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Surgical overkill for the elderly

At 87, Maxine Stanich cared more about improving the quality of her life than prolonging it.

She suffered from a long list of health problems, including heart failure and chronic lung disease that could leave her gasping for breath.

When her time came, she wanted to die a natural death, Stanich told her daughter, and signed a “do not resuscitate” directive, or DNR, ordering doctors not to revive her should her heart stop.

Yet a trip to a San Francisco emergency room for shortness of breath in 2008 led Stanich to get a defibrillator implanted in her chest — a medical device to keep her alive by delivering a powerful shock. At the time, Stanich didn’t fully grasp what she had agreed to, even though she signed a document granting permission for the procedure, said her daughter, Susan Giaquinto.

Stanich, at age 87, had signed a “do not resuscitate” directive, ordering doctors to not revive her should her heart stop, but doctors gave her a defibrillator anyway. (Photo courtesy of Susan Giaquinto)

That clarity came only during a subsequent visit to a different hospital, when a surprised ER doctor saw a defibrillator protruding from the DNR patient’s thin chest. To Stanich’s horror, the ER doctor explained that the device would not allow her to slip away painlessly and that the jolt would be “so strong that it will knock her across the room,” said Giaquinto, who accompanied her mother on both hospital trips.

Surgery like this has become all too common among those near the end of life, experts say. Nearly 1 in 3 Medicare patients undergo an operation in the year before they die, even though the evidence shows that many are more likely to be harmed than to benefit from it.

The practice is driven by financial incentives that reward doctors for doing procedures, as well as a medical culture in which patients and doctors are reluctant to talk about how surgical interventions should be prescribed more judiciously, said Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist who treated Stanich when she sought care at the second hospital.

“We have a culture that believes in very aggressive care,” said Redberg, who at the University of California-San Francisco specializes in heart disease in women. “We are often not considering the chance of benefit and chance of harm, and how that changes when you get older. We also fail to have conversations about what patients value most.”

While surgery is typically lifesaving for younger people, operating on frail, older patients rarely helps them live longer or returns the quality of life they once enjoyed, according to a 2016 paper in Annals of Surgery.

The cost of these surgeries — typically paid for by Medicare, the government health insurance program for people over 65 — involve more than money, said Dr. Amber Barnato, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Older patients who undergo surgery within a year of death spent 50 percent more time in the hospital than others, and nearly twice as many days in intensive care.

And while some robust octogenarians have many years ahead of them, studies show that surgery is also common among those who are far more frail.

Eighteen percent of Medicare patients have surgery in their final month of life and 8 percent in their final week, according to a 2011 study in The Lancet.

More than 12 percent of defibrillators were implanted in people older than 80, according to a 2015 study. Doctors implant about 158,000 of the devices each year, according to the American College of Cardiology. The total cost of the procedure runs about $60,000.

Procedures performed in the elderly range from major operations that require lengthy recoveries to relatively minor surgery performed in a doctor’s office, such as the removal of nonfatal skin cancers, that would likely never cause any problems.

Research led by Dr. Eleni Linos has shown that people with limited life expectancies are treated for nonfatal skin cancers as aggressively as younger patients. Among patients with a nonfatal skin cancer and a limited time to live, 70 percent underwent surgery, according to her 2013 study in JAMA Internal Medicine.

With diminished mental acuity and an old-fashioned respect for the medical profession, some aging patients are vulnerable to unwanted interventions. Stanich agreed to a pacemaker simply because her doctor suggested it, Giaquinto said. Many people of Stanich’s generation “thought doctors were God … They never questioned doctors — ever.”Surgery poses serious risks for older people, who weather anesthesia poorly and whose skin takes longer to heal. Among seniors who undergo urgent or emergency abdominal surgery, 20 percent die within 30 days, studies show.

According to the University of Michigan’s National Poll on Healthy Aging, published Wednesday, more than half of adults ages 50 to 80 said doctors often recommend unnecessary tests, medications or procedures. Yet half of those who’d been told they needed an X-ray or other test — but weren’t sure they needed it — went on to have the procedure anyway.

Dr. Margaret Schwarze, a surgeon and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said that older patients often don’t feel the financial pain of surgery because insurance pays most of the cost.

When a surgeon offers to “fix” the heart valve in a person with multiple diseases, for example, the patient may assume that surgery will fix all of her medical problems, Schwarze said. “With older patients with lots of chronic illnesses, we’re not really fixing anything.”

Even as a doctor, Redberg said, she struggles to prevent other doctors from performing too many procedures on her 92-year-old mother, Mae, who lives in New York City.

Redberg said doctors recently treated her mother for melanoma — the most serious type of skin cancer. After the cancer was removed from her leg, Redberg’s mother was urged by a doctor to undergo an additional surgery to cut away more tissue and nearby lymph nodes, which can harbor cancerous cells.

“Every time she went in, the dermatologist wanted to refer her to a surgeon,” Redberg said. And “Medicare would have been happy to pay for it.”

But her mother often has problems with wounds healing, she said, and recovery would likely have taken three months. When Redberg pressed a surgeon about the benefits, he said the procedure could reduce the chances of cancer coming back within three to five years.

Redberg said her mother laughed and said, “I’m not interested in doing something that will help me in three to five years. I doubt I’ll be here.”

Dr. Rita Redberg, director of women’s cardiovascular services at the University of California-San Francisco Division of Cardiology, tends to her mother, Mae Redberg, in Mae’s apartment in Manhattan. (Yana Paskova for Kaiser Health News)

 

The momentum of hospital care can make people feel as if they’re on a moving train and can’t jump off.

The rush of medical decisions “doesn’t allow time to deliberate or consider the patients’ overall health or what their goals and values might be,” said Dr. Jacqueline Kruser, an instructor in pulmonary and critical care medicine and medical social sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Many hospitals and health systems are developing “decision aids,” easy-to-understand written materials and videos to help patients make more informed medical decisions, giving them time to develop more realistic expectations.

After Kaiser Permanente Washington introduced the tools relating to joint replacement, the number of patients choosing to have hip replacement surgery fell 26 percent, while knee replacements declined 38 percent, according to a study in Health Affairs. (Kaiser Permanente is not affiliated with Kaiser Health News, which is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)

In a paper published last year in JAMA Surgery and the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, Schwarze, Kruser and colleagues suggested creating narratives to illustrate surgical risks, rather than relying on statistics.

Instead of telling patients that surgery carries a 20 percent risk of stroke, for example, doctors should lay out the best, worst and most likely outcomes.

In the best-case scenario, a patient might spend weeks in the hospital after surgery, living the rest of her life in a nursing home. In the worst case, the same patient dies after several weeks in intensive care. In the most likely scenario, the patient survives just two to three months after surgery.

Schwarze said, “If someone says they can’t tolerate the best-case scenario — which involves them being in a nursing home — then maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”

Maxine Stanich was admitted to the hospital after going to the ER because she felt short of breath. She experienced an abnormal heart rhythm in the procedure room during a cardiac test —not an unusual event during a procedure in which a wire is threaded into the heart. Based on that, doctors decided to implant a pacemaker and defibrillator the next day.

Dr. Redberg was consulted when the patient objected to the device that was now embedded in her chest. She was “very alert. She was very clear about what she did and did not want done. She told me she didn’t want to be shocked,” Redberg said.

After Redberg deactivated the defibrillator, which can be reprogrammed remotely, Stanich was discharged, with home hospice service. With nothing more than her medicines, she survived another two years and three months, dying at home just after her 90th birthday in 2010.


Sharp’s pre-hospice program saves money

By ANNA GORMAN

For Kaiser Health News

Gerald Chinchar isn’t quite at the end of life, but the end is not far away. The 77-year-old fell twice last year, shattering his hip and femur, and now gets around his San Diego home in a wheelchair. His medications fill a dresser drawer, and congestive heart failure puts him at high risk of emergency room visits and long hospital stays.

Chinchar, a Navy veteran who loves TV Westerns, said that’s the last thing he wants. He still likes to go watch his grandchildren’s sporting events and play blackjack at the casino. “If they told me I had six months to live or go to the hospital and last two years, I’d say leave me home,” Chinchar said. “That ain’t no trade for me.”

Most aging people would choose to stay home in their last years of life. But for many, it doesn’t work out: They go in and out of hospitals, getting treated for flare-ups of various chronic illnesses. It’s a massive problem that costs the health care system billions of dollars and has galvanized health providers, hospital administrators and policymakers to search for solutions.

Sharp HealthCare, the San Diego health system where Chinchar receives care, has devised a way to fulfill his wishes and reduce costs at the same time. It’s a pre-hospice program called Transitions, designed to give elderly patients the care they want at home and keep them out of the hospital.

Social workers and nurses from Sharp regularly visit patients in their homes to explain what they can expect in their final years, help them make end-of-life plans and teach them how to better manage their diseases. Physicians track their health and scrap unnecessary medications. Unlike hospice care, patients don’t need to have a prognosis of six months or less, and they can continue getting curative treatment for their illnesses, not just for symptoms.

Before the Transitions program started, the only option for many patients in a health crisis was to call 911 and be rushed to the emergency room. Now, they have round-the-clock access to nurses, one phone call away.

“Transitions is for just that point where people are starting to realize they can see the end of the road,” said San Diego physician Dan Hoefer, one of the creators of the program. “We are trying to help them through that process so it’s not filled with chaos.”

The importance of programs like Transitions is likely to grow in coming years as 10,000 Baby Boomers — many with multiple chronic diseases — turn 65 every day. Transitions was among the first of its kind, but several such programs, formally known as home-based palliative care, have since opened around the country. They are part of a broader push to improve people’s health and reduce spending through better coordination of care and more treatment outside hospital walls.

But a huge barrier stands in the way of pre-hospice programs: There is no clear way to pay for them. Health providers typically get paid for office visits and procedures, and hospitals still get reimbursed for patients in their beds. The services provided by home-based palliative care don’t fit that model.

In recent years, however, pressure has mounted to continue moving away from traditional payment systems. The Affordable Care Act has established new rules and pilot programs that reward the quality rather than the quantity of care. The health reform law, for example, set up “accountable care organizations” networks of doctors and hospitals that share responsibility for providing care to patients. They also share the savings when they rein in unnecessary spending by keeping people healthier. Those changes are helping to make home-based palliative care a more viable option.

In San Diego, Sharp’s palliative-care program has a strong incentive to reduce the cost of caring for its patients, who are all in Medicare managed care. The nonprofit health organization receives a fixed amount of money per member each month, so it can pocket what it doesn’t spend on hospital stays and other costly medical interventions.

Gerald Chinchar’s medicine is packed in a kitchen drawer for a Sharp HealthCare Transitions program nurse to check. (Heidi de Marco/KHN)

‘Something That Works’

Palliative care focuses on relieving patients’ stress, pain and other symptoms as their health declines, and it helps them maintain their quality of life. It’s for people with serious illnesses, such as cancer, dementia and heart failure. The idea is for patients to get palliative care and then move into hospice care, but they don’t always make that transition.

The 2014 report “Dying in America,” by the Institute of Medicine, recommended that all people with serious advanced illness have access to palliative care. Many hospitals now have palliative-care programs, delivered by teams of social workers, chaplains, doctors and nurses, for patients who aren’t yet ready for hospice. But until recently, few such efforts had opened beyond the confines of hospitals.

Kaiser Permanente set out to address this gap. Nearly 20 years ago, it created a home-based palliative care program, testing it in California and later in Hawaii and Colorado. Two studies by Kaiser and others found that participants were far more likely to be satisfied with their care and more likely to die at home than those not in the program. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

One of the studies, published in 2007, found that 36 percent of people receiving palliative care at home were hospitalized in their final months, compared with 59 percent of those getting standard care. The overall cost of care for those who participated in the program was a third less than for those who didn’t.

“We thought, ‘Wow. We have something that works,’” said Susan Enguidanos, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, who worked on both studies. “Immediately we wanted to go and change the world.”

But Enguidanos knew that Kaiser Permanente was unlike most health organizations. It was responsible for both insuring and treating its patients, so it had a clear financial motivation to improve care and control costs. Enguidanos said she talked to medical providers around the nation about this type of palliative care, but the concept didn’t take off at the time. Providers kept asking the same question: How do you pay for it without charging patients or insurers?

“I liken it to paddling out too soon for the wave,” she said. “We were out there too soon. … But we didn’t have the right environment, the right incentive.”

A Bold Idea

Dan Hoefer’s medical office is in the city of El Cajon, which sits in a valley in eastern San Diego County. Hoefer, a former hospice and home health medical director and nursing-home doctor, has spent years treating elderly patients. He learned an important lesson when seeing patients in his office: Despite the medical care they received, “they were far more likely to be admitted to the hospital than make it back to see me.”

When his patients were hospitalized, many would decline quickly. Even if their immediate symptoms were treated successfully, they would sometimes leave the hospital less able to take care of themselves. They would get infections or suffer from delirium. Some would fall.

His patients were like cars with 300,000 miles on them, he said. They had a lot of broken parts. “You can’t just fix one thing and think you have solved the problem,” he said.

And trying to do so can be very costly. About a quarter of all Medicare spending for beneficiaries 65 or older is to treat people in their last year of life, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Hoefer’s colleague, Suzi Johnson, a nurse and administrator in Sharp’s hospice program, saw the opposite side of the equation. Patients admitted into hospice care would make surprising turnarounds once they started getting medical and social support at home and stopped going to the hospital. Some lived longer than doctors had expected.

In 2005, the pair hatched and honed a bold idea: What if they could design a home-based program for patients before they were eligible for hospice?

Thus, Transitions was born. They modeled their new program in part on the Kaiser experiment, then set out to persuade doctors, medical directors and financial officers to try it. But they met resistance from physicians and hospital administrators who were used to getting paid for seeing patients.

“We were doing something that was really revolutionary, that really went against the culture of health care at the time,” Johnson said. “We were inspired by the broken system and the opportunity we saw to fix something.”

Despite the concerns, Sharp’s foundation board gave the pair a $180,000 grant to test out Transitions. And in 2007, they started with heart failure patients and later expanded the program to those with advanced cancer, dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other progressive illnesses. They started to win over some doctors who appreciated having additional eyes on their patients, but they still encountered “some skepticism about whether it was really going to do any good for our patients,” said Jeremy Hogan, a neurologist with Sharp. “It wasn’t really clear to the group … what the purpose of providing a service like this was.”

Nevertheless, Hogan referred some of his dementia patients to the program and quickly realized that the extra support for them and their families meant fewer panicked calls and emergency room trips.

Hoefer said doctors started realizing home-based care made sense for these patients — many of whom were too frail to get to a doctor’s office regularly. “At this point in the patient’s life, we should be bringing health care to the patient, not the other way around,” he said.

Across the country, more doctors, hospitals and insurers are starting to see the value of home-based palliative care and are figuring out how to pay for it, said Kathleen Kerr, a health care consultant who researches palliative care.

“It is picking up steam,” she said. “You know you are going to take better care of this population, and you are absolutely going to have lower health care costs.”

Providers are motivated in part by a growing body of research. A studypublished in January showed that in the last three months of life, medical care for patients in a home-based palliative care program cost $12,000 less than for patients who were getting more typical treatment. Patients in the program also were more likely to go into hospice and to die at home, according to the study.

Two studies of Transitions in 2013 and 2016 reaffirmed that such programs save money. The second study, led by outside evaluators, showed it saved more than $4,200 per month on cancer patients and nearly $3,500 on those with heart failure.

The biggest differences occurred in the final two months of life, said one of the researchers, Brian Cassel, who is palliative care research director at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine in Richmond.

One reason for the success of these programs is that the teams really get to know patients, their hopes and aspirations, said Christine Ritchie, a professor at UC San Francisco’s medical school. “There is nothing like being in someone’s home, on their turf, to really understand what their life is like,” she said.


HHS’s OIG backs report on hospice-care scams

 

The Office of Inspector General  of the Department of Health and Human Services has released a report backing a 2014 Washington Post Investigation that found that hospice companies recruit patients who aren’t dying in order to boost profits.

Hospices are paid a daily flat rate for patients, so they can earn more profit on healthier patients who require fewer services, the Post’s story said.

The paper found that more than a third of patients were considered “hospice survivors” at hundreds of hospices around America.

As Becker’s Hospital Review noted: “Sometimes patients’ health does improve unexpectedly, but according to The Washington Post, the rate of patients who leave hospice alive is typically around 15 percent. The newspaper observed high ‘hospice survivor’ rates most often at new, for-profit hospices, according to the report. The highest rates were noted in Mississippi (41 percent) and Alabama (35 percent).”

As usual, dubious healthcare billing is heavily concentrated at for-profit healthcare institutions in Red States whose political leaders have opposed the Affordable Care Act. The Feds, however, are stepping up efforts to fight healthcare fraud. With the huge increase in elderly patients, we can expect a huge increase in hospice-care scams.

Becker’s reported: “The OIG report … builds on the body of evidence. The OIG found many hospices had patients sign paperwork that did not make it clear the care provided would be palliative, or provide relief from pain, rather than curative.

“It also found physicians had limited involvement in determining if hospice care was appropriate for patients in 14 percent of hospice general inpatient stays.”

To read the Becker’s article, please hit this link.


Big gaps seen in palliative care

hospice

The Joint Commission reports that only a quarter of U.S. hospitals have complete  palliative-care teams.

The Joint Commission  called on hospitals to deliver palliative care to Americans suffering from chronic and serious illnesses with  teams including a physician, a nurse, a social worker and a chaplain.

Regional variation in palliative care in the U.S. is  striking.  In New England, 88 percent of hospitals had palliative-care programs at last count, as did 77 percent of hospitals in the Pacific and Mid-Atlantic states. But in the south-central region, only about 40 percent of hospitals did.

For a Reuters overview on this topic, please hit this link.

 


Hospice industry driving up Medicare costs

hospice

Very long hospice-care stays are causing Medicare bills to surge. This was not the original idea of Medicare officials in covering hospice.

As The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Medicare’s hospice program … is supposed to be only for patients who doctors certify are likely to die within six months, or about 180 days. Today, care is routinely being extended not only to those with terminal cancer—the program’s original focus—but to patients with an array of ailments, including dementia, whose declines can take years.”

“Hospice-care providers are partly responsible for the expansion, sometimes canvassing nursing homes and other facilities for Medicare patients to persuade to enroll in hospice programs, according to hospice workers and regulators. Patients, their families and sometimes their doctors have ample reason to agree. For many, it entitles them to care that wouldn’t otherwise be covered by the federal government.

“The shift has fueled a steady increase in Medicare hospice spending, which roughly doubled over the nine years examined by the Journal, to about $15 billion in 2013. That growth shows how payment rules in the government’s program for seniors and disabled people can influence patient care in ways that weren’t intended.”


Hospice care new goldmine for nursing homes

 

Nursing homes find that hospice care is turning into a bonanza as it’s being used for many more patients than were traditionally seen as hospice patients. And taxpayers are getting big new Medicare bills to pay for it, as Richard Salit reports in The Providence Journal.


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