RoS: Review of Systems

Jeffrey Brenner is best known for his ground-breaking work with high-need patients in Camden, New Jersey, where he founded the Camden Coalition and changed how we all think about caring for this subset of our patients. He joins us this week and talks with us about how a shooting and subsequent relationship with the Camden police led him to a physician breakfast club and then the coalition; what it was like to catapult to fame after being featured in Atul Gawande’s hotspotter article in The New Yorker; his decision to join United Health Care to continue his work caring for the most vulnerable patients; and what he thinks the future of primary care should look like. I’d like to thank the Harvard Center for Primary Care for helping to facilitate this interview; and just a warning in case you are listening around young ears, there is some adult language in this episode. If you enjoyed the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen. Tweet us your thoughts @RoSpodcast and leave us a message on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email me at audrey@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.  This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. This podcast episode contains adult language. Photo courtesy Jeffrey Brenner.

How many times have you treated a dental infection in your primary care office, or spent 10 minutes after a visit googling a dentist that takes your patient’s insurance? We’ve all done it too many times. There is an epidemic of dental disease in the United States – dental care is expensive and difficult to access. Mary Otto, a journalist, author, and our guest this week, has written a book called Teeth. In it, Mary explores the oral health crisis and explains its wide-reaching effects, such as decreased social mobility and fewer opportunities for employment; also, she talks about how oral health has become so segmented apart from the rest of the healthcare system and what can be done about it. Click here to find more information about Mary Otto, winner of The Studs and Ida Terkel Award, which is dedicated to supporting authors who are committed to exploring aspects of American life that are not adequately represented by the mainstream media. You can find more information about Teeth here. You can find many of Mary’s articles here. You can find Dr. Satcher’s landmark report, Oral Health in America, here. If you enjoyed the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen. Tweet us your thoughts @rospodcast and leave us a message on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email me at audrey@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Images courtesy of Mary Otto.

David Rosenthal, Thomas Kim, and Audrey Provenzano discuss the landmark study published in Annals of Internal Medicine by Sinsky and colleagues, Allocation of Physician Time in Ambulatory Practice: A Time and Motion Study in 4 Specialties. Have you ever wondered how much time you spend each month fighting with technology or filling out VNA forms? Well, Christine Sinsky and her colleagues studied this and have some answers for us…all of which raise more fascinating questions about how we practice medicine. Tweet us your thoughts @RoSpodcast, and send us feedback at audrey@rospod.org!

Can we solve chronic disease using a medical model? In this episode, the first in a series with speakers from the 2017 second Starfield Summit, we talked with Dr. Lloyd Michener – the principal investigator of the Practical Playbook, which facilitates the integration of primary care and public health – about why primary care clinicians need to collaborate with public health agencies to tackle chronic disease, how to look at data differently to identify what’s really happening in our communities, and how primary care can be a better partner in community collaborations. Lloyd Michener is a professor of Community and Family Medicine at Duke, the department’s former chair, and one of the country’s pre-eminent authorities on reducing health disparities through community health, community engagement, and practice redesign. Lloyd also leads the technical support service of the BUILD Health Challenge (bold, upstream, integrated, local, and data-driven), a national competitive award program aimed at improving hospital, community, and public health collaborations that improve health. He has also served as President of the Association for Prevention Teaching & Research, Chair of the Council of Academic Societies and as a member of the Board of the Association of Academic Medical Colleges. You can also learn more about his personal and professional journey here. The Starfield Summit brought together leaders in primary care, clinicians, experts, advocates, patients, and community members – this year in order to collaborate in paving paths towards health equity and social accountability. The Summit was primarily sponsored by Family Medicine for America’s Health, Oregon Health & Science University, and OCHIN.  Stay tuned in upcoming weeks for more speakers from the Starfield Summit. This interview was edited lightly for clarity. Photo credit: Duke

We are tremendously lucky to welcome health policy expert John McDonough as our guest this week. He has had a long and distinguished career in public service as well as a scholar and advocate. We talk about his work as a member of the MA state legislature for 13 years (discussed in his book Experiencing Politics), as well as his efforts between 2008 and 2010, when he served as a Senior Advisor on National Health Reform to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions where he worked on the development and passage of the Affordable Care Act. He wrote about his experiences during that time in Inside National Health Reform. He is now a Professor of Public Health Practice in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and you can find his academic publications here, and a collection of his lay-press publications on his blog. If you enjoy the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen. Tweet us your thoughts @RoSpodcast and leave us a message on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email me at audrey@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Photo courtesy of John McDonough.

Today we’re joined by Lauren 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! This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This week Thomas Kim, David Rosenthal, and Audrey Provenzano talk about three recently published manuscripts for a lightning round edition of Journal Club. Thomas shares a paper by Bynum et al, Outcomes in Older Adults with Multimorbidity Associated with Predominant Provider of Care Specialty, examining outcomes among patients primarily cared for by specialists vs primary care providers. David shares a paper describing a novel technology for agenda setting and evaluation of social determinants of health by Wittink et al, entitled Patient priorities and the doorknob phenomenon in primary care: Can technology improve disclosure of patient stressors? (H/T Primary Care Progress for tweeting it!). Lastly, Audrey shares a paper entitled Cost effectiveness of emergency department initiated treatment for opioid dependence by Susan Busch et al, which is a cost-effectiveness analysis of an RCT of ED-initiated buprenorphine performed at Yale, previously featured on the podcast in an interview with Gail D’Onofrio.  If you enjoy the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen. Tweet us your thoughts @RoSpodcast and leave us a message on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email me at audrey@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.

Primary care models integrating behavioral health services are being adopted across the country. This week, we talked with two leaders at the Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC), Dr. Mark Alexakos and Dr. Kiame Mahaniah, about their experience with integration. LCHC is unique among community health centers in that it started out as a mental health counseling center, and now has the largest community health center-based behavioral health program in Massachusetts. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to integrate behavioral health services with primary care clinical services – how it can reduce the fragmentation of services to better meet the needs of patients and the demand for mental health care (2:40), why it may better position clinics participating in accountable care (7:40), what successes they’ve seen (8:45), and the resources it has required (12:28). Along the way, our guests make it clear that the staff at LCHC love working in integrated teams. You can learn more about various other models of integrated behavioral health here. Mark Alexakos MD, MPP, is the chief behavioral health officer of LCHC. He has a joint degree in medicine and public policy and developed an early interest in the interface between policy, research, and service delivery as they relate to access barriers, health disparities, and community health. Before working at LCHC, he spent seven years developing intensive, school-based mental health services that combined health promotion and prevention with quick access to behavioral health treatment in five Boston Public Schools. Kiame Mahaniah, MD, is the chief executive officer of LCHC, though at the time of this interview, he served as the chief medical officer. His passion resolves around social and restorative justice, in the context of healthcare.   His twin clinical interests are teaching—he holds an appointment at the Tufts University School of Medicine—and integrating opioid addiction treatment into the primary care/behavioral health matrix. This interview was edited lightly for length and clarity. photo credit: Lynn Community Health Center

All of us like to think that we provide high-value care for our patients; but the truth is, just like the rest of the health care system, primary care provides a lot of low value care too – and we drive a lot of overuse. John Mafi joins us this week to talk about his leading research into these thorny, complex issues. We talk about the definitions of high-value and low value care, his 2016 study in Annals of Internal Medicine examining rates of high and low value care among physicians, NPs, and PAs in the primary care setting, how practice setting may affect the delivery of high and low value care, and the essential truth that there is no free lunch in trying to solve some of the challenges in fixing primary care in the US. You can find Shah et al, which John referenced here; a recent study relevant to our conversation by Hong et al looking at clinician characteristics and frequent ordering of low-value imaging studies; and an extremely important new paper that John published recently in Health Affairs looking at the the impact of low-cost, high-volume studies on unnecessary health spending. A little bit more about our guest:  John N. Mafi, MD, MPH is an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA where he also practices and teaches. He also serves as an Affiliated Natural Scientist in Health Policy at RAND Corporation. Dr. Mafi trained in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2012, where he also served as Chief Medical Resident and completed the Harvard Medical School Fellowship in General Internal Medicine and Primary Care in 2015. Dr. Mafi’s research focuses on quality and value measurement and how electronic health records can improve the value of care. If you enjoy the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen. Tweet us your thoughts @RoSpodcast and leave us a message on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email me at audrey@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.  This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Have you ever felt lonely and overwhelmed in a clinic room with a patient whose needs are far beyond your skills and ability to meet? I have, many times, and so has our guest this week, Dr. Lori Tishler. Dr. Tishler is the Vice President of Medical Affairs at Commonwealth Care Alliance, a not-for-profit organization that cares for more than 20,000 of the most vulnerable patients in Massachusetts, duals, or individuals who have both Medicare and Medicaid. We talk about how CCA’s member-centered approach (as opposed to a physician-centered approach) has helped her feel more effective in caring for these vulnerable patients. We talk about the range of services that CCA offers, the role of their care partners, and the freedom that their financial model permits – for example, they provide 90% of care to patients in their homes. You can find the Atlantic Magazine article we referenced featuring CCA here, and find a few Health Affairs blogs featuring CCA here, and a blog post focusing on building the business case for a community paramedicine program here. A bit more about our guest: Lori Tishler is the Vice President of Medical Affairs at Commonwealth Care Alliance, a not-for-profit organization that cares for more than 20,000 of the most vulnerable patients in Massachusetts, people who have both Medicare and Medicaid.  She oversees CCA’s physicians and is involved with clinical aspects of quality, utilization, and pharmacy.  In addition, she is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and an active member of the General Medicine Faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, As a caring and connected physician leader, mentor, and educator, Dr. Tishler’s passion has been providing care for the medically and socially vulnerable and making a difference in health systems for all.   Tishler has found that the most rewarding way to help change and grow our health care systems is to mentor learners who are interested in clinical care, leadership, and innovation. Her leadership roles have extended outside of the clinic and outside of primary care.  She served on the Partners Healthcare Board of Directors, the Board of Directors for the Office for Women’s Careers, and the Board of the Schwartz Rounds while at the Brigham.  At Commonwealth Care Alliance, she teaches and presents nationally about our care model and innovations. In addition to her leadership work, she continues to provide clinical care  Tishler feels that working as a clinician informs her choices and decisions as a leader.  Outside of work, Dr. Tishler loves to spend time with her husband and teenaged daughter, to travel, read, and knit.  She is honored to have been interviewed on Review of Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen. Tweet us your thoughts @rospodcast and check out our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email us at audreyATrospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.

This week, we are discussing an article from the Journal Women’s Health Issues, entitled: Understanding High Utilization of Unscheduled Care in Pregnant Women of Low Socioeconomic Status, by Pooja Mehta, Tamala Carter, Cjloe Vinoya, Shreya Kangovi, and Sindhu Srinivas. Pooja Mehta, the lead author of the study, joins us for our conversation.  You can find the interview with Dr. David Buck referenced in our conversation here. Dr. Mehta is Director of Maternal & Women’s Health Policy for the Consortium for Health Care Transformation, and Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Systems Management and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, advising the Louisiana Department of Health and Medicaid Program. Dr. Mehta’s interests are in the use of health care delivery innovation and community-engaged accountable care models to reduce reproductive health disparities, pregnancy-associated mortality, and low-value care, and to support patients with complex health and social needs. Her research has been supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. 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 @RoSpodcastand are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at audrey@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you. Listen at the end of the episode for a promo code to receive 15% off registration fees for an upcoming conference from the Harvard Center for Primary Care: Primary Care in 2020 – Future Challenges, Tips for Today. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dr. Tom Bodenheimer is one of the world’s foremost experts in primary care re-design, having recently written about high-performing primary care clinics and the Quadruple Aim, which are articles consistently in the most-read list for the Annals of Family Medicine and among his most cited work.  We focused much of our conversation on his work visiting 23 high-performing primary care practices, what he and co-authors learned, how resident teaching sites can also be high-performing, and why we should be seeking a fourth aim in addition to IHI’s famed Triple Aim. A general internist who received his medical degree at Harvard and completed his residency at the University of California-San Francisco, Dr. Tom Bodenheimer spent 32 years in primary care practice in San Francisco’s Mission District, a primarily low-income, Latino community—ten years in community health centers and 22 years in private practice.  He is currently Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF and Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Excellence in Primary Care.  He has written extensively in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Family Medicine, and Health Affairs, on health policy and health care delivery for chronic disease management, including patient self-management, health coaching, and team-based care. He is also co-author of the books Improving Primary Care: Strategies and Tools for a Better Practice, and the health policy text book Understanding Health Policy. Listen at the end of the episode for a promo code to receive 15% off registration fees for an upcoming conference from the Harvard Center for Primary Care: Primary Care in 2020 – Future Challenges, Tips for Today. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This episode starts with a question: “what if the architectural design of an obstetric unit influenced the c-section rate in that unit?” That question occurred to obstetrician/gynecologist Neel Shah when he attended a presentation by Michael Murphy, the co-founder and executive director of Mass Design, an architectural design and research firm that focuses particularly on healthcare architecture. Neel thinks about c-section rates all the time and is a leading researcher in the field of maternal health. C-section rates vary widely throughout the US – from 7 to 70%, and where a woman delivers better predicts whether she will get a c-section than her own personal risk factors. So, Michael Murphy’s contention that “Architecture is never neutral. It either heals or hurts” stayed with Neel and inspired him to pursue a research initiative between Mass Design and his research group, Ariadne Labs. Neel Shah and two of his collaborators, Amie Shao and Deb Rosenberg, researchers and architects with Mass Design, join us to talk about their collaboration and the report they produced. Amie Shao is a director with MASS Design Group, where she oversees research focusing on health infrastructure planning and evaluation. In addition to guiding impact research for MASS built projects, she coordinated the production of National Health Infrastructure Standards for the Liberian Ministry of Health and has been involved in the design and evaluation of healthcare facilities in Haiti, Africa, and the United States. Deb Rosenberg joined MASS in 2015, with a unique background in healthcare and architecture. Throughout her career in nursing and architecture is a common ambition to promote health and well-being, and she believes that the spaces where people live, work and heal have the capacity to greatly support or restrict our human potential. Neel Shah, MD, MPP, is Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School, and director of the Delivery Decisions Initiative at Ariadne Labs. His team is currently collaborating with hospitals across the United States, and using methods from design, systems engineering, and management to reduce the epidemic of avoidable c-sections. If you enjoyed the show, please give us 5 stars wherever you listen. Tweet us your thoughts @rospodcast and check out our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Or, you can email us at audreyATrospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.

Teaching health centers (THCs) are primary care residency training sites in community-based organizations, often in federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), in contrast to traditional tertiary care hospital-based training. Federal funding for the THC program, created by the ACA in 2010 and renewed through MACRA in 2015, is set to expire on September 30, 2017. THCs may be a key part in solving the primary care workforce shortage, so we talked with Dr. Frederick Chen, Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Washington and a recent senior advisor to HRSA’s Bureau of Health Professions for the Teaching Health Center program. We review flaws in traditional methods of funding graduate medical education in the US (2:50) then discuss Freddy’s research (8:15) showing that residents trained in FQHCs are 3-4 times more likely to go work in underserved settings. He also describes the key factors in creating community health center-family medicine residency partnership (12:20). Freddy’s work led to the THC graduate medical education program, an innovative federal policy that aims to increase access to primary care where it is needed the most, and we talk about some of the early lessons since its inception (18:50). You can also find the controversial 2014 Institute of Medicine report mentioned by Freddy in our conversation here.  Finally, Freddy shares about how his academic career led him to help shape national health policy (23:07). Listen at the end of the episode for a promo code to receive 15% off registration fees for an upcoming conference from the Harvard Center for Primary Care: Primary Care in 2020 – Future Challenges, Tips for Today. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This week, we are discussing a recent article from the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, entitled: Association between process measures and mortality in individuals with opioid use disorders, by Katherine Watkins and colleagues: Susan Paddock, Teresa Hudson, Songthip Ounpraseuth, Amy Schrader, Kimberly Hepner, and Bradley Stein. We are also joined by a guest discussant, Gabriel Wishik. Gabriel Wishik is a clinician educator in general and addiction medicine, and is an instructor at Boston University and Boston Medical Center. He is the clinic medical director at Boston’s Healthcare for the Homeless Program’s largest clinical site and practices harm reduction in primary care with a population at the front lines of the current opioid epidemic. You can find the obituary we shared on the show here. 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 @RoSpodcastand are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you. Listen at the end of the episode for a promo code to receive 15% off registration fees for an upcoming conference from the Harvard Center for Primary Care: Primary Care in 2020 – Future Challenges, Tips for Today. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.