Friday, June 8, 2007
Pennsylvania's Lawmakers Could Learn From Texas
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Texas enacted tort reform in 2003, capping damage awards at $250,000. In an article titled "Insurance companies, doctors flock to Texas" David Hendricks passes along some facts I hope Pennsylvania legislators take to heart:
- Malpractice insurance rates have fallen an average of 21%
- The number of companies offering malpractice insurance in the state has risen from four to thirty
- Malpractice lawsuits have fallen 50%
- Doctors are coming to Texas, as evidenced by 2,250 pending applications for medical licensure
[Kevin, MD]
Thursday, June 7, 2007
At risk: vaccines - The Boston Globe
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The Boston Globe
"Certainly there is plenty of evidence to refute the notion that vaccines cause autism. Fourteen epidemiological studies have shown that the risk of autism is the same whether children received the MMR vaccine or not, and five have shown that thimerosal-containing vaccines also do not cause autism. Further, although large quantities of mercury are clearly toxic to the brain, autism isn't a consequence of mercury poisoning; large, single-source mercury exposures in Minamata Bay and Iraq have caused seizures, mental retardation, and speech delay, but not autism.
Finally, vaccine makers removed thimerosal from vaccines routinely given to young infants about six years ago; if thimerosal were a cause, the incidence of autism should have declined. Instead, the numbers have continued to increase. All of this evidence should have caused a quick dismissal of these cases. But it didn't, and now the courthas turned into a circus. The federal and civil litigation will likely take years to sort out."
[Via PointofLaw.com]
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Pennsylvania CRNA's Are After Independent Practice (Again)
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Currently pending in the Pennsylvania Legislature is House Bill 1256 to amend the state law that currently requires CRNA's to be supervised by physicians. If enacted, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists would no longer be 'supervised' but 'shall administer anesthesia in collaboration with a physician or dentist' (emphasis mine). Furthermore, such collaborating physician only needs to be available electronically (i.e. a phone call away). I'm told that this new language would essentially give CRNA's the ability to practice independently in the State of Pennsylvania.
I think this is a very, very bad idea. In a year when the Governor has made patient safety a centerpiece of his legislative agenda, telling CRNA's that they can practice without supervision seems to me to be a step in the wrong direction. CRNA's are nurses. Highly trained (and the most highly paid) advanced practice nurses, yes, but still nurses. The proposed legislation seeks a substantial change in the status quo and should not be enacted without clear proof that the quality of care Pennsylvania's residents receive will not be adversely affected.
The CRNA lobby is arguing that you really only need anesthesiologists in teaching institutions. I hope our legislators will pause to consider how silly this assertion is. I know a lot of CRNA's. A few of them are very, very good. I would let any one of my physician colleagues (that's about forty people) give my family members an anesthetic. I would only let a handful of CRNA's do the same, and then only with physician supervision immediately available.
Perhaps we should amend this bill so that only the Governor, and members of the legislature and their families will receive anesthesia only from CRNA's and without physician direction for, say, the next ten years and see how good an idea they think this is.
Pennsylvania's citizens are aging. They need physicians to evaluate them before, during, and after their surgery and anesthesia. If you're in favor of this bill, you're probably also in favor of RN First Assistants doing routine cholecystectomies and other surgeries. Those performing surgery have to try really hard to kill a patient. We just have to not pay attention for one minute.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
"Not All Hyperglycemia is the Same"
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One of my almost daily frustrations is the imprecise description of what kind of diabetes patients have. I'm often told, or see written, that a patient has 'insulin dependent diabetes' just because they are taking insulin. Dr. RW points to the second in a series of articles on diabetes in the journal Clinical Diabetes. It's a good review for me that I may use as the basis for a 'refresher' for the nurses...
[Dr. RW]
Monday, May 7, 2007
Another Obstetrics Ward in Philadelphia Plans To Close
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The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article over the weekend titled Demise of maternity wards is inducing . . . The Baby Scramble
"Blaming financial losses and a deluge of patients who previously might have gone to other, now-defunct maternity wards, Jeanes Hospital is closing its obstetrics unit May 31. Chestnut Hill Hospital is reviewing its obstetrics program as well and has not ruled out closure."
Lots of other good data in that article, too, such as the time-line for closure of other OB units in the greater Philadelphia area:
- Medical College of Pennsylvania (1997)
- Nazareth (1998)
- Germantown (1999)
- City Avenue (1999)
- Roxborough (1999)
- Warminster (2000)
- Elkins Park (2001)
- Episcopal (2001)
- Mercy Philadelphia (2002)
- Methodist (2002)
- Mercy Fitzgerald (2003)
- Parkview (2003)
- Frankford-Torresdale (2006)
- Jeanes (2007)
Pennsylvania Physician Supply Back In The News
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A recent Health Affairs article titled Changes In Physician Supply And Scope of Practice During A Malpractice Crisis: Evidence From Pennsylvania has gotten a great deal of national media attention. It's conclusion was as follows:
"...This study found that the proportions of physicians restricting their scope of practice and exiting practice in Pennsylvania were similar during and before the malpractice crisis for most high-risk specialties. The overall supply of high-risk specialists did not decrease during the crisis except in obstetrics-gynecology."
I've been thinking about this article for a while now. I've written to the lead author asking about the inclusion of medical residents-in-training in their statistics but have yet to hear back. Including residents may hide important trends. For example, new residency programs may have opened during the study period. Trading doctors who are fresh out of internship for experienced specialists is not a good deal, but the numbers as used wouldn't show this.
Another question I have is 'compared to what?' What has happened in other states during this time? According to the Dauphin County Medical Society, among the twenty most populous states, only Pennsylvania and California saw their physician supply drop during the study period. All others saw an increase of 10-20% in physician supply.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
I'm a Better Anesthesiologist Today Than A Year Ago
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At the end of this busy week I began to reflect on how this week was different than an average week would have been even a year ago. It was different both for me and for a significant number of my patients. Hopefully, it was as good for patients as it was for me.
For the first ten years after I finished my training I did not believe nerve blocks for extremity surgery were worth doing. Surgeons didn't want to wait for me to do them or for the blocks to 'set up.' Blocks failed a certain amount of the time. There were complications that just didn't happen when 'numbing the big nerve.'
My thoughts on all this changed, not because of a journal article or discussions with a colleague, but because of an article in Wired magazine. The Painful Truth was an article on the use of regional anesthesia to improve medical care to our wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Now Buckenmaier is leading a group of army doctors and nurses determined, as he puts it, "to drag the military kicking and screaming into the 21st century." His team believes the future of wartime pain control is a new form of anesthesia called a continuous peripheral nerve block, which takes a more targeted approach by switching off only the pain signals coming from the injured limb, leaving patients' vital signs and cortical functions unimpaired.
The applicability to civilian anesthesia was obvious. In my hospital, when someone gets a knee replaced, the surgeon usually blindly injects a large amount of local anesthetic in the general vicinity of the femoral nerve and we dope them up with morphine. Patients are in the hospital for three days largely for pain control issues, all the while at risk for nausea, vomiting, respiratory depression, etc.
I took a second look at regional anesthesia and decided to use it in my practice again. This week two elderly ladies had total shoulder replacements after having interscalene blocks. They were pain free for the rest of that day. Six of my patients had knee replacements after femoral and sciatic blocks. They had no pain until the next morning.
With catheter techniques, these pain-free intervals will be measured in days instead of hours. The surgeons are giving us the time to do these techniques because they are hearing about how good they are for patients at their own national meetings. My colleagues who 'didn't do blocks' have learned to do simple femoral nerve blocks and want to learn others.
It was a good week for me because I love seeing patients do well. It was a good week for my patients (whether they knew it or not) because they trusted me enough to let me poke them with a needle once or twice to make their recovery that much easier. By next year I hope to be placing catheters and doing infusions. Thanks, Trip Buckenmaier.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Pennsylvania Malpractice Numbers Ignored?
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I composed a polite letter to the editor of our local paper, the Patriot-News. It went something like this (exactly like this, actually):
"Title: Is Pennsylvania's Malpractice Crisis Solved? Maybe for trial lawyers.
Dear Editor,
Data just published by the non-profit, non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation at http://www.statehealthfacts.org/ provides facts to consider in our discussion of health care reform in Pennsylvania.
Based on data from the National Practitioner Databank, Pennsylvania ranks third in the nation in the number of paid malpractice claims per thousand physicians (http://tinyurl.com/22mppw). Pennsylvania ranks second only to New York in total payments for claims made during 2006--over $300,000,000 (http://tinyurl.com/26hh9p).
Please consider passing these facts on to your readers so that they may form their own conclusions about the state of Pennsylvania's malpractice system. I submit that being ranked second and third in the nation in two objective measures of malpractice payouts does not support those who contend that our malpractice crisis is 'over.'"
Was it published? Nope. Oh, well.
It WAS published on Sunday, April 29th, 2007,
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
PA Ranks Second in Total Dollars Paid in Malpractice Claims
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At the same website mentioned in the preceding post one can find information on total dollars paid in malpractice cases in 2006. Pennsylvania ranked second with $308,781,000 paid (second only to New York). See for yourself.
Vermont looks pretty good to me right now...
PA Ranks Third in Paid Malpractice Claims
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The Kaiser Family Foundation maintains StateHealthFacts.org, a site "designed to provide free, up-to-date, and easy-to-use health data on all 50 states". The site just published Number of Paid Medical Malpractice Claims, 2006. Pennsylvania ranks third among all states in number of malpractice claims paid per thousand physicians. See for yourself.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Acoustic Respiratory Monitoring: What Is It?
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An intriguing press release last week from Masimo (known for their motion artifact-resistant pulse oximeters) begins as follows:
"Masimo, the inventor of Pulse CO-Oximetry and Read-Through Motion and Low Perfusion pulse oximetry, reported that three new independent studies, including one presented the recent International Anesthesiology Research Society (IARS) Clinical & Scientific Congress in Orlando, concluded that Masimo Acoustic Respiratory Monitoring technology (ARM) is "at least as accurate as capnometry" and "significantly more reliable" for monitoring respiration in spontaneously breathing patients."
The release then refers to "an adhesive bioacoustic sensor applied to the patient's neck and connected to a breathing frequency monitor prototype" which in turn accurately monitors respiratory rate.
If this device does what I think it does, it will become the standard of care for post-surgical patients very rapidly. We've been looking for a way to reliably monitor respiratory rate on the floors, once patients are discharge from the recovery room. For example, a patient may receive pain medications from multiple sources, with unpredictable onsets. How do we know their maximum respiratory depression won't happen after they've been delivered to their hospital room?
A patient can receive oxycontin and celebrex orally from a surgeon before their knee replacement surgery, then more fentanyl, morphine, and versed from us (anesthesia). The surgeon may then inject bupivicaine and morphine into the joint at the conclusion of surgery (without necessarily telling the anesthesiologist). I might also do a femoral nerve block to further reduce post-op pain. All of us are trying to do right by the patient but, given the right set of circumstances, are setting them up for significant respiratory depression post-op. The ability to reliably monitor respiratory rate with this new Masimo monitor would be a huge patient safety advance.
The Society for Technology in Anesthesia abstract is here.
Monday, April 2, 2007
Skim for OS X
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A new application called Skim has been released for Mac OS X and I mention it here for readers who stuff their hard disks with pdf files of articles they have heretofore been unable to annotate electronically:
"Skim is a PDF Reader and note-taker for OS X. Skim is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF."
[Michael McCracken]
Do Specialty Hospitals Call 911 to Save Their Patients, or Transport Them?
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The New York Times has an article titled Some Hospitals Call 911 to Save Their Patients which details two cases of patients having surgery at a specialty surgical hospital, experiencing complications, and then being transferred to a medical center (where they ultimately died). The whole article is written, and certainly the title was chosen, to suggest that 911 emergency services were called in order to treat a deteriorating patient as no physicians routinely stay in-house overnight.
Although I am not familiar with the particulars of the two cases mentioned in the New York Times article, it should be known that 911 would be called for any intra-facility transfer and does not necessarily imply they were called to render care in an emergency or that care was unavailable from other professionals already there.
Isn't it interesting, though, that a patient who is has no objection to getting their care from a CRNA, nurse practitioner, physician's assistant, or other 'health care provider' (after all, it's cheaper, right?) suddenly deems it essential to have a doctor there when things start to go south? Of course they do. I would, too!
If you're flying a commercial flight and the landing gear won't deploy, you feel better knowing the pilot is a former military pilot with years of experience in 'heavies.' If your child's safety is threatened by a stranger, you feel better knowing that highly trained and qualified officers are there to protect you. If you're having surgery and things start to go bad, you want an anesthesiologist, a physician, a smart, independent thinker who doesn't get flustered or do whatever the surgeon says to do. You want me. Not someone who is cheaper, less highly trained, less experienced, someone who will do in 99% of cases.
