Showing posts with label discrimination against physicians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discrimination against physicians. Show all posts

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Mismanagement of Knowledge Workers


In a previous post,  I discussed Drucker's concept of “knowledge workers” and how that concept applied to psychiatrists and physicians. The basic concept is that knowledge workers know more than their managers about the service they provide, work quality is more characteristic than quantity, and they are generally considered to be an asset of corporations.  I pointed out that physician knowledge workers are currently being managed like production workers and referred to common mistakes made in managing physicians and psychiatrists. Today I will tell attempt to describe how some of that mismanagement occurs using examples that psychiatrists have discussed with me over the past several years.

Inpatient psychiatry has taken a severe hit over the past 20 years in terms of the quality of care. Many people have talked with me about the discharge of symptomatic patients occurring in the context of high volume and low quality. Depending on the organization, a psychiatrist may be expected to run an outpatient clinic in addition to a busy inpatient service or in some cases provide all the medical services to the inpatients with minimal outside consultation. Most hospital care is reimbursed poorly despite political suggestions to the contrary. Psychiatric DRGs are typically 20% less than medical surgical DRGs and they are not adjusted for complex care. Administrators generally "manage" psychiatrists in a way to make sure that inpatient beds are covered. That frequently means that psychiatrists who prefer practicing in an outpatient setting end up doing some inpatient care. An outpatient clinic may be canceled so that a psychiatrist is available to run an inpatient unit. There have been situations where inpatient beds or whole units have been shut down for lack of psychiatric coverage. The only explanation given is that there is a "shortage" of psychiatrists.

I had the pleasure of running into one of my residency mentors in an airport last May. I let him know that I was just finishing up 21 years of inpatient work and moving on to something else. He smiled and said: "Three months wasn't enough?".  I always liked his sense of humor but there is also a lot of reality in his remarks.

I don't mean to imply that it is any easier on the outpatient side. If you are a manager, what could be easier than having a unit of production that you could hold your employees to? It turns out there is something easier and that is being able to set the value of that unit of production. That is what RVU based productivity is all about. A standard managerial strategy these days is to have a meeting with an outpatient psychiatrist and show them how much they are "costing the clinic" based on their RVU production. Spending hours a day answering phone calls, doing prior authorizations, questions from other clinicians, curbside consultations, discussions with family members, and documenting everything doesn't count. I have had the experience calling a clinic at 7 PM and hearing keyboards clicking in the background. I have asked outpatient colleagues how they are able to produce outpatient documentation themselves and still get out of clinic on time. Now that I work in an outpatient setting myself, I know what they were telling me was accurate and that is the documentation gets deferred until later.

The mismanagement does not stop there. At some point in time medical schools decided that there were also going to start basing faculty salaries on clinical production. I suppose every medical school as a formula for converting teaching and research time into production units, but until I see those formulas my speculation is that any activity that does not result in billing leads to lower compensation. The days when physicians were hired as teachers and academicians seem to be gone.  Because of discriminatory reimbursement, departments of psychiatry will be disproportionately affected.

Within psychiatry there used to be an interest in organizational dynamics and how they impacted patient care. The dynamics in most organizations today are set up to promote the business. That has produced a focus on high volume-low quality or in some cases supporting the specialty with the highest reimbursement and procedure rates.   Associated dynamics are in place to select and shape an idealized corporate employee who will modify his or her practice according to the whims of the Corporation. It may be hard to believe but large medical corporations everywhere are trying to figure out how to recruit young physicians who believe in their models. Physicians who don't accept these ideas frequently find that the company is not very friendly to them. There are always various political mechanisms for ousting any dissidents and there is minimal tolerance for debate.  The dissent can be as mild as asking why consultants with less expertise than the physicians in the practice are being called in to critique them and come up with a plan.

When it comes to physician mismanagement there are few businesses that can equal the government. RVUs, the Medicare Physician Payment Schedule, pay for performance, and various failed political theories like fraud as the cause for healthcare inflation, and managed care amplifying all of the above and focusing all of that irrational management directly on physicians.  The result is obvious as enormous inefficiencies, job dissatisfaction, and demoralization. Governments partnering with businesses and placing business practices like utilization review and prior authorization in state statutes increases the burden exponentially. At the heart of this conflict is a physicians training to be a scientific critical thinker and function autonomously with the businesses interest of making a buck. Despite all the lip service to quality, business decisions are always made on a cost rather than quality basis.

It is often difficult to see any light through the blizzard of government and business propaganda that passes for the management of physicians and psychiatrists. Psychiatry has bore the brunt of mismanagement over the past 20 years and that has well been well documented in the Hay group study showing the disproportionate impact of managed care on our field. Inpatient bed capacity has dwindled and the beds that have not been shut down are managed for high-volume low quality work. Outpatient clinics including those run by and nonprofits are managed according to the same model.  Businesses and governments have provided the incentives for this type of practice.  The available consultants in the field only know an RVU based productivity model and nothing else. Rather than treating psychiatrists as knowledge worker assets, the available jobs frequently reduce us to micromanaged clerical workers utilizing about 10% of our knowledge.  It should be no surprise that the environment makes it seem like anyone can do the job.

One of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker was: "More and more people in the workforce and mostly knowledge workers will have to manage themselves".   After all, only  the knowledge worker knows how to best complete the job.  Every psychiatrist that I know, knows how to get the job done and it is often at odds with what we are allowed to do. The best pathway to do this is to optimize the internal states of the knowledge workers and create environment where they manage themselves.  There are very few environments available where that can happen today for psychiatrists.

George Dawson, MD

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Physician oversight or intimidation?

The Board of Medical Practice in the state of Minnesota regulates 20,000 physicians. Most of them are employees in large healthcare companies. That means they have to undergo the credentialing process within those organizations as well as collateral organizations in addition to renewing their state license every year. There are about 800 complaints against physicians with the board of medical practice every year and the board takes serious actions based on those complaints at the rate of about 1.29 serious actions per 1000 physicians.

In Minnesota, anyone can complete a formal complaint against any physician. A specialist at the board sends a letter with the complaint to that physician's office and they have two weeks to respond to the complaint. That generally involves a specific letter to address the complaint as well as all of the associated medical records.  Frequently several physicians or clinics are part of the complaint in the process cannot go forward until all of the responses have been received by the Board.  The physician must respond literally to the complaint as written by the complainant.   The complaint is never interpreted by the Board.  The Board renders a decision based on the information it receives.
Like many states there is a move by politicians and the news media to suggest that doctors are not regulated tightly enough and they are not punished thoroughly enough in the state of Minnesota. The local press has been beating that drum for the past month.
There is now a clear case to be made that some of these complaints have little to do with medical practice and more to do with politics.  Many of us have seen it happen to our colleagues. I am familiar with several cases where a physician was accused of having a problem with other staff. The descriptions of those problems varied from being "disrespectful" to "snubbing" another staff member. Even in the case of unsubstantiated complaints there are protocols available in the Twin Cities that allow for physicians to be fired, written up, or rehabilitated based on purely subjective complaints. That is a far cry from the concerns about "disruptive physicians". It is apparent that in many settings purely subjective and essentially political complaints are being made on physicians and advanced by their administrative hierarchies.
Before anyone plays the "you're just defending physicians" card consider this. There is no physician I am aware of who would not agree with disciplining a physician who is physically abusive, verbally abusive, or otherwise out of control. There is no physician I am aware of who wants to see an incompetent physician practicing anywhere regardless of the source of their incompetency.  The people who escape criticism in the issue of physician discipline are not physicians but anyone who stands to gain from the proposition that there continue to be physicians who endanger public safety and there are widespread undetected numbers of them out there practicing.
Clearly the media has a stake in this process. The letter by Dr. Langland points out that the media in this case certainly could have done a better job investigating the major points of their contention that the medical board is failing in its public safety mandate. At a national level, Public Citizen obviously has a lot to gain by its ranking of medical boards and suggesting that ranking has a lot more meaning than it really does. Politicians at all levels get a lot of mileage out of keeping professionals accountable. That is true whether they are teachers or physicians. The irony is that politicians at all levels are clearly some of the least accountable people out there. I have also posted clear evidence that their approach to holding teachers "accountable" with an emphasis on standardized test score results is exactly the wrong approach to improving student test scores.
There are clearly a lot of people with a lot to gain in pushing this agenda and that conflict of interest is never discussed. The objective evidence is also never discussed. But I want to draw attention to a key paragraph in Dr. Langland's letter and that is the paragraph below:
"The Star Tribune also expresses concern that a majority of 74 doctors whose privileges were suspended or revoked by hospitals or clinics did not receive disciplinary action. Again, I am very familiar with these situations, most of which do not involve substandard patient care. Often they result from personality conflicts, turf battles and competitive issues. The board has correctly not let itself be drawn into these battles." (see reference 1)
This is a rather stunning revelation. It suggests that some organizations that are punishing physicians for what are essentially subjective or political complaints are also filing those complaints with the Board of Medical Practice and looking for them to be legitimized. While it is good to know that the current board has been able to see those complaints for what they are, there is no guarantee that will always be true. With the increasing influence of businesses and their agenda to control doctors, at some point in the future we may see these trivial complaints suddenly become complaints that threaten a physician's license and livelihood.
That is a heavy price to pay for the cost of doing business.

George Dawson, MD

1.  James Langland.  State Medical Board is Sound.  StarTribune March 5, 2012
2.  Star Tribune Editorial Board.  Medical Board Fails Quality Examination.  StarTribune February 25, 2012
3.  Medical Board actions against doctors, per 1,000 doctors, 2010.  StarTribune  February 6, 2012.
4.  Glenn Howatt and Richard Merryhew. State panel: Public deserves more information about physician misconduct.  StarTribune February 27, 2012.
5.  Glenn Howatt and Richard Merryhew. Doctors who err escape penalties.  StarTribune February 5, 2012.