Strategy

How to raise healthcare IT costs without really trying

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Like anyone needs my advice as to how to do that. Go ahead, have at it. Go shopping. Shop to you drop. How much do you need? Suppose we open the coffers. How much; another million? Ten Million? Twenty-five, fifty? $100,000,000? This is a one-time offer, so make sure you ask for everything you need

What if I told you this money is available provided you correctly answer a few basic questions. Reasonable? I’d hope so for a hundred million dollars.

1. What will you do with the money that you haven’t already done?

2. Has anyone else every done that?

3. If yes, did it work for them?

4. If no, why not, and what makes you think it will work for you?

5. Will these additional funds;

5a. Get you the ARRA money?

5b. Enable you to see more patients?

5c. Help you retain and attract physicians?

5d. Increase patient safety?

6. What is your mission?

7. Why isn’t your mission the KPIs listed in question 4?

8. Are other hospitals spending the amount you are requesting?

9. Did that amount of funding allow them to meet the criteria specified in question 5?

10. If no, what makes you think you can do it?

If your CFO asked these questions, would you think them reasonable? If not, prepare 3 envelopes (see Google)

If you don’t buy the right EHR and implement it correctly, you’ve just spend a hundred million dollars to scan charts.  Somebody will be held accountable for the money.

Upgrade the coffee to Starbucks-$5. New bedpan-$50. New plasma monitors-$1,200. Knowing what you are doing—Priceless.

May I borrow your pen?

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Have I written recently I’m not a fan of technology for unless someone knows what business problem they intend to solve? It’s not so much that I have anything against any of the technology or any particular technology or EHR vendor, it’s more that I think many are misjudging what the technology will do for them, what they have to do to it, and they forget to ask themselves how to best address the problems.

Whatever do you mean? Thanks for asking—here’s an example. When the United States first started sending astronauts into space, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity.

To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 Billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300C.

The Russians used a pencil.

Have a meeting about how to best plan for and implement EHR in your hospital. One rule, all discussion should involve process, not technology. Try first to reach consensus about what to do, then look at how to do it. You may find out that all you need is a pencil.

Does reform need to be reformed?

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The following is the comment I posted to,

Kent Bottles: Is It Really Impossible to Control the Cost of Health Care in the U.S.?

Kent, your narrative should be mandatory reading for all those in Washington whose vision of reform stands in stark contrast to the piece. Then, before they are allowed to propose or vote on their vision, they should be forced to explain why their vision doesn’t address these issues.

In my non-luminary opinion, here’s where I think the reformists have failed. The notion of spending funds that don’t exist, to fix things that may not be broken, without fixing those that are could only come from Washington.

Permit me to over simplify things to make a point. When I look at healthcare, I see a three legged stool; pharma, the payors, and the providers—the three P’s. Not exactly in a pod, each working to their own benefits and operating under different business models—models which are in conflict. For example, many hospitals operate as not for profits, which conflicts with the for profit sectors.

I believe the present reform effort will increase the conflict. Why? Because the legislation is siloed—it looks a lot like the word ‘soiled’ which might also be part of the problem. The legislation does not seem designed to address healthcare as in integrated industry. The way reform is positioned, each nudge that is put to one leg of the stool will cause a reaction, an unfavorable one, to the other legs. It is a little like doing an experiment, changing multiple variables at once, and hoping for the best.

Two sides of the stool, the payors and pharma, have behemoths running the show. Among the behemoths, the business models in pharma are quite similar and the same holds for the payors.
I think it is important to distinguish between the business of healthcare (the dollars and cents) and the healthcare business (the clinical side). The provider segment is highly fragmented. There is no behemoth provider cartel. The business of healthcare, is the side most in need of reform. Each of the thousands of providers operates under their own business model. None of these businesses was designed to be interoperable—I do not use this term in the same sense being used by the ONC and CMS.

The business of healthcare, with all of its inefficiencies, is designed to operate within its four walls and across a limited geographical radius. The long term goal of healthcare reform, I believe, is to make the provider side appear as one giant services provider. Just because consolidation sort of worked for steel, the airlines, and the automotive industry does not mean it will work for delivering healthcare.

My final comment has to do with the payor side of healthcare, and I’ll start by acknowledging that this one is more than a little provocative, one for which I have not thought through a workable solution—I’ll leave that to those of you who aren’t grasping for metaphorical tomatoes to throw. I could be convinced to skip the rest of my comments if for a moment I thought that the business model of the payors was—let’s cover everyone who needs care for a fair cost. Ignore for the moment that my statement is naive.

We know that on a small scale it is possible for people to self-insure, to meet their needs without having to rely on payors. I’ll frame my final comment with a question—where is the value-add to healthcare from the payors?

Here is my issue with the current model. You want to go to the movie, you hand me ten dollars for an eight dollar ticket, and I pay the movie theater on your behalf and pocket the two dollars. In this instance I am merely the middle man, I manage the transaction. The theater gets no marginal benefit, and you get no marginal benefit.

Not complex enough? Let’s say someday millions of people want to go to the movies and a ticket will cost them eight dollars. Anticipating that, everyone pays me a dollar a day so that when the time comes they can go. On that day, I pay for movie tickets for those who want to go, pocket the difference, and I keep the money for those who don’t go.

In my small mind, that’s how I view the payor leg of the stool. I think the payors relish reform. I think the more they complain about how badly this will hurt them the more they may like it. It reminds me of the Uncle Remus story in which Brer Rabbitt pleading with Brer Bear and Brer Fox not to throw him into the briar patch.

What industry wouldn’t be salivating if they could find an additional thirty or forty million customers overnight? What if you could charge them a monthly fee and make the co-pay so high that you might not have to cover major medical claims? Does this sound absurd or does it sound a little like the mortgage banking industry? Fess for no service. I am not saying that this will happen in every case, but I do not think one can argue that this will never happen.

Circling back to how to reform reform. From my vantage point, the most advantageous reform idea would be to force multiples of payors to compete in every state. Competition could do wonders for cost control.

A final thought. Earlier this year a House committee passed legislation on “can’t fail” businesses. The Financial Services Committee voted on an amendment that would let regulators dismantle a firm, limit mergers and acquisitions, and force an end to activities deemed systemically risky. The financial industry opposed the measure, as part of legislation to overhaul Wall Street rules. This could be another opportunity for the camel—Washington—to get its nose further under the healthcare tent. There is nothing that limits the legislation to financial services. Call me a cock-eyed pessimist, but what is there to prevent Congress from deciding that the payors need to be dismantled, thereby ushering in a federal payor model? That would give them two legs of the stool. What if…?

Patient Relationship Management & Patient Equity Management

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Here’s a link to my deck on the above. I’d like to read your thoughts.

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/good-CEM-deck

My latest piece on healthsystemCIO.com

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What Would You Do Without MU?

I was wondering how CIOs would approach the implementation of EMRs if they had never heard the term Meaningful Use. The more I thought about the question, the more I felt it merited discussion. If I were a CIO, I would not let these outside regulatory influences dictate my strategic decision making. As a member of the executive team, my responsibility is two-fold; to facilitate and improve patient care, and to contribute to the business as an advisor, someone whose actions positively impact the bottom line.

Some CIOs have been forced to abdicate their responsibility and to approach EHR as order takers. Sometimes the CEO/CFO/COO creates a directive mandating EHR. That said, their guidance may end. In other, more problematic cases, it doesn’t, and they also supply the name of the EHR vendor that must be used. The worst reaction to this pressure is to not challenge the issue of whether your organization will attempt to meet Meaningful Use. The concept is much more novel than it may appear.

What if Meaningful Use didn’t exist? Many hospitals undertook EHR without any hint of the fact that MU was coming — coming with money, penalties, and constraints. Many completed the implementation only to learn that to meet MU they are not done, far from it. In fact, they have just begun modifying their implementations, and paying big time for those changes.

Those who started EHR early did so under the notion that their efforts were working in concert with an established set of business goals. This is the right way to operate. Remember, EHR is voluntary — really. By default, that makes meeting MU voluntary. There is no hidden directive that states all those who implement an EHR must meet MU. Not meeting it may subject your organization to penalties, and these should be factored into your ROI calculation.

Let’s assume you have, or are going to implement, an EHR system. For large providers, it is difficult to develop a business argument for not having EHR. Now assume that MU does not exist. We already have seen examples of how having MU impacts HIT strategy, how would not having to plan around MU impact your EHR and HIT strategy? What other projects would be at the top of your list? What initiatives could you own if you did not shuffle resources away from your preferred strategy simply to chase MU? Instead, would you be addressing patient and physician churn? Implementing managed services opportunities? Aligning workflows? Developing a social media platform?

There is nothing wrong with assessing what you would be doing to support your hospital if there were no Meaningful Use. You can and should undertake that assessment and calculate its ROI. Then, instead of having a lone MU ROI, you have something else against which to compare it.

Why do witches burn?

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Some argue that skewed logic is better than none at all. I’m not some people. What is skewed logic? It’s drawing an errant conclusion from a set of facts. If A and B, then C. For example, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there is the discussion to deduce if a woman is a witch.
Why do witches burn?
Villager: Because they’re made of…..wood?
B: Goooood!
Other Villagers: oh yeah… oh….
B: So. How do we tell whether she is made of wood?
One Villager: Build a bridge out of ‘er!
B: Aah. But can you not also make bridges out of stone?
Villagers: oh yeah. oh. umm…
B: Does wood sink in water?
One Villager: No! No, no, it floats!
Other Villager: Throw her into the pond!
Villagers: yaaaaaa!
B: What also floats in water? …
King Arthur: A Duck!
Villagers: (in amazement) ooooooh!
B: exACTly!
B: (to a villager) So, *logically*…
Villager: If…she…weighs the same as a duck……she’s made of wood.
B: and therefore…
Villager: A Witch!
All Villagers: A WITCH!

Let’s depict this like a business problem.


There you have it. So campers, where could we possibly heading with this? Here’s where. We’re starting a hospital; THEREFORE we need an ENR.  Washington is giving away money; therefore we need an EHR.

If that logic was correct, if that logic was both necessary and sufficient how would we know it? One way is we would see a bunch of doctors running towards EHRs rather than away from them. The reason this logic is faulty is that the lifeblood of the EHR is about one thing—the records.

So, if the EHR is made of wood and weighs the same as a duck…

“Are the best intentions of EHR Half-Full or Half Empty?”

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Doublethink. Functioning simultaneously on two contradictory beliefs and accepting both as true. By definition, one must be false, unless of course you are living in a parallel universe, in which case you’re in need of more help than I can deliver. George Orwell defined it as, “A vast system of mental cheating”—on yourself, I might add.

What does doublethink accomplish and why does it exist with varying degrees within each of us? First, it allows us to overcome our own competence. I think that’s worth repeating, overcoming our own competence. We know better and yet we talk ourselves out of accepting what we know, creating an equal and offsetting false belief.

Second, it acts as a safety net. How? Let’s say we are one hundred percent confident in Belief A. Well, almost. There’s always that little nagging disbelief, that little devil on the shoulder trying to convince you otherwise. Sort of like ‘buyer’s remorse’—only we’ll call it believer’s remorse. Just in case Belief A is wrong, maybe I should have a backup belied, Belief B. Jeckyll and Hyde.

How does that impact one in the EHR problem?  Buckle up. Most people with whom I’ve worked are very passionate about what they do and are paladins of their methods.  Sort of EHR young Turks.  Belief A. They do everything they can for the program.

While sincerely believing in the importance of EHRs, here’s what else I’ve observed.  Much of that belief envelopes the limited notion of believing that nothing lays outside of their skill set. They often recognize it more as a desire than a belief.  They know fully that they will face challenges which are new to them.  They know fully that many implementations have failed and that they need to spend more effort on change management and work flow alignment than was budgeted.  The list of challenges for which they lack the expertise never empties.  They know the light at the end of the tunnel is just a train. They know fully that solving the current problem only seems to reveal the next one.  Belief B.

So, we’ve come full circle. We outwardly profess we can do what others have failed to do, yet in our heart of hearts we believe that you may never see an ROI. Doublethink.

Which gets us back to our original question, “Are the best intentions Half-Full or Half Empty?”

HealthsystemCIO.com–a few thoughts

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These are my comments to the post by Steve Huffman, VP & CIO, Memorial Health System.

Well written Steve. I think part of what is being missed by Washington is that in their effort to mandate providers move to facilitate a nationalized healthcare model; they have overlooked a few things. For starters, I think the EHR discussion has shrouded the fact that EHR is voluntary. Unfortunately, very few providers look at EHR as a decision they should evaluate—do I or do I not do EHR. Instead, they eschew that question, and view the need to do EHR as a decision that was made for them.

• Two business models are in play, a national model and the one used by providers. In the end game, even though it is only mentioned in the privacy of their own policy rooms—and not streamed on CSPAN—the national model is ultimately being designed to connect every doctor to every patient—one big hospital under thousands of roofs. The other model is the provider’s singular business model. It’s a patient-centric model (the healthcare business) and a business model (the business of healthcare). The two models have different goals and different requirements.

• If the model Washington is pushing were attractive, providers would be knocking one another down tying to be first in line to implement it. Clearly, that is not happening. Instead, Washington is offering billions in rebates, and there are still few takers.

• There is no viable plan on how to get from here to there—none, nada, zip. Instead of a coherent plan coming from them, they have put the monkey on the back of the providers, guiding them with carrots and sticks. Washington launched this idea without a much of a plan, and after the fact saddled the providers with three innocuous stages of rules—two of which remain undefined. They have yet to convince providers that they have a way to make sense out of having 400 different EHR vendors, no set of standards, hundreds of unique HIEs—I know you can’t have hundreds of anything and label it as unique—which bespeaks–the problem–and realistically expect it to work.

Why change your business rules and work flows to try to meet a plan that has stability of having been drafted on an Etch-A-Sketch? There are plenty of valid business reasons to evaluate changing the way providers work. There are huge potential gains in safety, care, efficiency, and effectiveness. These gains vary by organization. They vary based on the unique requirements of each organization. Properly planned and implemented, and EHR program with change management on workflow improvement can facilitate taking the business of healthcare from an 0.2 model to a 2.0 model.
Done poorly, and EHR will prove to be nothing more than a multi-million dollar scanner.

That being the case, you may want to use Steve’s methodology and ask him where you can go to buy a supply of the Composition books he uses.

Should you listen to the voices in your head?

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Well, for starters, if you don’t nobody else will.

Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean the voices in my head aren’t real. What voices?  They don’t like it when I speak of them, so I am going to speak in parentheses so they do not hear me.)

Riding the in the car yesterday with my son, the radio was playing Barber’s adagio, a mournful and eerily melancholy piece. It has long been one of my favorites.  I tried to get my son to turn off his PSP long enough for him to try to develop an appreciation for it.

He asked me to tune the radio to what he calls ‘his’ station while I kept extolling the specific virtues of the adagio, of Barber, and of classical music in general. I intended to win him over to my way of thinking.

The phrases I used to bolster my opinion kept coming to me, although I knew not from where.  I soon reached the point where I knew that I was no longer speaking to him, but role playing the very same discussion I had had with my father when I was about the same age as my son. Déjà vu. I have become my father’s son. The voice in my head was my father’s and I was not even charging my father rent for the space.

Do you hear the voices? No, not those voices. The ones you hear at work when you realize that the person speaking to you is your other self. The same voice you hear when you go out after work with your friends and begin to talk shop. By the third glass of wine the conversation has shifted from swapping stories about the craziest patient to wondering aloud when the company is ever going to learn how to fix their business. By glass five, you’re fixing it for them, diagramming solutions on cocktail napkins.

A word of encouragement. Listen to the voices. I bet you’ve come up with some great ideas. They won’t do anyone any good locked up in your head. Let them out. Show someone who can do something about it what you wrote on the napkins.

Project Management lessons from Alice and Wonderland

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During my career I’ve been involved with hundreds of project teams, some quite gifted, others whose collective intellect was rivaled only by simple garden tools.  I’ve been asked often if I can define what distinguishes the two types of teams.  For me it always comes down to leadership.  It doesn’t matter how hard the people work, it matters how well they are lead.  Does the leader know what to do tomorrow?

That got me to thinking.  Are there some leadership secrets, some project management gems that may have been overlooked?  Rather than offering traditional mish-mash consulting jargon, I thought it would be helpful to find a common ground by which we can form a basis for this discussion.  Hence the following narrative: Everything I learned about project management I learned from Alice in Wonderland.

So, you have spent tens of millions on an electronic health records system.  Some did so without even defining their requirements.  The project is chugging along, new regulations and penalties are appearing through the diaphanous mist like the Cheshire Cat’s toothy grin.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice.  “But a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”


How fast must you run so as not to lose ground?  How many milestones do you have to meet, how many due dates do you have to check?  What can be learned from the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland?  She told Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast.”




For the EHR project to progress it requires extraordinary effort.  This begs a question of the project leader, where does the project need to go?  In a conversation with the Cheshire Cat Alice asks,

“Would you tell me, please which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where,” she said.
“Then, it doesn’t matter which way you go.” “So long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

If you only walk long enough.  What is enough for a three year project?  When are you done?  When the money runs out; when there are no more tasks in the work plan.  It seems many EHR projects are much bigger than allowed for by the plan.  They get big, impossibly big.  A lot of that size comes from underestimating the effort to support workflow improvement, change management, and user acceptance.

“Sorry, you’re much too big.  Simply impassible,” said the Doorknob to Alice.   “You mean impossible?” “No, impassible.  Nothing’s impossible.”

We don’t have the benefit of getting advice from talking doorknobs which is why we get so stymied when confronted with having to do the impossible. What is impassible or impossible for your project?  It might be deciding or knowing when to stop.

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Believing it does not make it so.  Never has, never will.  Belief does not beget success.  Planning does.  Defining your requirements may.  There is no shortage of ex-CIOs who believed their EHR vendor.

Then there’s the skill of managing your EHR vendor.  Perhaps Eaglet said it best, “Speak English! I don’t know the meaning of half those long words, and I don’t believe you do either!”

There will always be those select members of every project team who are so dense that light bends around them; those who have not learned that it is better to keep their mouth shut and appear unintelligent than to open it and remove any doubt; those who have the right to remain silent, who just don’t have the ability.

“You couldn’t deny that, even if you tried with both hands.”

“I don’t deny things with my hands,” Alice objected.

“Nobody said you did,” said the Red Queen. “I said you couldn’t if you tried.”

Do you find yourself sitting through a status meeting unable to tell if the project is moving backwards or forwards, unable to tell what is hiding around the bend?  You think so hard your head feels like your ears are trying to switch places with your eyes.  When all else fails, try this bit if advice.

“Fan her head!” the Red Queen anxiously interrupted. “She’ll be feverish after so much thinking.”  A little thinking won’t hurt, who knows; in small doses it might even be beneficial.

Now, let’s assume you’ve got yourself all worked up.  You and your team are pouring over your work plan, trying to decide what’s left to accomplish, or what can’t be accomplished.  How do you know what’s what and which is which?

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely.  “And go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

I’ll take the King’s advice and do the same.