Just how screwed up is the US medical system?

Let me count the ways.

Here are three recent stories that highlight what's wrong with our medical system.

An in-depth report by the Tampa Bay Times found that hospitals in Florida are charging exorbitant fees for patients arriving at trauma centers. It led with an account of a patient who spent 40 minutes in a Fort Pierce trauma center before being transferred to another institution for a higher level of care. After some diagnostic tests were done, he was on his way. The tab for the 40 minutes? $32,727.

The Times found that the average charge for a trauma center activation was over $10,000 and the highest was $33,000. For-profit hospitals tended to charge the most. These charges were billed regardless of nature of the injuries, be they minor cuts or abrasions. And as is customary today, the uninsured were charged the full amounts.

Hospital administrators admitted that the charges were based on what other hospitals charged and had no relationship to what resources were used. The fees did not include bills for physician services, which were separate.

Televised live surgery: Would you want to be the patient?

"Defibrillation, defibrillation, where is the defibrillator? We did a mistake while talking," said a cardiologist when a patient went into ventricular fibrillation during a live broadcast of a percutaneous coronary intervention at a meeting in Europe last year.

Before it was recognized by the operators, the complication was identified by members of a panel and an audience who were watching the procedure remotely.

The Medscape article with a link to the video of the procedure is available here.

Live broadcasting of procedures—is it really educational; is it just self-promotion; is it marketing?

Several societies have published guidelines for live broadcasts of operations and procedures, and some papers have discussed the ethics of the practice. I won't get into those areas.

Here are some things to consider.

How to select surgical residents: The evidence

On Twitter a while ago, a medical student asked me how surgical program directors select new residents. Then a discussion arose among some academic surgeons on the same topic. Someone suggested that medical school grades were the best way to tell whether an applicant would be a successful resident.

The fact is that we aren't really sure what the best way to choose residents is.

First, here's what we really do.

Gallbladder surgery goes back to the future in China

Chinese surgeons claim taking out just the gallstones without removing the gallbladder works well for most patients.

There were 65 patients with gallstones, 61 of whom underwent successful minimally invasive surgery for removal of just the stones leaving the gallbladder in place. The other four patients had laparoscopic cholecystectomies for various technical reasons. After an average follow-up of 26 months, the stone recurrence rate was 4.9% (3 cases).

Not mentioned in the abstract but noted in the methods section of the full article is that all patients were given a 3-month course of ursodiol postoperatively. The authors said it "adjusts the abnormal lipid metabolism in the gut-liver axis and prevents stone recurrence." This statement contains some truth up until the word "and." It's not clear how a short course of ursodiol would help.

Before the advent of laparoscopic cholecystectomy, doctors tried dissolution with ursodiol as a primary treatment. It worked 30-80% of the time for pure cholesterol stones, not those that were pigmented or calcified. About 50% of the time the gallstones recurred after the medication was stopped if the follow-up was long enough, that is, at least 7 years. [I had to go back to 1988 for this reference.]

Well over 100 years ago when open gallbladder surgery was first attempted, surgeons soon learned that removing the stones was inadequate treatment due to a high rate of recurrence.

Since the gallstone removal procedure involved general anesthesia and laparoscopy with two 10 mm and two 5 mm ports anyway, it makes absolutely no sense to just remove the stones. Most laparoscopic cholecystectomies are done with one 10 mm and three 5 mm ports so there is one less large incision which decreases the risk of postoperative hernias.

Here are some more issues.

Preoperatively, only 26 of the patients in the series had biliary colic. Gallstones with "atypical upper gastrointestinal symptoms" were present in 34, and 5 had no symptoms. Surgeons in the US generally would not have operated on patients in the latter two categories.

No mention was made of the duration of the operation, which involves laparoscopy with the 4 ports as noted above, insertion of a choledochoscope into the gallbladder, grasping the stones with a basket an unstated number of times, irrigation, and suture closure of the gallbladder wall.

The authors also that said except for the three recurrences of stones, gallbladder function was normal postoperatively. This was determined by ultrasonography after a fatty meal which took place every 6 months postop.

The three reoperations were done when stones were found by the ultrasound. Of those three, the authors said, "One patient remained asymptomatic, 1 patient experienced biliary colic, and the other patient had non-specific upper gastrointestinal symptoms (flatulence and dyspepsia)."

I don't see this procedure catching on here in the US. Do you?

UPDATE 3/25/14: See a follow-up post on this subject here.

"Medical errors kill hundreds of thousands each year in the US"

How about that headline?

It appeared on RT.com, "the first Russian 24/7 English-language news channel which brings the Russian view on global news."

The story, which originally ran in November of 2013, was resurrected again on Twitter yesterday. It's subject was a paper that claimed as many as 440,000 patients die from medical errors in the United States every year.

Back in September, I criticized the study because it assumed that every death was both preventable and caused by a medical error. Neither assumption is correct. It also extrapolated the doomsday figures from only four other papers describing just 38 deaths.

In that post I said, "Inflating the incidence of these problems does nothing but further erode the already shaky confidence of the public in the medical profession. And creating the impression that such events are totally preventable leads to unrealistic expectations and unachievable goals."

So why am I bringing this up again?

Take a look at a few of the comments from the RT.com story [printed verbatim]:

Old news, as many as a million die each year cause of doctor errors. Thats why their malpractice insurance is so high. Legal unintentional homicide.

It's convenient to claim such deaths are errors but a great many are deliberate. They know such incidents will not be investigated as crimes. It's very easy to conceal a murder if no one is looking. The medical system is completely corrupt.

if they'd stop getting high in med school and pay more attention maybe this wouldnt happen. then there is their attitudes. Heaven forbid anyone needs medical care, that's for sure.

According to CDC, medical errors is not even a category of death, but they published research that indicates drunk drivers kill about 10,000 yearly. If that is correct, then doctors kill almost twice that many every hour of every day -. MADD should be mad about DEADLY DOCTORS. You are 40 times more likely to be killed by a deadly doc than you are by a drunk driver. And yet - where is the "funding" for this deadly phenomena?

I know those who comment on the Internet usually do not represent the views of rational individuals, but it infuriates the hell out of me that the 440,000 deaths from medical errors estimate, which is clearly wrong, is repeatedly trumpeted all over the place and so readily believed.

By the way, the paper appeared in the Journal of Patient Safety, which recently underwent an editorial change due to a kickback scandal involving former editor Dr. Charles Denham. That's another story (here).

Do doctors and hospitals make mistakes? Yes. Can we improve? Yes. Does it help to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem? Emphatically, no.

Single-incision vs. standard 4-port laparoscopic cholecystectomy: Part 2

Here's another paper that shows why reading only an abstract can sometimes be misleading.

A prospective trial (abstract here) of 49 patients randomized to single-incision laparoscopic cholecystectomy (SILC) vs. 51 who had standard 4-port laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) found that average operative times were 63.5 ± 21.0 minutes for the SILC compared to 43.8 ± 24.2 minutes for those who had LC, and hospital charges were also more than $4000 higher for the SILC patients—both significant differences with p values < 0.0001.

Medical and surgical supplies were the major factors contributing to the increased charges for SILC.

Other than a significantly larger number of females in the SILC group, the patients were similar in baseline characteristics.

Other important considerations such as postoperative pain, hospital length of stay (an average of 24 hours or less for both operations), use of analgesics, cosmetic appearance of the wounds, rates of incisional hernia, and quality of life were similar. Average follow-up was 16 months in both groups. The authors concluded that there was no advantage to SILC.

Since this paper supports my bias against single-incision surgery, I was going to tout it as yet another negative paper like a recent meta-analysis (here) from a group in Croatia showing absolutely no advantage for SILC.

But this sentence from the "Methods" section of the paper foiled my plan. "Before partaking in the study, each surgeon developed his or her SILC technical skills in a laboratory setting and demonstrated proficiency during 5 SILCs under the supervision of a surgeon with experience on more than 50 SILC cases."

This was not mentioned in the abstract.

Are you surprised that a surgeon that might take longer to do SILC, an operation done only 5 times before, than LC, which each of the surgeons had probably done hundreds of times? Although the mean operative duration was longer for SILC, it is a "straw man" in statistical parlance. This may not detract from the rest of the results but certainly has to be considered.

As noted by the authors, the study was underpowered (that is, there weren't enough patients) to detect differences in some of the other outcomes due to difficulty recruiting subjects.

Of 946 patients offered enrollment in the study, only 103 consented. Patients declined to participate either because the surgeon explained that he had done more standard LC procedures, or the patients opted for the SILC because of its supposed cosmetic advantage.

The authors, based at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, should be commended for their honesty in explaining their inexperience with SILC to potential subjects of the trial and wonder if other surgeons who perform SILC do this.

This paper also highlights the problems associated with attempts to conduct randomized prospective studies involving new surgical procedures.

Bottom line: The extra costs associated with SILC are not worth it.

Part 1 of this 2-part series on SILC appeared on Tuesday, 2/18.

Universal medical licensing for doctors—a good idea that will never happen

Some well-intentioned people at the Center for American Progress say that the concept of individual state medical licenses is outdated, and states should recognize each others' licenses.

On the Health Affairs Blog, they listed many convincing reasons for this plan such as the streamlining of some requirements—many of which are unique to each state, the consolidation of such things as background checks and paperwork, decreasing costs to physicians, the fact that individual licensing has hindered the development of telemedicine, difficulty in credentialing physicians trying to help out in disasters, delays at best averaging 2 to 3 months to obtain a license in another state, and others.

On Twitter the idea was endorsed by Dr. Ashish K. Jha, a health policy researcher at Harvard. However, he wondered whether state boards would tolerate the loss of income. To me, the answer is simple. No.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of income the states receive, consider these figures.

According to the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) as of 2012, there are approximately 878,000 MDs and DOs with active licenses in the United States. This includes 142,423 (16.8%) who have active licenses in two states, and 50,454 (5.9%) with licenses in three.

The average cost of a medical license and yearly renewal in each state is about $400. I was unable to determine exactly how many states require yearly renewal, but a spot check suggests that it is well over half.

I'll do the math. Using the FSMB data, there are about 192,000 doctors with active licenses in two or three states. If states recognized valid licenses from other states, they would lose about $100,000,000 in yearly revenue. (142,423 docs would no longer have to pay for one additional license and 50,454 for two additional licenses [50,454 x 2] x $400.) And to yield all medical licensing to the feds, the states would lose another $351,200,000 (878,000 x $400) every year.

The state medical boards probably couldn't even make the decision independently. Another figure which I could not obtain is how many states funnel medical licensing income into their general funds instead of using the money to investigate complaints about doctors. I know some states do so for sure, including Connecticut and Texas.

It seems many of these fees are really taxes disguised as licensing costs.

Yes, universal medical licensing is a great idea, but the states will never give up this money.