The plenary sessions bookending the Society of Hospital Medicine’s HM18 conference will provide insight into the current state of hospital medicine and a glimpse at the directions in which it is evolving.
Opening the conference will be Kate Goodrich, MD, chief medical officer at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Dr. Kate Goodrich
“What I want people to understand is the evolution within our health care system from one where we pay for volume to paying for value, and the role that Medicare can play in that,” Dr. Goodrich said in an interview. “Medicare has traditionally been sort of a passive payer, if you will, a passive payer of claims without a great deal of emphasis on the cost of care and the quality of care. [Now there is] a groundswell of concern nationally, not just here at CMS but nationwide, around the rising cost of care, and our quality of care is not as good as it should be for the amount that we spend.”
Dr. Goodrich said her plenary talk will look at how “that came to be, and then what CMS and other payers in the country are trying to do about it.” She said the United States is in a “truly transformative era in our health care system in changing how we pay for care, in service of better outcomes for patients and lower costs. I would like to give attendees the larger picture, of how we got here and what’s happening both at CMS and nationally to try and reverse some of those trends.”
Dr. Robert Wachter
Closing HM18, as has become tradition at the annual meeting, will be Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, of the University of California San Francisco, who will focus on the broader changes that must happen as the role of the hospitalist continues to evolve.
“I am going to talk about the changes in the world of hospital care and the importance of the field to innovate,” Dr. Wachter said. “To me, there are gravitational forces in the health care world that are making … patients who are in hospitals sicker than they were before. More and more patients are going to be cared for in outpatient settings and at home. We are going start to … see things like sensors and telemedicine to enable more care outside of the hospital.”
Dr. Wachter said hospital medicine must evolve and mature, to continue to prove that hospitalists are indispensable staff members within the hospital.
“That was why the field became the fastest-growing profession in medical history. We can’t sit on our laurels. We have to continue to innovate,” he said. “Even as the system changes around us, I am confident that we will innovate. My talk will be a pep talk and include reflections on how the world of health care is changing, and what those changes will mean to hospitalists.”
As value-based purchasing programs – and the push to pay for value over volume in Medicare and the private sector – continue to become the norm, the expected trend of sicker, more complex patients entering the hospital is already happening, Dr. Goodrich said. She is experiencing it in her own clinical work, which continues in addition to her role at CMS.
“I can confirm from my own personal experience [that] I have absolutely encountered that exact trend,” she said. “I feel like every time I go in the hospital, my patients are sicker and more complex. That is the population of patients that hospitalists are dealing with. That’s why we are actually in that practice. We enjoy taking care of those types of patients and the challenges they bring, both on a clinical level but I would say also even on a social and economic level.”
Dr. Goodrich said that trend will present one of the key challenges hospitalists face in the future, especially as paying for value entails more two-sided risk.
“In a value-based purchasing world, transitioning to payments based on quality and cost is harder because by nature the sicker patients cost more and it is harder to improve their outcomes. They come to you already quite sick,” she said. “That’s a dilemma that a lot of hospitalists face, wondering ‘How is this going to affect me if I am already seeing the sickest of the sick?’ ”
Dr. Wachter noted that the trend of steering less sick patients to the outpatient setting, as well as other economic factors, would change the nature of hospitalist practice.
“It will be more acuity, more intensity, more complex relationships with your own hospital and often with partner hospitals,” he said. “More of the work will be digitally enabled than it would have been five or ten years ago.”
Integration of data and technology innovation will be a key to better serving this sicker population, Dr. Wachter predicted. We need “to take much fuller advantage than we have so far of the fact that we are all dealing with digital records and the decision support, the data analytics, the artificial intelligence that we get from our computer systems is pretty puny,” he said. “That is partly why physicians don’t love their computers so much. They spend huge amounts of time entering data into computers and don’t get much useful information out of it.”
Dr. Goodrich agreed that this is a challenge.
“How do we make it usable for the average front-line nurse or doctor who didn’t go to school to learn how to code and analyze data?” she asked. “How do we get platforms and analytics that are developed using human-centered design principles to make it very understandable and actionable to the front-end clinician, but also to patients and consumers? What is really needed to truly drive improvement is not just access to the data but usability.” She added that this problem is directly related to the usability of electronic health records. “That is a significant focus right now for the Office of the National Coordinator [of Health Information Technology] – to move away from just [adopting] EHRs, to promoting interoperability and also the usability aspects that exactly gets to the problems we’ve identified.”
Dr. Wachter also warned that too much data could have a negative impact on the delivery of care.
“One of the challenges we face is continuing to stay alert, not turn our brains off, and become increasingly dependent on the computer to give us information,” he said. “How do we avoid the challenges we’ve already seen from things like alert and alarm fatigue as the computer becomes more robust as an information source. There is always the risk it is going to overwhelm us with too much information, and we are going to fall asleep at the switch. Or when the computer says something that really is not right for a patient, we will not be thinking clearly enough to catch it.”
Despite the looming challenges and industry consolidation that are expected, Dr. Wachter doesn’t believe there will be any shortage of demand for hospitalists.
“I think in most circumstances, [hospitalists are a protected] profession, given the complexity, the high variations, and the dependence that it still has on seeing the patient, talking to the patient, and talking to multiple consultants,” he said. “It’s a pretty hard thing to replace with technology. Overall, the job situation is pretty bright.”
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