RoS: Review of Systems

Today we’re discussing a paper published in the January 2017 issue of Birth titled: How do pregnant women use quality measures when choosing their obstetric provider? by Rebecca A. Gourevitch MS, Ateev Mehrotra MD, MPH, Grace Galvin MPH, Melinda Karp MBA, Avery Plough BA, Neel T. Shah MD, MPP. The researchers utilized an online forum for pregnant women, Ovia Pregnancy to survey women about how and why they chose their obstetric provider. Interestingly, they found that most women did not utilize quality measures such as c-section rate or obstetric infection rates when choosing a provider. These fascinating findings were widely covered in the media and led to a great discussion. Please have a listen! 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 journal clubs and who we should have on to talk about their work. We look forward to hearing from you, and thanks for listening!

This week, we are joined by Lisa Sanders. You may recognize her name from the monthly “Diagnosis” column that she writes for the New York Times Magazine. She writes about unusual cases and diagnostic dilemmas, exploring both a patient’s experience of disease but also their journey through the healthcare system. She is the author of a book exploring similar themes, Every Patient Tells a Story. Her column was the inspiration for the popular TV show House, and she served as a technical advisor for the show. Dr. Sanders is an associate professor of medicine and a clinician educator in the primary care internal medicine residency program at Yale University School of Medicine. Today, we talk about her journey in medicine, going from outsider to insider in medicine, and using English rather than medicalese. She talks about what it is like to live in a world of zebras when most of us are used to horses, and how she finds her fantastic cases. Lastly, she shares what it is like to work as a technical advisor on a hit TV show. Send your interesting cases to Dr. Sanders for her column: lisa.sandersmdATgmail.com. 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.

Today we are joined by Dr. Dennis Dimitri, the immediate past-president of the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS) and current chair of the society’s Task Force on Opioid Prescribing and Physician Communication, to discuss supervised injection facilities, or SIFs. A SIF is a location where individuals may use illegal drugs under the supervision of a medical professional ready to assist in case of an overdose requiring treatment. Later this month, the MMS will vote on whether to advocate for a task force to assess the feasibility of a pilot SIF in the state of Massachusetts. If the proposal is approved, the MMS will become the first statewide physician organization in the Bay State to advocate for such a pilot program. We discuss with Dr. Dimitri what it would mean should the MMS advocate for SIFs. We review the evidence on the effect of SIFs on rates of fatal overdose, uptake of Substance Use Disorder treatment, and rates of transmission of HIV and HCV. We talk about the ethical considerations of such a program, whether SIFs enable behaviors harmful to people’s health or they represent harm reduction, and the complex legal considerations involved with a potential pilot program. Major events of the opioid epidemic in the last few years, such as business owners planning for the possibility of overdose in bathrooms and a recent HIV outbreak stemmed by a needle exchange program in Indiana, raise the potential benefits of SIFs. If you’re interested in reading more, check out recent guest Dr. Sarah Wakeman‘s compassionate and evidence-based case for SIFs in this recent NEJM article. You can also listen to our past episode Dr. Jessie Gaeta on the SPOT program (supportive place for observation and treatment) when she also gave her thoughts on SIFs. Dr. Dimitri is a family physician and Vice Chair of the Department of Family Medicine at University of Massachusetts and the UMass Memorial Medical Center. What do you think? In the face of the opioid epidemic, could pilot SIFs in the US also reduce overdose deaths as in Canada and Australia? Tweet us your thoughts at @rospodcast or leave a comment on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems.  Or, drop us a line directly at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you – and thanks for listening. Graphic from of Centers for Disease Control, Opioid Overdose.

This week we are joined by Seth Berkowitz to talk about his research examining the associations between food insecurity and health outcomes. Seth is a primary care physician, Instructor of Medicine, and is on faculty in the Division of General Internal Medicine and the Diabetes Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Seth’s research interests include population management, food insecurity, cost-related medication underuse and the impact of adverse social circumstances on chronic disease management. His goal is to develop and disseminate interventions and care delivery models that address social and economic needs. Today he joins us to talk about a recent collaboration, funded by an award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Evidence for Action Program, with Community Servings. Community Servings is a Boston-based non-profit organization dedicated to bringing medically tailored meals to chronically ill adults. The study aims to assess whether individuals receiving the medically tailored meals have lower rates of inpatient hospitalization, ED utilization, and medical expenditures. You can find a piece co-authored by Seth and David Waters, the CEO of Community Servings here, and the Health Affairs article Seth and I talked about examining the effect of eliminating use of SNAP, or food stamps, for sugary sweetened beverages here. Lastly, 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.  

On this week’s journal club, David Rosenthal, Audrey Provenzano, and Thomas Kim discuss Less AND More are Needed to Assess Primary Care, which was recently published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine by Rebecca Etz, PhD, Martha M. Gonzalez, BS, E. Marshall Brooks, PhD, and Kurt C. Stange, MD PhD. The study utilized surveys to assess the lacuna between current quality measures and attributes of high quality primary care, and make the case that as policymakers and payers work to reduce the administrative burden of quality measurement more attention should be paid to measuring domains of high quality primary care. What do you think? How do you know good primary care when you see it? How should the quality of primary care be assessed? 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 journal clubs and who we should have on to talk about their work. We look forward to hearing from you, and thanks for listening!

This week we are joined by Andrew Schutzbank, the Vice President of Product and Technology at Iora Health. His passion for revolutionizing health care began as a medical student at Tulane in pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans and continued during his Internal Medicine & Primary Care residency at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He writes at schutzblog.com and joins us today to talk his work at Iora Health. We discuss how the idea of completely starting over brought him to Iora Health after his residency, how Iora Health’s model works and how they navigate risk, the central role of Health Coaches in the care team, what challenges Iora is still grappling with, about Iora Health’s novel EHR, Chirp, and finish up with his reflections on how software development and patient care are similar. Please rate and review us on itunes or stitcher, 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 publishing the show a few days early to bring you a timely AHCA and ACA update. We are joined once again by Emma Sandoe, a PhD candidate in Health Policy & Political Analysis at Harvard University, for a discussion of the AHCA, the most recent attempt to repeal the ACA. You can find our prior episode with Emma, about the ACA, here. Prior to starting her PhD program, Emma spent six years in Washington, DC working on the passage and implementation of the ACA. She served as the spokesperson for Medicaid and HealthCare.gov at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and worked on ACA coordination at the HHS Budget Office. We start with a summary of what happened this week and what were key factors in the ACHA’s demise (2:45), in particular the key Essential Health Benefits (9:00), talk about the future of the ACA (14:05), and ways that opponents of the law may try to sabotage it’s success over the next few years (15:25), and finally how lawmakers might address some of the very real problems with the law (16:57). It turns out that healthcare reform is complicated, and advocacy does work as this Washington Post article shows. Listen to a show all about block grants and per capita caps on Medicaid featuring Matt Broaddus of the Center on Budget and Priorities here. 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, 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.

On today’s Journal Club, we discuss a paper published in Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2016, entitled Association Between Patient-Centered Medical Homes and Adherence to Chronic Disease Medications, by Julie Lauffenburger and colleagues. The North Carolina Medicaid study that Thomas mentions can be found here, and an interesting systematic review of strategies to improve medication adherence from 2012 here. If you enjoy the show, 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. Or, you can email us at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you. And thanks for listening.  

Today we are joined by Sarah Wakeman to talk about substance use disorders, one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. Sarah is the Medical Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Substance Use Disorder Initiative. She designs systems of care that draw on the strengths of communities to care for patients and residents with addictions. Sarah also practices in the Adult Medicine Department of the MGH Charlestown HealthCare Center. We talk about the importance of language and discourse on the care for patients with substance use disorders (4:00), how an approach of compassion has proven more effective than the popularized tough love style (7:30) and how rewarding it can be to witness a patient have a Lazarus moment (10:00) in a journey to recovery. We also talk about the very real challenges of caring for this patient population (13:00), the complexities and power dynamics of monitoring (16:15), and what needs to be done to turn around the epidemic (20:45). You can find the landmark report on the opioid epidemic from our Surgeon General Vivek Murthy here, which is full of helpful information on this topic. 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 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

This week we are joined by Matt Broaddus to talk about block granting Medicaid, which is a major health policy change that the Trump administration plans to pursue in the coming months. Matt is a Research Analyst in the Health Division at The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan research and policy institute in Washington DC. His policy, research, and analytical work is conducted in the areas of Medicaid and the State Child Health Insurance Programs. We start with an overview of the Medicaid program, the largest insurance program in the US. We touch on the possible benefits of block granting (19:00), and how it may affect other industry stakeholders such as health systems, hospitals, community health centers, and insurers that offer Medicaid managed care products (23:20). Lastly we discuss another block granted program, CHIP and why many see it as a successful block grant program (29:00), and one other suggestion that has been made for Medicaid reform, per-capita funding (32:45). You can find the article we mentioned by Sara Rosenbaum here, as well as some additional resources on block grants from Kaiser Health News and The Commonwealth Fund. 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. Photo: President Lyndon B Johnson surrounded by supporters and advisors signing Medicare into law.

This week we’re excited to bring you a journal club episode, highlighting a study published in the September 2016 issue of JAMA by Brian Powers and colleagues Scott Rhinefort and Sachin Jain from Caremore Health, entitled NonEmergency Medical transportation, Delivering care in the Era of Lyft and Uber. Powers and colleagues report on their pilot study of Caremore Health patients utilizing Uber and Lyft for non-emergency medical transportation to and from appointments. 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.

Today our guest is Jessie Gaeta, the Chief Medical Officer of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. She is a leading advocate for supportive housing for chronically homeless individuals, and has led BHCHPs efforts in responding to the opiate use disorder and overdose crisis, which is what we discussed. Dr. Gaeta and her colleagues found themselves confronting the reality of opiate overdose as the leading cause of death among Boston’s homeless individuals day after day on their campus. In reaction to this, Gaeta and her colleagues opened SPOT, or Supportive Place for Observation and Treatment – a space within their building where individuals can come after using to ride out a high while being monitored by a nurse for overdose, and for opiate reversal if necessary. Photo: Jessie Gaeta, MD

We are joined this week by Andrew Morris-Singer, a general internist and founder of Primary Care Progress. Primary Care Progress is a national non-profit organization dedicated to building a stronger primary care system. Working with current and future healthcare professionals from across disciplines and career stages – from students and faculty to providers and health systems leaders – PCP offers leadership development and support that emphasizes relational skills, individual resiliency, and advocacy. Andrew has a unique background as a community organizer with more than 15 years of experience. He is a lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Family Medicine at OHSU and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah. He currently sees patients in Portland, Oregon. On the show, we talk about relational leadership,  advocacy and activism in primary care. Photo: Andrew Morris-Singer MD