review us wherever you listen, and share us on social media. Tweet us your thoughts @rospodcast and check out our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email us at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Dr. Joshua Freeman is a family physician, health policy researcher, social justice activist, and writer.  He publishes a widely-read blog, “Medicine and Social Justice”, and in 2015 published a book, Health, Medicine and Justice: Designing a fair and equitable healthcare system (Copernicus Healthcare press), which is available on Amazon and other sites, in both softcover and electronic versions. This week, Thomas Kim chats with Dr. Freeman about some of the major themes of the book: why the US health care system fails to produce a healthy population, the role of profit in American medicine, why he uses social justice to frame his analyses and commentary, and how the American health care system could become more primary care-centered. Dr. Freeman is Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, where he served as the Alice M. Patterson MD and Harold L. Patterson MD Professor and Chair of the Department of Family Medicine from 2002-2016, and was also Professor in the Departments of Preventive Medicine and Public Health and of Health Policy and Management. He was a Fulbright Scholar in São Paulo, Brazil in 2003 and served nationally as Treasurer of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and the Association of Departments of Family Medicine. He received STFM’s highest honor, the Recognition Award, in 2006. He served as a member of the board of trustees of Roosevelt University in Chicago, as assistant editor of the journal Family Medicine, and also on the board of Southwest Boulevard Family Health Center in Kansas City, KS. Dr. Freeman is a graduate of the Loyola-Stritch School of Medicine, family medicine residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and faculty development fellowship and Preventive Medicine residency at the University of Arizona. This interview was lightly edited for clarity.

This week, we bring you a journal club on the manuscript: Exploring the Patient and Staff Experience with the Process of Primary Care, which was published in Annals of Family Medicine in the July/August 2015 issue by Elizabeth J Brown, Shreya Kangovi, Christopher Sha, Sarah Johnson, Casey Chanton, Tamala Carter, and David Grande. If you like the show, please rate and review us on itunes, google play, stitcher or your favorite podcasting app, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @RoSpodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you.

This week, in the second of our series about physician burnout, our guests focus on solutions. Diane Shannon and Paul DeChant, both physicians, join us to talk about their recent book Preventing Physician Burnout, Curing the Chaos and Returning Joy to the Practice of Medicine. Diane and Paul talk about their experiences with burnout and how they came to work on this project together, how they contend that organizational and structural factors are more important than individual factors in driving burnout, how compensation and intangible rewards can reduce burnout, how leadership in healthcare can address the epidemic of burnout. We also talk about how they have come to believe that the LEAN principles, most especially the pillar of respect for people, is key in transforming healthcare organizations into places where primary care physicians can thrive, why change is so difficult, and some other resources that can help. Diane Shannon is a general internist who left clinical medicine due to burnout and turned to a career in medical writing and public health. Paul DeChant is a family physician and experienced healthcare executive who has previously worked in organizations such as The Paulo Alto Medical Foundation, Sutter Gould Medical Foundation, and is now a senior advisor with Simpler Healthcare. If you’ve missed it, have a listen to the first in our burnout series with Colin West, researcher at Mayo Clinic who has done foundational research on burnout and physician well-being. Please rate and review us on itunes, google play, or stitcher, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @rospodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.

This week, we are joined by Colin West, professor of Medicine, Biostatistics and Medical Education at Mayo Clinic. Colin’s research focuses primarily on physician well-being, evidence based medicine and medical education. We talk today about his extensive research in the area of physician well-being and burnout. We talk about what researchers mean precisely by burnout and how it is measured, what the implications are for patient care and quality of care that the primary care workforce is increasingly burdened with burnout, and his findings in an important 2016 study that physicians with significant burnout scores cut back on patient care over time. We also talk about the EMR, and what specific features of EMR most correlate with user dissatisfaction. Lastly, we talk about what questions he most wants to answer in his field. This is part 1 of a 2-part series on burnout. Today we focus on the evidence behind burnout, and in part 2 we will talk about what can be done to alleviate the problem. If you like the show, please rate and review us on itunes, google play, or stitcher, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @rospodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.

Our guest this week is David Himmelstein. He is a distinguished professor of public health and health policy in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, adjunct clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has served as chief of the division of social and community medicine at Cambridge Hospital. David has authored or co-authored more than 100 journal articles and three books, including widely cited studies of medical bankruptcy and the high administrative costs of the U.S. health care system. His 1984 study of patient dumping led to the enactment of EMTALA, the law that banned that practice. He is also a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and is a principal author of PNHP articles published in the JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler. We talk about how he got his start in research by looking at patient dumping practices as a trainee, and how he views advocacy as a natural outgrowth of his research findings. We also talk about his work as a leader in advocacy for a national health insurance program and talk about a few common arguments against such policy changes. Lastly, he gives some advice for folks early in their career who would like to follow his model of research blended with advocacy. If you like the show, please rate and review us on itunes, google play, or stitcher, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @rospodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.

On our journal club this week, we talk about an article published in September 2016 in the journal Academic Pediatrics: Do On-Site Mental Health Professionals Change Pediatricians’ Responses to Children’s Mental Health Problems? By Sarah McCue Horwitz and colleagues. If you like the show, please rate and review us on itunes or stitcher, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @rospodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you.

This week we are again looking at the opioid crisis, but this time from the perspective of an emergency room physician. Gail D’Onofrio, MD, MS is Physician-in Chief of Emergency Services at Yale-New Haven Hospital; she and her colleagues published a randomized controlled trial in JAMA in April 2015 looking at an intervention initiating suboxone treatment for patients with substance use disorders in the ED.  Gail is Professor and Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University and is internationally known for her work in substance use disorders, women’s cardiovascular health, and mentoring physician scientists in research careers, and she is a founding board member of the American Board of Addiction Medicine. We talk about her perspective on the opioid epidemic as an ED physician; her RCT; how people could set up a similar program in their local ED and community; and her thoughts on ED utilization for primary care complaints, which is the subject of a recently issued report from the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission. Please rate and review us on iTunes or Stitcher and share us on social media. Tweet us your thoughts @RoSpodcast and check out our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email us at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you.

This week we are joined a few days early by Harold Pollack to bring you a timely update on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal and American Health Care Act (AHCA) legislation that is moving quickly through congress. Harold has published widely at the interface between poverty policy and public health including the effects of health reform and the ACA. Today we talk about the current state of the repeal and replace effort in the Senate and what effects their bill would have in terms of individuals who would lose coverage or find it much more expensive should the bill pass. We also discussed the very dramatic changes the bill would likely make to Medicaid and how that might affect the poor and vulnerable people that the program serves, and in particular how it might impact the raging opiate epidemic. Lastly, we talk about what a bipartisan solution to many of the very real problems of the ACA might look like, and what impact individuals can have on policy by calling congress. You can find more information about the unusual legislative process here, and the lack of information available on the bill here. Read about the effects that changes to Medicaid might make for disabled individuals here, and listen to Matt Broaddus of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities discuss block granting and per capita caps on Medicaid here. If you would like to reach out to your Senator to talk with him or her about the legislation and how it might affect you or your patients, you can find your Senator’s contact information here. Harold is the Helen Ross Professor at the School of Social Service Administration, an Affiliate Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division and the Department of Public Health Sciences and Co-Director of The University of Chicago Crime Lab and a committee member of the Center for Health Administration Studies (CHAS) at the University of Chicago. He tweets @haroldpollack. If you like the show, please rate and review us on itunes or stitcher, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @rospodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you.

This week we are joined by Bon Ku, the Assistant Dean for Health and Design and an Associate Professor at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, to talk about design thinking and medicine. Bon is a practicing emergency medicine physician and the founder and director of JeffDESIGN, a first-of-its-kind program in a medical school that teaches future physicians to apply human-centered design to healthcare challenges. Bon has spoken widely on the intersection of health and design thinking (TEDx, South by Southwest, Mayo Clinic Transform, Stanford Medicine X, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) and serves on the Design and Health Leadership Group at the American Institute of Architects. Bon talks with us about what design thinking is, how he got into it, why he thinks physicians would benefit from learning to think in this way, and how to apply it to common primary care challenges, like walk-ins. He also directs listeners to the following resources to learn more about design thinking in medicine: the Stanford Dschool, and ideou. If you like the show, please rate and review us on itunes or stitcher, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @rospodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you.

For this week’s journal club, we are talking about a recent paper from Health Affairs entitled: Los Angeles Safety Net Program eConsult System Was Rapidly Adopted and Decreased Wait Times to See Specialists  by Michael Barnett, Hal F. Yee Jr, Ateev Mehotra, and Paul Giboney. The paper describes and analyzes data from an e-consult system that was rolled out to a network of hundreds of safety-net clinics in Los Angeles County. We are thrilled to have the lead author, Michael Barnett, join us for our discussion! Michael is an Assistant Professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He publishes prolifically on a variety of topics, and is particularly interested in the primary care-specialty care interface. Do you use e-consults in your practice? Or do you wish you had access to such a system? Please tweet us your thoughts @RoSpodcast, or drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. And, let us know what manuscripts you think we should look at in future journal clubs or who we should have on to talk about their work. We look forward to hearing from you, and thanks for listening.

This week, Thomas Kim hosts the show and interviews Dr. David Buck, a family physician and professor of family and community medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine.  He is the founder and president of Patient Care Intervention Center (PCIC), an organization that uses advanced population health methods to target super-utilization of the health care system and intervenes through intensive care coordination and case management. It’s based in Houston, Texas and recently opened a branch in Dallas, and they were recently featured on PBS NewsHour. Prior to Dr. Buck’s work at PCIC, he founded Healthcare for the Homeless – Houston (HHH), now a federally qualified health center for over 7,000 homeless in Harris County, as well as the associated Houston Outreach Medicine Education and Social Services (HOMES) clinic, a student-managed clinic at HHH in conjunction with BCM and the University of Texas Health Science Center. He is a co-founder of the Houston-based physician advocacy group Doctors for Change, and founded the Houston-Galveston Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. He helped found the international street medicine institute, and was appointed to the 15-member Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan Program advisory board created as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2012. You can find some CDC resources about Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs here, and a New Yorker article about the effects of ACEs on health here. Dr. Buck is a graduate of the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas School of Public Health, as well as family medicine residency at the University of Rochester.

This week we are joined by Natalie Spicyn, an internist and pediatrician at Chase Brexton, a Federally Qualified Community Health Center in Baltimore. Like all FQHCs, Medicaid patients are a large portion of the Chase Brexton payor mix, but the clinic also provides specialized care for a large and active LGBT and HIV positive community in the city.  Last year, caregivers and administrators faced conflict regarding proposed workflow, volume, and compensation restructuring. Several employees were terminated during early efforts at unionization; ultimately, clinicians voted to unionize and attempt collective bargaining.  Natalie published an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun during this tumultuous period, and joins us to talk about her experiences with unionizing, fair compensation practices in primary care, and how all of this affects patient care. Photo: Rally outside Chase Brexton Health Care in Baltimore, Maryland, on Aug. 19, 2016. Photo: Jay Mallin, jay@jaymallinphotos.com, Courtesy of 1199 SEIU

Today we’re joined by Lauren A Taylor, a health services researcher based at Harvard Business School, where is she is earning her doctorate in health policy and management. Prior to joining HBS, Lauren co-authored The American Health Care Paradox, which has become required reading at a variety of medical and public health schools across the country. Our discussion spans a range of topics and should excite clinician and policymaker listeners alike, especially those interested in addressing upstream factors that affect health in our American society. We start with reviewing the initial research paper that lay the groundwork for her book and what other countries show us about how government spending on social services can affect health outcomes, as well as what she learned interviewing caregivers and social services workers in the US.  We also talk on how American sociopolitical factors influence our discourse on the distribution and allocation of resources as well as how research is done in her field. We discuss whether health systems are moving in the right direction addressing social determinants of health through ACOs, why management gets overlooked and undervalued as a key ingredient in healthcare delivery, and why it’s just so hard to get all of this right. Lauren’s work focuses on organizational theory and strategy in health care, with a particular emphasis on the integration of health and social services. She holds a BA in the History of Medicine and a Master in Public Health from Yale University. She has also worked as a health care chaplain and studied ethics as a Presidential Scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School. If you like the show, please subscribe on our website www.rospod.org, and rate us on iTunes and Stitcher and share us on social media. Get in touch via twitter @RoSpodcast or drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. Thanks for listening!