Sorry Charlie: Too Many Sharks at the Trough

There is an old analogy in healthcare that refers to the largesse of national healthcare spending as the Big Tuna. Many sharks feed off that tuna – the extension of the analogy being that many individuals and organizations financially benefit from being in the healthcare industry without adding any real value to the consumers served by the industry – patients.

This is my interpretation of an article posted by Dr. Fred Pelzman on New Year’s Day, Return the clinician to the center of the health care experience, on the KevinMD healthcare system blog. Dr. Pelzman asks what I believe should be the quintessential question of the 2015 healthcare policy debate: “Are we allowing the health care system to be transformed by people who should not be transforming health care?”

Now, it should be remembered that it was a clinician – Dr. Donald Berwick – who popularized the Triple Aim concept that came out of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement prior to the Affordable Care Act being passed. Clinicians are not exempt from thinking big thoughts and hoping to altruistically apply that thinking to achieve goals and objectives that are widely held desirable by society. So I don’t know if getting them unselectively more involved is going to lessen the incredible waste that rightly drives physicians like Dr. Pelzman crazy.

But I do know – or rather I believe, anyway – there is a finite limit of tuna available to satiate the sharks before they start feeding on the patients. It’s indignantly ironic that clinicians are being pressured to improve performance in the name of value when a great deal of the non-clinical world is only being held accountable to producing value in the abstract – and most often ex post facto.

Unquestionably, there needs to be greater connectivity between the work performed by non-clinicians and the ultimate value produced for patients. This is not going to be any easier to measure than patient outcomes’ metrics currently being explored and tested on/by clinicians. So what? Get used to it.

As I have written before, I wholeheartedly agree with those who, like Dr. Pelzman, promote the central role clinicians must play in assessing, planning and implementing healthcare public policy. But if you look at the landscape you will see there are already quite a few retired clinicians in that space, and the system is still largely a mess. So there must be more to the story.

What do you think is missing?

Cheers,
  Sparky