Did you miss the chance to talk with loved ones on National Healthcare Decisions Day on April 16, ’16? It’s not too late! And I want to help you start the conversation by offering a giveaway of five books, from April 20 to 27 from Goodreads.
Click to see how to enter to win!
Sometimes Andy Lazris is not popular with the adult children of the very old people he sees in his practice as an internist and geriatrician as well as in his role as medical director at assisted living and skilled nursing facilities. Why? Because his is a “less is more” approach to care for elders who typically live with multiple chronic conditions. He believes in fewer diagnostic tests, less clinging to the orthodoxy of “ideal” numbers gauging, for example, glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol. His focus is on helping his patients live a better life, and he favors better nutrition, more physical activity and social engagement. He also has a deep appreciation of the fact that aging, decline – mortality itself — are inevitable facts of life.
That approach is hard for caregivers to accept sometimes, particularly when we are all bombarded by news or advertisements for near miraculous results offered by new drugs and leading-edge treatments and surgical procedures. So off they may go to medical specialists whose approach may be wholly different, but not necessarily better and often far worse in terms of the elder’s quality of life.
Ironically, Medicare is at the heart of the disconnect between the kind of care elders mostly want and what they get – over-testing, over-treatment and over-medication. In its pursuit of quality and thoroughness in elder care, Dr. Lazris says, Medicare rewards aggressive measures by paying for tests, treatments and procedures.
Dr. Lazris explores the many implications of Medicare policies in a new book, “Curing Medicare,” to be published this May by Cornell University Press. Through stories about patients and his own challenges in dealing with the health care system, he shows how these policies often achieve the precise opposite of what they were intended to do.
My own view is that as baby boomers age over the next decade or two, Medicare policies dealing specifically with palliative and hospice care will need a radical overhaul. So I was glad to have had the opportunity to talk recently with Dr. Lazris about his book. His aim is to educate the patients and family members who are keenly interested in how our health system works.
He is hoping that readers will use the information to foster conversations with their doctors. He doubts that this will help fix the health care system, but, he said, “Do it on a small scale. Advocate for yourself, on an individual level.”
An outstanding discussion in the book addresses the differences between “absolute risk” and “relative risk” in assessing various treatment options, a subject Dr. Lazris told me he talks “incessantly” about in public speaking engagements. In 2007, Erik Rifkin, PhD, and Edward J. Bouwer, PhD, wrote a book called “The Illusion of Certainty: Health Benefits and Risks,” in which they present the elegant “Risk Characterization Theater,” a graphic of a hypothetical 1,000-seat theater, to explain the difference between absolute and relative risk. You can learn about it here. The graphic reprises its role in “Curing Medicare.”
Misunderstanding the difference between the two helps to explain the tremendous overuse, in Dr. Lazris’ view, of the blood-thinning drug Coumadin, for example. And in a recent blog post, Dr. Lazris applied the Risk Characterization Theater” to analyze recent findings about the potential risks of proton pump inhibitors – drugs like Prilosec – related to chronic kidney disease.
Published studies, he said, are all about relative risk; adding that physicians don’t know enough about that. But when he explains it to patients even in their nineties, they are “quite sophisticated in figuring things out.”
What would Medicare reform look like to Dr. Lazris? It would “put power in the hands of well informed patients who can control the course of their care.” In short, it would promote individualized care based on patient preference and provide medical interventions shown to be beneficial to the individuals being treated. It would be cost effective. It would give patients choices to maximize patient satisfaction, as well as enhance the doctor-patient relationship.
The bottom line, he writes, is that “the focus of care is to help patients live a better life.”
If your appetite for not-so-arcane medical information has been whetted, visit http://www.thennt.com/home-nnt. NNT stands for “number needed to treat” patients to result in a benefit to one person. A group of physicians have developed a framework and rating system to evaluate therapies based on their patient-important benefits and harms as well as a system to evaluate diagnostics by patient sign, symptom, lab test or study. A lot of this is technical, of course, but the colors used are not: Green indicates that the benefits outweigh the harms, while Yellow indicates that benefits are unclear. Red indicates no benefits and Black indicates that harms outweigh the benefits.
To learn more about over-treatment, visit the Lown Institute’s website. It also includes five questions to ask your physician about a recommended test, medication or procedure.
Not everyone understands what hospice care is, or what hospice care teams – physicians, nurses, home health aides, social workers, chaplains and volunteers – actually do. Not only for people who are very ill, but for their caregivers, too.
So, educating the public about it continues to be critically important. One unique and moving way to do that was organized by the Louisiana-Mississippi Hospice and Palliative Care Organization:
a traveling exhibit of artworks created specifically to convey “the compassion and dignity that hospice provides,” LMHPCO executive director Jamey Boudreaux told me.
It took a lot of thought and a fair amount of time to organize the project. A competition was launched in 2013 at the organization’s annual conference, where member hospices were encouraged to find an artist they could work with. But before the artists could apply paint brush to canvas, to get a better sense of the work, they were to go through hospice volunteer training and then spend time shadowing hospice team members. After that, they created a variety of works in different media, including paintings, sculpture, stained glass and photography. In 2014, a group of art critics and artists judged the work of 40 artists, representing 40 member hospice agencies, and selected the 16 finalists that would make up the traveling exhibit. 
Shown here is artist and musician Tammy Hromadka’s “A Window Into Hospice.” Ms.Hromadka volunteers at CHRISTUS Cabrini Hospice’s Grace Home in Alexandria, Louisiana.
As Jamey Boudreaux pointed out, though, “The Art of Hospice” wasn’t just an art exhibit. Over an 18-month period, each of the 10 venues in Mississippi and Louisiana also presented educational courses for physicians, nurses, CNAs, chaplains and volunteers. The public at large also attended sessions devoted to advance care planning. The exhibit stayed in each venue for three or four weeks.
“It raised the level of awareness about hospice in these communities,” Boudreaux said.
Still, LMHPCO found that there was much misinformation or misunderstanding to address about what hospice is all about. Some people were unaware, for example, that hospice is not just “the government coming in to take over for family members,” Boudreaux explained; or that it does not provide 24-hour care; or that there are private agencies – nonprofit and for-profit – that provide this care.
The traveling exhibit involved many logistical challenges and was a one-time event. Boudreaux has talked about the art project with fellow hospice organization executives, but so far none have sought to replicate what LMHPCO did. Most of the artworks have been returned to the artists and the remaining few soon will be returned.
So what does the education committee of LMHPCO do for an encore? The focus will be on providing care for the homeless and for those who are the so-called “un-befriended” — people who do not have caregivers, at the organization’s upcoming conference. I’m eager to see its creative approach to professional and public education after that.
The Costco in our area recently shuttered its long-standing warehouse store and opened a brand-new, bright and shiny and much larger one a few miles away. Eager to see what the new store had to offer (and lured by the prospect of a free roasted chicken), my husband and I made our first visit.
Once inside, it was simply…overwhelming. First, the sheer enormity of the place. It’s hard to visualize what 148,000 square feet of space actually looks like, until you’ve actually sprinted from one end of the store to another (in this case, to pick up an item I’d forgotten, while my husband waited in line with our cart.) There were yet more endless aisles than there had been in the old store, with unreachable goods stacked up to the ceiling. I barely knew where to find anything in the old store, but the new one was even more of a mystery. There was no way to figure out the logic (or lack of it) behind what products were located where. There was no one to guide us; what staff members we saw were absorbed in their own tasks.
So, in short, I felt lost, confused, intimidated, turned off and discouraged.
And it made me think: maybe this is a medical metaphor. Maybe this must be how too many patients and caregivers feel when they’re suddenly thrust into the health care system to deal with serious illness or a medical crisis. The hospital setting alone can be jarring and intimidating. In a crisis, patients (or their caregivers, if patients aren’t in a position to speak for themselves), must make decisions about treatment and care fairly quickly.
Much has been written about how shared health care decision-making (by patient and physician) has come to replace the old paternalistic model in which physicians mostly made decisions for you. But the fact is, particularly in a crisis, there is not an even playing field between you and your medical team. The team has the advantage of having far more knowledge and experience with your condition than you, and unless the team includes gifted communicators, that puts you at a disadvantage.
So what can you do to avoid becoming dazed, confused and fearful about making harmful choices in a medical setting? A little preparation, while you’re in good health, can help. Here are just two of many useful sources:
Recognizing that patients need better information about what care they truly need, Consumer Reports and the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation have developed the Choosing Wisely® website (http://www.choosingwisely.org/patient-resources/) which aims help consumers choose care that is supported by evidence; doesn’t duplicate tests or procedures already received; and is truly necessary. More useful information is available at http://www.consumerhealthchoices.org, including advice for caregivers and treatments and tests for elders.
One of the best things you can do is to have an advance directive that spells out the kind of care you’d want if you couldn’t speak for yourself. Caring Connections is a program of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). You can find advance directive forms for each state on its web site: http://www.caringinfo.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3289. Caring Connections makes its forms available free of charge.
I haven’t yet found a road map for our local Costco. Fortunately, though, there are many to be found, pre-crisis, in health care.
When her children were young, Theresa Brown, RN, made a mid-career change: from English professor at Tufts University to nursing, and chose to specialize in medical oncology. We should all be glad she did, because she has chronicled her experiences – and by extension, illuminated some of the most pressing issues and challenges in our health care system – in two excellent books as well as in personal essays in The New York Times. And she does it with clarity, insight, humor and understated eloquence.
Her voice is important because nursing truly is the heart of care for the ill. No other health professionals spend as much time providing hands-on care for the sick than nurses. Our health care system is increasingly complex, technology-laden and hyper-specialized. So the need for a humanistic perspective from those who are on the front lines has never been more pressing.
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Theresa recently, following her book tour for The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives. The book focuses on a day in her life in the oncology ward of a Pittsburgh teaching hospital; she subsequently left that position and currently works as a hospice nurse, visiting people in their homes.
Just a couple of highlights of our conversation:
Theresa told me that she is comfortable in her current role as a home hospice nurse. In fact, she said, one reason she made this switch was that she always likes to learn new things and wanted particularly to learn about how the kind of care provided for patients at home might ultimately be transferred to the hospital setting. Care that offers more dignity and privacy for patients, such as letting patients sleep when they need to; or even wear their own clothes; and making it easier for family, friends and caregivers to visit any time and stay overnight if need be.
“It would be great to go back to a hospital and say, how can we make things better?” she said. “Creating a balance of comfort and quality care.” Even making the decision not to wake people in the middle of the night would be an enormous change, she pointed out.
We also talked about the ideal of the team approach in palliative and hospice care, where physicians and nurses work closely together in an atmosphere of mutual respect. (I’ve interviewed a number of such teams and, like proverbial married couples, they often do finish each other’s sentences.) In a hospital setting, Theresa noted, “communication between physicians and RNs often is not what it should be.”
She’d like to see more inter-professional training focusing on better communications so that “we could view each other as people and understand each other’s roles and responsibilities, and the pressures on each of us.”
There is no doubt in my mind that Theresa will keep learning – and educating us along the way – and that she’ll continue to make a difference in reaching the goal of improving patient care. In the meantime, you can order books, read her columns or join her mailing list at http://www.theresabrownrn.com.
How often have you shuddered at the prospect of being terribly frail, living in a nursing home, and then said to your spouse, your kids, your partner, your close friends, “If I ever get like that, just shoot me?” I’ll admit to having said that, myself, on a few occasions.
The fact is, at some point, most of us are going to need some kind of assistance at some point in late life. Boomers may not have the luxury that our parents did, of being tended by adult children or other family members. Families may live too far from one another to enable that day-to-day caregiving. Many boomers – including a sizable LGBT population – do not have children to depend on at all. And whether in future years there will be a sufficient number of skilled home health aides to assist us in our own homes remains an open question.
The good news is that in the course of researching my book, “Last Comforts: Notes From the Forefront of Late-Life Care,” I learned that there are viable alternatives to conventional nursing homes and that they focus more on “home” than on “nursing” in design, operation and management.
Sometimes they’re called “households” or “small houses.” The Green House is one of the better-known variations on the theme of alternative nursing facilities. (www.thegreenhouseproject.org) Instead of a nursing station dominating a floor, a kitchen and common dining and living areas cater to residents who have their own bedrooms and bathrooms. A floor – often called a “neighborhood” — might include 10 to 20 bedrooms. These homes are distinguished for their person-centered care. So, residents’ own preferences dictate their schedules – that is, they can awaken when they want, eat when they want, spend time how they want to. Aides may be referred to as “universal workers,” and are given more responsibilities (and training) than aides in conventional nursing homes.
The nearly 95,000-square-foot Leonard Florence Center for Living in Chelsea, Massachusetts, which has been open since 2010, is a case in point. (www.chelseajewish.org) It cares for 100 residents in 10 “houses” (its term for “neighborhood”) of 10 people apiece. Three of the houses serve people who need short-term rehabilitation. One of the houses serves people living with ALS; another serves people with multiple sclerosis (MS).
The building’s first floor is its “Main Street,” with a bakery, deli, spa and chapel; each house also has its own communal area for games, social gatherings and other events. Each house also offers made-to-order Kosher meals; menus are designed jointly with residents and staff.
There are roughly 15,500 nursing homes in the U.S. that serve about 1.4 million residents at any given time; “household” style nursing homes that embrace culture change currently represent a very small fraction of the total number of long-term care residences in this country. So the question that arises is: Can these models grow substantially over the next 20 years so that we will come to expect this level of care as the norm? The nonprofit sector has led the way in this arena. It’s time for the private sector, which accounts for two-thirds of the nursing facilities in the country, to pay attention.
What was the top medical news story in 2015? In November, Medscape (a medical website from WebMD) asked just that of its readers — primary care physicians, specialists and other health professionals – and more than 400 replied. Number one was: a major change in diagnostic codes, known as ICD-10. Not surprising, perhaps, as there are many more new codes for physicians to ponder, and probably much more administrative time required, as a result, to the chagrin of small practice owners. (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/855309)
If we’re talking about developments that have the potential to make a big difference for patients in the coming years, though, I’d like to suggest at least two that ought to top the list.
My first “top news” story affects advance care planning. At long last, as of January 2016, you and your doctor will be able to discuss your goals, beliefs, values and fears should you become seriously ill – and Medicare will actually reimburse him or her for doing it. Granted, the reimbursement isn’t huge — $86 for a mere 30-minute discussion and $75 for a follow-up – but maybe it will be enough of an incentive to encourage more physicians to engage in these critical conversations.
These are difficult discussions to engage in, whether you’re talking with family and friends or your physicians. And too many physicians’ communication skills leave something to be desired. But the goal is to make sure that if you become very ill – particularly if you are not able to speak for yourself – your care will reflect your wishes and values.
My second “top news” story was the selection of hospices that will participate in the Medicare Care Choices pilot project, with implementation beginning in January 2016.
The Care Choices pilot will allow certain hospice patients with advanced cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), congestive heart failure, or HIV/AIDS to elect hospice care without having to give up curative treatments.
Originally, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was going to pick at least 30 rural and urban Medicare-certified and enrolled hospices to participate. It expected to enroll 30,000 beneficiaries over a three-year period. But because there was so much interest in the pilot, CMS expanded it to more than 140 Medicare-certified hospices and extended the duration of the project from three to five years. It expects to enroll as many as 150,000 eligible Medicare beneficiaries.
Why is this important? Because the idea of forgoing treatment aimed at cure – currently a requirement to enter into hospice care – has discouraged too many patients and their physicians from considering comfort care solely. Ideally, when the pilot is done, there will be useful evidence about whether concurrent care (curative and comfort) improves quality of life and results in fewer hospital readmissions and, possibly, lower Medicare costs.
In my “wishful thinking” category: Maybe in 2016 CMS will announce it is eliminating the six-month prognosis requirement for patients to enroll in hospice care. That would certainly get my vote for top medical news story next year!
Surprisingly, many people do not know what palliative care is despite its great strides in recent years. A Consumer Reports survey of more than 2,000 adults, for example, showed that 61 percent had never heard of palliative care.
As the population ages and the demand for palliative care grows, the ability to assess quality throughout the country and across care settings is increasingly important, as Dr. Joseph Rotella, chief medical officer of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) and co-chair of its Measuring What Matters Clinical User Panel explained. And because there has been “no consistency regarding which measures are required by various groups, from accrediting organizations to payers,” AAHPM and the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association (HPNA) came up with “measuring what matters” quality indicators.
Moreover, he said, “there has not been enough focus on cultural sensitivity and social supports. The quality indicators represent a small set of measures to use right now in hospice and palliative care because they are meaningful to patients and have a real impact on them.”
These measures are not mandatory. But if you are seriously ill, or taking care of someone who is, this is the kind of care you should look for. The measures call for:
Did you know that November is National Hospice and Palliative Care Month? It is, thanks to the efforts of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. It’s a month devoted to broadening public awareness about the outstanding and much-needed care that hospice organizations provide for the very ill and their caregivers.
So I thought I’d do my part. I’m excited to announce the upcoming publication of my book, “Last Comforts: Notes From the Forefront of Late-Life Care.” Why did I write this book and start this blog?
I was drawn to hospice care because its caring and profoundly respectful philosophy and practice offers physical and emotional comfort, support and kindness to the dying and their families. My family experienced that first-hand with my mother’s last illness, a stark contrast five years after my father’s more conventional medicalized, nightmarish last months. So when I had an opportunity to sign on for hospice volunteer training at Holy Name Medical Center, I took it.
“Last Comforts” was born when one nagging question kept arising early in my journey as a hospice volunteer. Why were people coming into hospice care so late in the course of their illness? That question led to many others that rippled out beyond hospice care. Are there better alternatives to conventional skilled nursing home operations? How are physicians and nurses educated about advanced illness and end-of-life care? What are more effective ways of providing dementia care? What are the unique challenges of minority and LGBT people? What is the role of popular media in our death-denying culture? What has been the impact of public policy decisions about palliative and hospice care?
The book is part memoir of lessons learned throughout my experiences with patients and families as a hospice volunteer; part reporting about the remarkable pathfinders and programs in palliative and late-life care; and part call to action. I encourage readers – particularly her fellow baby boomers — not only to make their wishes and goals clear to friends and family, but also to become advocates for better care in the broader community.
It’s no secret that care at the end of people’s lives right now is mostly fragmented, uncoordinated, often futile and unsustainable. But without question, it can be managed far better for those who are ill as well as for their caregivers. I’m hoping that “Last Comforts” – and this blog — will help shed light on how we can help make that happen.
Last Comforts 