While significant progress has been made in improving cancer survival rates—as evidenced by a drop in cancer deaths in the U.S.—the number of new cases continues to increase. Experts say far too many patients receive inferior care. Mistakes in care can be fatal, and yet some people do not receive enough treatment, while others receive too much or the wrong kind.
“It’s quite surprising, but the quality of cancer care in America varies dramatically,” Stephen B. Edge, MD, chairman of surgery at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo told The New York Times in a 2007 article. “It’s scary how much variation there is.”
Government and medical groups acknowledge that the quality of care is uneven. In 1999, a report by the Institute of Medicine said, “For many Americans with cancer, there is a wide gulf between what could be construed as the ideal and the reality of their experience with cancer care.” The institute noted that there was no national system to provide consistent quality. Rates of concordance with clinical guidelines vary across different types of cancer care, patients and institutions. The New York Times, in that same article from 2007 said, “Cancer patients lose in a maze of uneven care.” Decisions for consumers can be agonizing, in part, because the quality of cancer care varies among doctors and hospitals.
The foundation for this journey is a platform of combined administrative claims and clinical data, allowing for sophisticated analytics that measure cost, outcomes, and guideline adherence.
It is impossible to improve what cannot be measured or to measure what hasn’t been defined. Take, for example, the topic of healthcare quality. Everyone wants quality, but everyone’s keeping score differently.
A challenge for payers
Payers are challenged with both the financial burden of cancer, and ensuring that the members in their network are receiving the highest quality care. Cancer quality measures and guidelines, such as those endorsed through the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) are more complex, and require the addition of clinical data for accurate reporting. Combined clinical and administrative data analytics will facilitate improvements in the care received by cancer patients and its cost efficiency at a level of granularity and precision not currently available with administrative data alone.
Payers are looking for answers to the following questions:
Are members in my network receiving the highest quality care?
Which providers in my network are adhering to clinical treatment guidelines and to what degree?
How is my plan performing compared to other plans when it comes to providing quality care?
How can I identify areas of wide variation and prioritize messages to my members and providers?
How can I adjust my benefit design or payment strategy to encourage quality care?
Benchmarking drives impact
According to the American Productivity & Quality Center, “. . . benchmarking (is) . . . ‘the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices and processes and processes from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance.”
Benchmarking can be used for many purposes, including healthcare coordination and delivery, medical management programs, information sharing programs, and quality improvement. Of course, the main purpose is comparison: application of data for the delivery of care for better outcomes.
Benchmarking drives impact in the areas of quality and cost of care. Quality is defined as enhanced clinical data, such as disease state for comparison of actual treatment to the NCCN guidelines (the recognized standard in oncology care). Cost of care is evaluated using episode of care units, risk assessment technologies, and evidence-based rules regarding cost-effectiveness and benchmarks from a national database. The benefit is education, consumer and provider, guideline concordance and cost of care analysis including drug therapies and treatment gaps.
Benchmarking typically begins with administrative (claims) data. Administrative data alone provides a limited view of quality of care but has become the standard. This data is used as a proxy for performance measures and provides only a partial view. This data, however, cannot be categorized to what matters in oncology, such as stage, tumor status, node status, and metastasis status which include the initial and treatment status.
Claims data analysis issues:
Data reasonableness
Comprehensive
Data quality
Incurred VS. paid
Incomplete data – physician group
Prospective VS retrospective
There is agreement that the combination of administrative and clinical data is a better solution, but the optimal solution also includes comparison to the clinical (NCCN) guidelines. This concept, administrative data, plus clinical data compared to guidelines can be utilized in care management, disease management, and pharmaceutical use. Clinical data allows a more robust view and comparison to treatment protocols.
For example, with administrative data only, we know that a breast cancer patient has had a physician visit and an annual mammogram. With clinical data, hormone therapy can be identified. The fact that this treatment is not recommended can only be identified by comparison to the NCCN clinical guidelines. This is an example of care management.
This example also applies as compared to drug use that is or is not part of the NCCN drug compendium. Several payers are only reimbursing physicians for those drugs on the drug compendium.
The United Health Group (UHG) has implemented a new program to collect oncology data for colon, breast, rectal and lung cancer. The clinical data collected is allowing UHG to accurately measure and assess the type of care the patient is receiving. Only information necessary to classify patients into clinically similar groups for assessing the care provided against evidence-based quality and efficiency is being collected. One result of this program has already addressed Herceptin cost, and appropriate usage. The data illustrated that 12% of Herceptin users were not been tested for HER2 status or had an under-expressed HER2 status. Utilizing this information, a new program was implemented requiring over-expressed HER2 status test result submission prior to initial Herceptin claim payment. This program has generated a reduction of in-appropriate Herceptin claims, with an annual savings of $10 million realized. For one case, the cost of treatment can be as much as $80,000 annually. This is for the fully insured HMO membership of UHC.
UHG also expects $10 million in annual savings in oncology spend for drugs ordered and not on the NCCN drug compendium. All oncology related pharmacy claims are evaluated against the NCCN drug compendium which is utilized as the standard.
Another example is the use of Erythropoietin (EPO) which was being prescribed for patients whose blood cell level did not warrant use of the drug. The program was implemented whereby the hematocrit level results are submitted with each claim prior to the claim payment. This resulted in 35% reduction in the EPO spend.
Data leads to improved value
This effort – the collaboration of payer, employer and provider data creates a comprehensive source to support performance measurement resulting in improved value.
It is not enough to compare to the NCCN guidelines, but the need is to create rules to utilize for the comparison and application. Rules can be created in the areas of disease management, care patterns, and medication adherence.
Collaborative oncology management
A solid feedback/reporting/evaluation loop can be created by a phased process of selected oncology reporting measures aligned through the use of data. One natural progression is benchmarking against regional or national norms.
Given these challenges, initiatives for benchmarking can follow several steps:
1. Evaluate administrative data claims set to provide analytics and interpretation on the top gaps in care for Oncology
2. Compare payers data (member experience) and (claims data) against regional and/or national data.
3. Create a gap analysis and strategic plan with recommendations to target areas for focus.
4. Define the business case for expansion of data collection capabilities to include clinical data beyond the administrative data set. Determine the analytic tool to compare this data.
5. Define the data collection options to engage physicians in the data collection process
6. Marry both the administrative and clinical data for analysis and comparison.
7. Identify options to include clinical guidelines, such as the NCCN guidelines to ensure patients are receiving appropriate treatment.
Conclusion
In today’s world, with an eye toward value-driven healthcare, all stakeholders (patient, providers and insurers) are increasingly demanding that healthcare be based on documented clinical knowledge. The application of evidence-based guidelines holds the promise of increasing consistency, reduction in medical errors leading to faster, more predictable, higher quality and less costly patient recovery.
Marybeth Regan is an expert in disease and care management. She has written numerous articles on strategies for care and disease management. She may be reached at mb@yleen.com. Robin Randall-Lewis is an expert in consumerism. She may be reached at robin.randall-lewis@Optumhealth.com.
American Well, a telehealth company, has developed a comprehensive online consult system that allows physicians to chat via Web video, review a patient's record, write a prescription, and make a referral. The company business model involves partnering with payers to set reimbursement rates for online consults. Doctors who choose to work with American Well can sign on whenever they want and see patients who are looking for an online visit. The company recently announced its first big customer: HMSA, Hawaii's Blue Cross Blue Shield provider, which has just under a million members and is the state's biggest insurer.
Michigan-based system St. John Health has announced it would downsize two Detroit emergency facilities to urgent care centers by July 1. About 50 full and part-time staff at the Detroit Riverview and Conner Creek Village sites are affected by the change, though nearly all will be offered jobs within the system, said Bob Hoban, chief strategy officer for St. John. Riverview, a 270-bed hospital that closed in June 2007, will retain its pharmacy and X-ray services. Conner Creek will continue to house a variety of health and mental health programs.
University of Washington Medical Center is one of eight hospitals worldwide testing a surgical checklist unveiled by the World Health Organization. The checklist also includes items from a statewide project, the Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program. With $1.35 million from the state Life Sciences Discovery Fund, UW Medical Center doctors are signing up hospitals to collect and share details about what surgeons do in operating rooms and how patients do afterward, and to use checklists to improve.
Major health groups that had backed California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's effort to extend medical coverage to all state residents have turned against him, saying his proposed budget cuts would swell the number of uninsured people by 1 million. The coalition includes Catholic Healthcare West, the state's largest private hospital chain; the Service Employees International Union; the consumer advocacy groups AARP and Health Access California; and insurers Kaiser Permanente and Health Net. Those groups last year pressed lawmakers to approve a $15-billion insurance expansion plan favored by Schwarzenegger.
My sense is that many of the attendees here are skeptical of that claim viscerally, but their minds—and their heavy attendance at consumer-oriented sessions here at HFMA-ANI—betray them.
Maybe it's just curiosity, but I don't think so. I think they want to know whether this coming horde of consumers is just a bunch of hype or not.
Well, by the time that's clear, it will probably be too late to do much about it. Steve Case, the head of Revolution Health, gave the keynote speech yesterday and despite his admitted lack of knowledge about the inner workings of healthcare, he knows how to market to consumers and to give consumers what they want.
It's important to note history to skeptics about consumerism in healthcare. Consumers have only outsourced their healthcare for the past couple of generations. Prior to Medicare's advent in 1965, if you didn't have employer-based healthcare, you paid for it out of pocket. Healthcare is complicated, but perhaps not so complicated that the forces of the free market can't have a big impact. Healthcare, Case says, will be one of the last industries to shift to a business model by which the consumer will shape winners and losers in the future.
For now, consumers are nibbling around the edges, but it won't always be so. Another conference presenter, Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, has done reams of research into what consumers want in healthcare and he's convinced that healthcare is a consumer market now. Maybe not for procedures, but in terms of wellness and other "integrated" medicine, it's already there. Are you managing to yesterday's model, he asks? More is spent on so-called "alternative medicine" than on primary care. That's striking, and it's a big missed opportunity if you're not trying to figure out how you're going to tap into that market.
It's a hard transition to make. Yesterday's model says your hospital should be managing to a system that ensures you're going to be paid for the procedures you currently do. For instance, Keckley says, no hospital gets paid to tell an orthopedist not to do a hip replacement. Hospitals get paid to help an orthopedist do a hip well that maybe should not have been done.
But that model isn't the only way to do it anymore. Capital allocation is perhaps the most fraught with danger. Should a hospital or system spend $100 million on a new patient tower or should it spend that huge capital allocation on research and development in consumer-oriented care systems? To many of you, the answer is obvious. You're going to get paid tomorrow under today's model for that investment in stuff like the new patient tower. But will that be true in 10 years? Or 20 or 30? That's how long it takes to pay off that new patient tower. It might be the right answer today but it may not be the right answer forever. Allina, in Minnesota, for instance, is spending on consumer R&D. That means that money isn't available to be spent on some project that boasts a lot of cranes and bricks and mortar.
I don't pretend to know what the right answer is for you and your hospital. But your consumers do. You should get to know them. They're getting to know you, whether you like it or not.