Continuing on with The New England Journal of Medicine’s Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy series, we now get a primer on healthcare quality.
I think Dr. McGlynn starts with a great framing of the problem: After nearly two decades of experimentation with several of the best ideas about how to improve quality, there has not been much progress. Sure, new innovations (drugs, devices, procedures, etc.) have increased what we can do, but our overall ability to deliver evidence-based care to Americans is not really improving. She shows a great graph looking at our progress at getting people’s blood pressure under control. The percent of people whose blood pressure is well controlled has not, on average, gone up much in the last 18 years.
In other (blunt) words, we suck at care delivery innovation.
Why? Well, her answer looks at it from the structure-process-outcomes framework, which she describes and then proposes some solutions. My answer is two words: financial incentives. I won’t re-explain it here, but this post is a good start.
The structure-process-outcomes framework is a useful one, so let’s talk about it for a second. Those are the three major dimensions that can help to define quality, according to Avedis Donabedian.
Structure refers to things like clinic personnel (such as after-hours doctor access and care managers to check on high-risk patients), access to records that provide lists of patients with certain needs (like how many uncontrolled diabetics haven’t had an appointment for more than three months), and also basic facilities and management things. Getting the right structure is important because it provides the foundation for the other two dimensions.
Process refers to things we do, such as prescribing beta blockers and ACE/ARBs to patients with systolic heart failure, and ordering age-appropriate cancer screenings.
Outcomes refers to how the patients actually fare. How many have well-controlled blood pressure and diabetes, how often heart failure and COPD patients get hospitalized for exacerbations, etc.
We can measure any of those three things, and often we try to link them to reimbursement. Although, as Dr. McGlynn pointed out at the start, it hasn’t worked.
As a side note, trying to link reimbursement to the outcomes dimension is especially unpopular amongst providers because they can do everything right and prescribe all the right meds and schedule all the necessary follow-up appointments, but they can’t control whether the patient actually takes the medications and follows up, which means providers are often getting penalized for things that they don’t have control over.
Anyway, now you’re familiar with one of the foundational frameworks that has been used to approach quality improvement in healthcare.
Dr. McGlynn’s proposed solutions are very academic: focus more on social determinants of health since they often have a bigger impact on health than do medical treatments, start measuring things differently (stop measuring discrete events because that worsens fragmentation, use the more clinically meaningful EHR data for measurement rather than insurance claims data), and do a better job linking healthcare systems with appropriately resourced public health and community-based services. I believe all of them are important and will be helpful but not transformational like the solutions illuminated by the Healthcare Incentives Framework.
Lastly, I want to push back against one of her conclusions. She talks about how there has been little relationship found thus far between methods of financing and quality, and then she says, “Financial incentives alone cannot fix fragmented and reactive systems or create the operating systems required to enable reliable delivery of high-quality care.” And while I agree that financial incentives alone cannot fix our healthcare quality, I feel like she’s implying that it’s not the core mechanism of change and is instead just another lever we should consider using. I could be misreading that though. But whether I am misreading her or not, thinking of financial incentives as just another lever among many to improve healthcare quality is a generally held sentiment among healthcare experts. It’s another symptom of how healthcare experts misinterpret data and come to incorrect conclusions.
I’ve done the best I can on this blog to show that such a sentiment is incorrect. I’ve tried to explain that financial incentives are the core mechanism we have to induce change in the healthcare system, just as they are the core mechanism that makes every other industry function the way they do. And even though healthcare is different from other industries in many ways, those differences do not fundamentally alter the role of financial incentives in healthcare.
And that is why my answer to the question, “What will it take to improve quality?” is to systematically fix financial incentives first and then watch the quality-improving innovation emerge and expand.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 