Minnesota Finally Rejects Managed Care

In a rather stunning reversal of thirty years of public policy, the Minnesota Legislature voted last week to fund for a "network of small treatment centers" to compensate for all of those years of rationing.  The details are still vague  but it is described in the StarTribune article by Serres as a "network of small treatment centers, to be built across the state, anchoring a broad package of preventive services so children don't end up in emergency rooms or inpatient psychiatric wards where many of them are discharged prematurely for a lack of beds."  The funding is about $13 million for 2 years and $6.6 million "to create a network of 30-bed treatment centers for children with highly aggressive or self-injurious behaviors, who are often turned away from hospital inpatient units."  Political speak is evident in that sentence.  I can't imagine that $6.6 million or even $19.6 million gets you a lot of 30-bed treatment centers.  Later in the article a total new bed capacity is described as 150.

The author of the article is oblivious to how this all happened in the first place.  Was Minnesota an idyllic place with no mental illness in the first place?  Did the problem arise because an epidemic of mental illness?  Absolutely not.  Thirty years ago, the state had more bed capacity and more treatment options for both children and adults with mental illness.  Minnesota is a state with massive managed care presence and those managed care companies currently run all of the acute care psychiatric beds in the state - for both children and adults.  Once managed care companies learned that they could deny hospitalizations based on some fictional "dangerousness" criterion and otherwise ration psychiatric services at multiple levels there was - in effect - no rational psychiatric care.  As I have posted on this blog many times, people are discharged from hospitals in a few days essentially without treatment, treatment units are chaotic without a therapeutic environment, people who require medical detoxification form drugs and alcohol are generally out of luck, and it creates and ongoing demand on emergency departments and correctional facilities.  All it took was getting these practices embedded in the state statutes and setting up a cursory review of complaints against managed care companies at the state level to seal the deal.  The reporter in this case makes it seem like the Minnesota Legislature and a "bipartisan coalition of lawmakers" are solving a problem.  This is a problem they created in the first place and I will believe in a solution when I see it.

I have some first hand knowledge of the problem with children's services from my contact with child psychiatrists around the state.  Their experiences are echoed in the story in this article of what happens when your child is out of control and nobody is willing to help.  The family in this case describes a 17 year old boy with severe mood problems, aggressive thoughts and thoughts of self harm.   He was hospitalized 6 times and discharged in a heavily medicated state.  He was turned down by 30 residential facilities before being accepted by an out of state facility.   His parents describe themselves in a "perpetual state of anxiety" trying to manage all of these scenarios.  But the most incredible line in the article:

"For years, children who exhibit highly aggressive or violent behavior in Minnesota have been forced to drift from one short term hospital to the next, often returning to their families heavily medicated but with their illnesses largely untreated."

This is not surprising to any psychiatrist.  This is the end product of managed care rationing and it occurs whether the patient is a child or an adult.  It happens when businesses and governments collude in providing some bastardized version of psychiatric care.  It happens when psychiatrists in this case are ignored.  When state officials ignore psychiatrists. When psychiatrists who are trained to treat aggressive and violent behaviors are not allowed to do their jobs.  After all, why would anyone with aggressive behavior because of a mental illness be turned away from a psychiatric unit?  Aggressive and suicidal behavior are the main reasons that psychiatrists exist today.  It is what we do.  Let us do our jobs.

So far this is one small victory for children's mental health advocates and my cap is tipped to them.  But to reverse more of the problem we need to acknowledge what it is and it is managed care or more specifically their marketing word for mental illness - behavioral health.

Let's get rid of it entirely.

   
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Reference:

Chris Serres.  Facing chronic shortages, Minnesota's mental health system gets a boost.  Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 29.  


Supplementary 1:  The image used for this post is of Dexter Asylum attributed to Lawrence E. Tilley [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.  The original image was Photoshopped with a graphic pen filter.

Supplementary 2:  For a detailed post on some of what happened try this.

Live by the Customer Satisfaction Ratings and Die By Them

My original intent was to look at the problem of what happens to a group of physicians who are sailing along with very high patient satisfaction ratings.  Then for no particular reason, their ratings drop by about 20-25%.  At the high point they did not question the validity of the ratings.  They just assumed the satisfaction ratings reflected their high quality work.  The problem is that nothing they did changed and suddenly their ratings were significantly lower and people were looking for explanations.  Hence the title of this post.  If these ratings really mean something in the first place the physicians are suddenly thrown into a lot of self doubt.  If they believe the ratings are unscientific, designed by people who don't know much about survey design or sampling, and are actually biased because of the way the staff presents the surveys - they are much less worried.

I posted to above bar graph as an introduction to this post.  It is a composite of the opinions that several primary care physicians have given me about the correlation between benzodiazepine and opiate prescriptions and customer satisfaction ratings.  More prescriptions for controlled substances equals greater customer satisfaction.    Some clinics have adapted to this by letting patients know that they do not prescribe benzodiazepines or deal with psychiatric disorders.  That eliminates physician-to-physician variability in prescribing.  It also demonstrates that certain overprescribed medications are viewed as more serious than others.  I have not for example seen any similar clinic rules for antibiotics even though they are also widely over prescribed.

I hope it is not a news flash to anyone that highly satisfied customers in the health care system have the highest mortality and probability of hospitalization (1).  I know that at least some of the customers out there may be very surprised to hear that doctors can't be rated like a Toyota dealership.  Toyota dealers after all have a product that is high in quality, uniform, and the same irrespective of those pesky human factors that we all have to deal with in human encounters.    I am referring of course to things like communication,  interpersonal skills, thinking capacity, personality traits and personality disorders.  A Toyota dealer is out to satisfy all customer needs in the very circumscribed area of personal transportation.  Even then there will be bumps in the road.  A customer may not like the way the vehicle has turned out or some of the results from the service department.  But generally Toyota dealers have a great product and most of their customers are highly satisfied.

This may be hard to believe but the MBAs that currently run medicine in the USA decided to introduce management principles into the field that were designed for the auto industry.   The details and names of those management principles is irrelevant at this time, but when they were introduced it was a big deal.  I had to listen to several hours of lectures on Six Sigma.  Feel free to read about it and let me know how it possibly applies to the practice of medicine.  After those lectures it was obvious to me that the MBAs running medicine were completely clueless about medical care.  One small piece of evidence in what is now a mountain of evidence that the business emphasis in managing hospitals and doctors is completely off the rails.   Most business concepts are introduced to groups of physicians as a manipulation.  They have to be because no rational person would buy what appears to be Dilbert style management.  It goes something like this:

"Look - we know that physicians don't like the idea that they can measured.   We know you don't like that idea, but let's face it, this is a new era.  Things aren't like they used to be.  The day of the physician running things is over.  You are all going to have to be accountable now.  Some day your reimbursement is going to be tied to these satisfaction ratings."

Administrators like to seethe a little bit when they play the authoritarian act with physicians.  They think it gives them more credibility.  They could also be playing off the collective seething in the room.  The logical questions followed:

"Well what about clinicians seeing patients with cognitive impairment or who are being treated on an involuntary basis.  What can you say about the validity of those satisfaction ratings?"

That led to some laughter, but no explanations.  Everybody would be rated and that was the end of it.  There would be no exceptions.  The irrational authoritarian business model rules.

Before anyone gets too bent out of shape about my view of the business model let me illustrate with an second example of what I mean.  Earlier this evening I consulted with a colleague from another state on an inpatient problem.  When that was over I asked her how things were going in general and she told me:  "It's really kind of tough.  The patients are never really stable, they have multiple psychiatric, substance use, and medical diagnoses and they are very hard to stabilize."  She was thinking about moving on.  She was in a meeting and an administrator said:  "This patient has been here (x number of days) what is the plan?"   She said:  "What do you mean what is the plan?  The plan is what the plan always is - stabilize the patient and discharge them."  Managed care administrators have the uncanny ability to blame the physician for any discrepancy with a pure business approach to medicine.  They apparently believe that hospital treatment and discharges are as predictable as Toyotas rolling off an assembly line.  That is as true for customer satisfaction ratings as length of stay outliers.  It give the administrators leverage against physicians, especially any physician who buys in to the idea that these are valid metrics.

Let me illustrate by considering two different physicians Doc A and Doc B.  Both are very competent psychiatrists, but for some reason Doc A consistently scores lower on customer satisfaction ratings than Doc B.   From the research in this area, it may simply mean that Doc B gives his patients more of what they want than Doc A.  My speculation is that personality is a big factor.  A simple mismatch between extroverts and introverts can fuel a lot of dissatisfaction.  The extroverts on both ends (doctor and patient) like to be engaged and they like the conversation to have no dead air.  A doctor that is too reserved may be perceived as being disinterested or not giving them enough in the interaction.  Some patients want special treatment and others just want confirmation of their perceptions of other doctors and in:  "I was not really impressed with your colleague.  What do you think of him?"  Psychiatrists generally know better, especially psychiatrists who recognize that their organization is set up to facilitate splitting and chaos.  There may be a difference between the doctors in terms of prescribing patterns in terms of my previous analysis of the overprescribing problem.  In this case Doc A may be known for no sleep medications, no benzodiazepine prescriptions, no opiate maintenance prescriptions and no high dose amphetamines for narcolepsy and no stimulant prescriptions for adult ADHD when the patient is functioning well in school or work.  Denying those groups of prescriptions will not only result in low physician satisfaction scores but threats of violence and suicide.  That is not to say that other tests or medication would not result in and extremely dissatisfied patient.  There are thousands of scenarios where the patient does not take the physicians advice in the manner with which it is intended and that is - the best possible advice to diagnosis or treat a problem at a given point in time.

I did not write this post to "prove" that being satisfied with your physician is necessarily a good thing or a bad thing.  If I wanted to approach problems like that I could probably get my own TV show.  The whole point here is that any potential patient-customer needs to know what these things mean.  You may not want to keep hearing the word but politics is the major reason.  People trying to sell their business based idea about medicine versus physicians who have no similar notions.  People trying to sell their idea that medicine is just like making widgets rather than treating people who have tremendous biological variability.  You don't want your Toyota to have tremendous mechanical variability, but for human beings biological variability is both a fact of life and a distinct advantage from an evolutionary standpoint.

And finally what about news from your physician that you don't want to hear.  Certainly there is widespread fear of a dreaded incurable diagnosis.  There is the concern of diagnoses associated with disability and loss of function.  But there is also straightforward advice on how to avoid fatal illnesses and disability.  The way that is presented varies considerably from physician to physician.  You have to ask yourself: "Would I rather hear that I am overweight and need to lose weight or that I should stop smoking or that I should stop using hydrocodone or alprazolam or would I rather be talking with a physician who would keep quiet on those issues?"

I don't think there is a good study of the issue and if somebody knows one please let me know so that I can post it here.  I can provide another anecdote.  I worked with a group of women once many of who consulted a female internist who was bright, attractive and wore very high fashion clothing (their characterization not mine).  Things were generally going along pretty well until this internist told some of them that they were overweight and needed to lose weight.  That elicited a very strong reaction and it seemed amplified by their perception of this physician as being "perfect".  When I thought about my experience with physicians - nobody has ever told me to lose weight even in situations where they should have.  I suggested it to a physician once and he said: "I concur with your recommendation doctor" but never told me that outright.  Social and cultural factors all play a part in the patients perception of the physician and their satisfaction ratings.

It is a good idea to keep all of those factors in mind in attempting to interpret physician satisfaction ratings especially since most consumer web sites focus entirely on these measures.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

1:  Fenton JJ, Jerant AF, Bertakis KD, Franks P. The Cost of Satisfaction: A National Study of Patient Satisfaction, Health Care Utilization, Expenditures, and Mortality. Arch Intern Med. 2012;172(5):405-411. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.1662

From the reference:

"Patient requests have also been shown to have a powerful influence on physician prescribing behavior, and our findings suggest that patient satisfaction may be particularly strongly linked with prescription drug expenditures." (p. 408)

"While we do not believe that patient satisfaction should be disregarded, our data suggest that we do not fully understand what drives patient satisfaction as now measured or how these factors affect health care use and outcomes. Therapeutic responsibilities often require physicians to address topics that may challenge or disturb patients, including substance abuse, psychiatric comorbidity, nonadherence, and the risks of requested but discretionary tests or treatments. Relaxing patient satisfaction incentives may encourage physicians to prioritize the benefits of truthful therapeutic discourse, despite the risks of dissatisfying some patients." (p. 409)

Supplementary 1:  If you are a primary care physician I am very interested in your thoughts about how patient satisfaction scores correlate with prescriptions for benzodiazepines, opioids, and stimulant medications as qualitatively depicted in the above bar graph. 

For The Last Time - Collaborative Care Is Not Psychiatric Care

I decided to post my response to the pro-collaborative care post “Experiences in Implementing Collaborative Care” by Sanchez on this blog so that it would be more readable and contain active links.  In reading this blogpost and the accompanying links it is apparent to me that these models have little to do with psychiatry.  The link to the article by Sanchez and Adorno describes a psychiatrist who is in clinic for direct consultation with patients for 4 hours per week and is otherwise available for curbside consultation.  Contrary to some of the initial responses this requires no special training on the part of psychiatrists.  Psychiatrists currently do that every day.  The other element that jumps out of this material is that this is behavioral health or in other words managed care.  Take the psychiatrist out of the picture and you have a method for providing more detailed primary care and supportive services to patients with mild if any psychiatric illness.  Given managed care’s lack of physician time with patients this is certainly a good idea.  It might actually save psychiatrists time when they find themselves explaining medications and drug interactions for medications prescribed by primary care physicians. Promoting this as psychiatric care and suggesting that this is the future of psychiatry (see Worcester) is a clear mistake.  At the level of large healthcare organizations, it allows them to say that they are providing “behavioral health care” while the needs of patients with severe mental illnesses are neglected and their care is shifted to another system that may include a local jail.

I was trained to do collaborative care in the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) model of Test and Stein in 1987.  For three years following residency, I did collaborative care with a case management team out of a community mental health center.  We provided comprehensive medical and psychiatric care to every person on the team and that included determining medical needs and making referrals for testing and treatment if I felt the patient’s medical problems were not being addressed.  In that model of care, the psychiatrist is a physician coordinating medical and psychiatric care for people with severe mental illnesses and significant medical comorbidity.  All of the care comes from a personal relationship with each patient.  The psychiatrist sees the patient frequently and knows them well.  We were tremendously successful in helping people stay out of hospitals, helping them live independently, providing 24/7 crisis coverage, reducing the total amount of medications prescribed, and getting them medical care for significant problems that were misdiagnosed or that they had refused to get care for. As far as I know, the community psychiatry models are being taught in most residency programs and the number of these programs has increased significantly since I was trained.

The problem with current models of collaborative care is that the psychiatrist does not or provides minimal medical or psychiatric care.  One central question is – what model are we talking about? The original model in a JAMA article points out that the psychiatrist does not see the patient at all but reviews rating scales.  The new model from a group consulting to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), has put the psychiatrist in the role of seeing the occasional patient, probably similar to the link to the Sanchez and Adorno article.  The remaining links are less specific.

The responsibilities outlined in both the AMA and APA models are not really psychiatry.  Instead they can be seen as an extension of a process initiated 20 years ago by managed care companies to ration access to psychiatrists and psychiatric care.  Everybody reading this knows what that means.  We currently have no useful inpatient treatment besides crisis care based on “dangerousness” criteria.  The largest psychiatric hospitals in the country are county jails.  We have limited to no access to detox facilities despite being in the midst of an opiate epidemic.  Access to psychiatrists is rationed and it is not uncommon to be told that a psychiatrist will be available for a 10-15 minute discussion of medications only.  Psychotherapy that resembles the psychotherapy delivered in research studies is rarely if ever provided.  In their place we have models where patients fill out a checklist and get placed on a medication as soon as possible.  That is occurring in the context of clear evidence that in many cases antidepressants already exceed the actual diagnosis of major depression.  It also occurs in the context that depression screening has no evidence basis and in most cases screening equates with diagnosis.

The current models of collaborative care can easily be done without a psychiatrist.  I think that is really the point.  Anybody can look at a PHQ-9 score and an antidepressant algorithm and put somebody on an antidepressant.  It is ironic that when psychiatrists and other physicians are being told that it is important to go through maintenance of certification procedures in addition to continuing medical education that the federal government and professional organizations have recommended such a low standard.  On the other hand it does seem like the logical conclusion of the marginalization of psychiatry and psychiatric services by the insurance industry and federal and local governments.

What is a proactive position for psychiatry?  First, recognize that this model is not the model for providing psychiatric services.  If anything it highlights the well known fact that there are two tiers of care for mental illnesses.  Psychiatrists have adapted to managed care rationing by refusing to accept insurance and changing to a cash only basis.  I recently saw this compared to how dental care is rationed and I think that is an accurate comparison.  Excellent dental care is available but the odds are the patient will pay for it.  Second, this form of rationing will probably continue the current managed care tradition of rationing psychiatric services.  It will not lead to any improvement in the availability of inpatient services, detoxification services, or psychotherapy for people with severe mental illnesses.  It will allow these companies to advertise collaborative care along with all of the other business services that are marketed as improvements to their patients.  Third, there is the undeniable connection between PHQ-9 scores and medication exposure at a time when the FDA has issued a warning on a widely prescribed antidepressant.  Fourth, with the widespread use of the PHQ-9 and availability of administrative data it is just a matter of time before somebody publishes papers based on the data showing a marked increase in the prevalence of depression.  Some researchers and many clinicians equate a PHQ-9 score with a diagnosis of depression.  Fifth, psychiatrists need to remain focused on providing a high standard of care to people with severe mental illness, neuropsychiatric problems, and people with significant medical comorbidity.  There are many internists and family physicians who are very competent in prescribing antidepressants and using typical augmentation strategies.  They are also using fewer benzodiazepines to treat anxiety disorders.  That constitutes a first line of medical care from the primary care side for mental illness in this country.

Collaborative care should not be confused with psychiatric care and psychiatrists should not be confused about this being a new model for them to follow.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

References:

Sharon Worcester.  Future of psychiatry may depend on integrated care.  Clinical Psychiatry News.  April 2014.  page 1.

The Model of Psychiatric Care for the Future

Collaborative Care – Even Worse Than I Imagined

     

Prior Authorization - A Legal Document?

As part of the continuous harassment that is prior authorization, I recently received a form in the mail.  It was a repeat of one that I had already signed and faxed in. The only difference was this boilerplate attached to the bottom"

"I attest that the medication requested is medically necessary for this patient. I further attest that the information provided is accurate and true, and that documentation supporting this information is available for review if requested by the claims processor, the health plan sponsor, or, if applicable, a state or federal regulatory agency. I understand that any person who knowingly makes or causes to be made a false record or statement that is material to a claim ultimately paid by the United States government of any state government may be subject to civil penalties and treble damages under both the federal and state False Claims Acts. See, e.g., 31 U.S.C. §§ 3729-3733."

I suppose I should be grateful that the PBM in this case did not attach the 14 page federal statute. And that's right, this statute is a Civil War era statute that I am sure no legislator at the time or since then would have applied to the practice of medicine. What are the implications?

1. First is the clear alliance of PBMs with the federal government. There is no clear separation of where a private for profit business ends and the government begins. I have never sent out a form or a letter with a warning that governments at any level might enforce my recommendations or services. In fact, I have complained numerous times to government officials and agencies about managed care companies at several levels only to be politely told "We can't help you." Probably because they are tripping over one another to help out the managed care cartel.

2. Secondly (and this is a recurrent theme), we have the illusion that health care companies are policing doctors and holding them accountable. That's right - the same industry that is basically one of the largest taxes on most Americans and the same industry that has dismantled mental health care and transferred the mental health care of millions of Americans to correctional facilities. There is also an implicit threat very similar to the threat I wrote about during the billing and coding era.

3. The propaganda effect - practically all managed care intrusions into the practice of medicine are designed to shift financial and clinical risk to physicians. That would includes all of the other managed care schemes like report cards, capitation, pay-for-performance, utilization review, managed formularies and all other schemes to shift risk onto doctors. The net effect of this propaganda has been to adopt the propaganda as somehow being normative. The worst effect is that these insurance companies and MBAs push the propaganda as though it is scientific fact. It not only lacks scientific merit but they frequently do not know how to analyze the data. The best example I can think of is using the PHQ-9 to "measure" depression treatment in the state of Minnesota. This is not only an invalid application of the screening tool, but the state clearly does not have any way to analyze the longitudinal data in any scientific manner.

The blizzard of propaganda from the managed care industry has been a positive for them. It has such a deleterious effect on physician morale that nobody seems to be up for a fight. They have actually launched a new wave of propaganda that is very similar to the initial wave that was used to justify managed care in the first place. We are now seeing "collaborative care" studies that claim very positive results. Medicine and psychiatry in particular seem desperate in the face of managed care propaganda. One of the front page headlines in this month's Clinical Psychiatry News was:

Future of psychiatry may depend on integrated care.


I would submit that it does but not for the reasons claimed in the article. Integrated care will result in psychiatrists with considerable less knowledge than they currently have and they will be totally marginalized without a clear set of problems to treat. The only reason psychiatrists have not been put out of business so far is that we successfully treat a set of problems that nobody else does.

Standing around in a primary care clinic looking at PHQ-9 scores and monitoring the rapid and random prescription of antidepressants by nonpsychiatrists seems like a job for an MBA rather than an MD.

I am sure at the proper time, some business type will come to that conclusion and psychiatry in managed care systems will politely disappear.........

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

APA Continues to Hype Managed Care

This YouTube video is fresh off my Facebook feed this morning from the APA.  It features American Psychiatric Association (APA) President Jeffrey Lieberman, MD discussing the advantages of a so-called collaborative care model that brings psychiatrists into primary care clinics.  I have critiqued this approach in the past and will continue to do so because it is basically managed care taken to its logical conclusion.  As opposed to Dr. Lieberman's conclusion, the logical conclusion here is to simply take psychiatrists out of the picture all together.

A prototypical example of what I am talking about is the Diamond Project in Minnesota.  It is an initiative by a consortium of managed care companies to use on of these models to monitor and treat depression in primary care clinics in the state of Minnesota.  In this model, patients are screened and monitored using the PHQ-9 a rating scale for depressive symptoms.  Their progress is monitored by a care manager and if there is insufficient progress as evidence by those rating scales, a psychiatrist is consulted about medication doses and other potential interventions.  The model is described in this Wall Street Journal article.  As is very typical of articles praising this approach it talks about the "shortage" of psychiatrists and how it will require adjustments.  In the article for example, the author points out that there would no longer be "one-to-one"  relationships.  There are two major problems with this approach that seem to never be not considered.

The first is the standard of care.  There are numerous definitions but the one most physicians would accept is care within a certain community that is the agreed upon standard provided by the same physician peers.  In this case care provided by all psychiatrists for a specific condition like depression.  There are professional guidelines for the care of depression and in the case of primary care guidelines for care provided by both family physicians and internal medicine specialists.  One of the tenants of this care is that physicians generally base treatment of an assessment that they have done and documented.  The only exception to that is an acceptable surrogate like a colleague in the same group covering a physician's patients when they are not available.  That colleague generally has access to the documented assessment and plan to base decisions on.  This is the central feature of all treatment provided by physicians and is also the basis for continuity of care.  As such it also forms the basis of disciplinary action by state medical boards and malpractice claims for misdiagnosis and maltreatment.  An example of disciplinary action based on this standard of care is inappropriate prescribing with no documented assessment or plan - a fairly common practice in the 1980s.

In all of my professional life, the standard of care has been my first and foremost consideration.  It is basically a statement of accountability to a specific patient and that is what physicians are trained to be.  Curiously it is not explicit in ethics literature and difficult to find in many state statutes regulating medical practice.  That may be due to the entry of managed care and the introduction of business ethics rather than medical ethics.  It also may be due in part to an old community mental health center practice of hiring psychiatrists essentially to refill prescriptions rather than assess patients.  This is addressed from a malpractice perspective by Gutheil and Appelbaum in their discussion of malpractice considerations and how they changed with the advent of managed care:

"Managed care is one omnipresent constraint.  Patients and clinicians must work together to fashion an appropriate treatment plan to take into account available resources and given the contingencies faced by the patient.  If that plan-properly implemented-fails to prevent harm to the patient, the clinician should not face liability as a result." (p 164).

They go on to explain how ERISA - the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 indemnifies managed care companies and their reviewers from the same liability that individual physicians have.  They cannot be sued for negligence and the resulting harm.  So managed care can take risks without concern about penalties as opposed to physicians who are obliged to discuss risks with the patient.  Managed care organizations can also implement broad programs like depression screening and treatment without a physician assessment and consider that their standard of care.

The second problem with the so-called collaborative care approach is that there is no evidence that it is effective on a large scale.  I pointed out this criticism by a group of co-authors including one of the most frequently cited epidemiologists in the medical literature.  That group has the common concern that a rating scale is a substitute for an actual diagnosis and everything that involves and given the recent FDA warning on citalopram.

Both of these concerns bring up an old word that nobody uses anymore - quality.  It is customary today to use a blizzard of  euphemisms instead.  Words like "behavioral health", "managed care", accountable care organizations", "evidence-based", "cost-effective" and now "collaborative care".  According to Orwell, the success of such political jargon and euphemism requires

"an uncritical or even unthinking audience.  A 'reduced state of consciousness' as he put it, was 'favorable to political conformity'." (3 p. 124)

Dr. Lieberman uses a lot of that language in his video.  The critics of psychiatry in the business community do the same.  There appears to be a widespread uncritical acceptance of these euphemisms by politicians, businesses and even professional organizations.

An actual individualized psychiatric diagnosis and quality psychiatric care gets lost in that translation.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

1.  Beck M.  Getting mental health care at the doctor's office.  Wall Street Journal September 24, 2013.

2.  Gutheil TG, Appelbaum PS.  Clinical Handbook Of Psychiatry And The Law. 3rd edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkens.  2000, p 164.

3.  Nunberg G.  Going Nucular: language, politics, and culture in confrontational times.  Cambridge: Perseus Books Group, MA 2004.

4.  American Psychiatric Association Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Espcially Applicable to Psychiatry.  2009 version.

Psychotherapy Has No Image Problem - Psychotherapy Has a Managed Care Problem

There was an opinion piece in the New York Times a few days ago entitled "Psychotherapy's Image Problem".  The author goes on to suggest that despite empirical evidence of effectiveness and a recent study showing a patient preference for psychotherapy - it appears to be in decline.  He jumps to the conclusion that this is due to an image problem, namely that primary care physicians, insurers, and therapists are unaware of the empirical data.  That leads to a lack of referrals and for some therapists use of therapies that are not evidence based - further degrading the field.  He implicates Big Pharma in promoting the image of medications and that the evidence base for medication has been marketed better.  He implicates the American Psychiatric Association in promoting medications and suggests that the guidelines are biased against psychotherapies.

I am surprised how much discussion this post has received as though the contention of the author is accurate.  Psychotherapy has no image problem as evidenced by one the references he cites about the fact that most patients prefer it.  It wasn't that long ago that the famous psychotherapy journal Consumer Reports surveyed people and concluded that not only were psychotherapy services preferred, they were found as tremendously helpful by the majority of people who used them.  That study was not scientifically rigorous but certainly was effective from a public relations standpoint.

The idea that psychiatry is promoting drugs over psychotherapy seems erroneous to me.  The APA Guidelines certainly suggest psychotherapy as first line treatments and treatments that are part of selecting a therapeutic approach to the patient's problems.   Psychopharmacology is also covered and in many cases there are significant qualifications with the psychopharmacology. Further there are a number of psychiatrists who lecture around the country who are strong advocates for what are primarily psychotherapeutic approaches to significant disorders like borderline personality disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.  Psychiatrists have also been leaders in the field of psychotherapy of severe psychiatric disorders and have been actively involved in that field for decades.   Even psychopharmacology seminars include decision points for psychotherapy either as an alternate modality to pharmacological approaches or a complementary one.  What is omitted from the arguments against psychiatry is that many payers do not reimburse psychiatrists for doing psychotherapy.

The author's action plan to politically promote the idea that psychotherapy is evidence based and deserves more utilization is doomed to fail because the premises of his argument are inaccurate.  There is no image problem based on psychiatry - if anything the image is enhanced.  There is definitely a lack of knowledge about psychotherapy by primary care physicians and it is likely that is a permanent deficit.  Primary care physicians don't have the time, energy, or inclination to learn about psychotherapy.  In many cases they have therapists in their clinic and just refer any potential mental health problems to those therapists.  In other cases, the health plan that primary care physicians work for has an algorithm that tells them to give the patient a 2 minute depression rating scale and prescribe them an antidepressant or an anxiolytic.

And that is the real problem here.  Psychotherapists just like psychiatrists are completely marginalized by managed care and business tactics.  If you are a managed care company, why worry about insisting that therapists send you detailed treatment plans and notes every 5 visits for a maximum of 20 visits per year when you can just eliminate them and suggest that you are providing high quality services for depression and anxiety by following rating scale scores and having your primary care physicians prescribe antidepressants?.  The primary care physicians don't even have to worry if the diagnosis is accurate anymore.  The PHQ-9 score IS the diagnosis.  Managed care tactics have decimated psychiatric services and psychotherapy for the last 20 years.

It has nothing to do with the image of psychotherapy.  It has to do with big business and their friends in government rolling over professionals and claiming that they know more than those professionals.  If you really want evidence based - they can make up a lot of it.  Like the equation:

rating scale + antidepressants = quality

If I am right about the real cause of the decreased provision of psychotherapy, the best political strategy is to expose managed care and remember that current politicians and at least one federal agency are strong supporters of managed care.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Brandon A. Guadiano.  Psychotherapy's Image Problem.  New York Times September 29, 2013.

Happy Labor Day - To All the Docs On The Assembly Line

When I first started working in medicine I was the Medical Director of an outpatient mental health clinic.  We had a staff of 8 psychotherapists, 2 nurses, and 2 case managers.  There were three transcriptionists to type up all of our notes.  Every person I saw had a typed note to document the encounter and all of the charts were paper.  There was no electronic health record.  If a person needed a prescription, I would write one or call the pharmacy and that was the end of it.  The majority of my time was spent speaking directly with patients and I could generally do all of the dictations in about 2 hours per day.

After three years I moved to a hospital setting.  There were three inpatient units with 6 psychiatrists and two transcriptionists.  One of the transcriptionists specialized in paperwork specific to probate court proceedings.  There was an additional pool of transcriptionists available 24/7 on any phone in the hospital for immediate documentation of any clinical encounter.  The admission notes were typed on two or three sheets and inserted in the chart.  Daily progress notes were typed on adhesive paper and pasted into the chart.  After I signed the note, a billing and coding expert came through and submitted a billing fee for the work that had been done.  The same process was in place with pharmacies.  Call them or send them a written prescription and it was taken care of.   Every Sunday I would go to the basement of the hospital in the medical records department and sign all of the areas I had missed to complete the charts.  It was the early 1990s and the administrative burden was certainly there but it was a manageable ritual.

Over the next decade things got much, much worse.  Even in the blur of a retroscope it is hard to say what happened first.  I would guess it was the political theory that health care fraud was the main driver of health care costs and the misguided effort by the federal government to crack down on doctors.  That led to the elimination of the billing and coding experts.  Doctors now had to waste their time in seminars devoted to making them experts in what is an entirely subjective process.  No two coders agree on the correct bill to submit.  How can you teach that lack of objectivity to doctors?  The end result is that the billing and coding people were eliminated or reassigned and doctors took on another job unrelated to medicine.

The next phase was the electronic health record (EHR).  It required that doctors learn the interface (more seminars and training).  Once that was accomplished it was decided that they could also learn to enter their own notes - either really clunky ones using EHR derived phrases or more natural ones with a fairly frequent embarrassing typo using voice recognition programs.  That eliminated the transcriptionists and required much more training. During the transition period I still went in to medical records every Sunday.  I expected to see a staff person there who I had seen every Sunday for 15 years but one Sunday she was gone - a casualty of the EHR.  The end result was doctors with a couple of new jobs and the elimination of both transcriptionists and medical records people.

At about the same time, managed care companies started to ratchet up the pain.  In an inpatient setting you could get one or two "denials" per day.  A denial is the managed care company saying that they refuse to cover the cost of care because the admission was not "medically necessary".  That is managed care rhetoric for "we have decided not to pay you."  These denials are purely arbitrary and have nothing to do with whether a person needs care or not.  The best examples at the time were people with alcoholism or addiction who were suicidal and needed to be detoxed and reassessed.  The standard managed care denial at the time was "This patient should be treated in a detox facility."  The obvious problem was that not every county has a detox facility and those that do will not accept people making suicidal statements.   So the next new job became battling with these companies who were essentially getting free care for their health plan subscribers if you did not jump through all of the hoops necessary to appeal.

Slightly later, managed care decided they could apply the same denial strategy to pharmaceuticals on the basis that cheaper drugs are as good and all drugs in the same class are equivalent.  It turns out that nether of those assumptions is accurate, but in America today business and politics always trumps medical decision making.  This prior authorization process created a blizzard of paperwork that ties up a lot of clinic time.  One study estimated 20 hours per week (across all employees) per physician  on average.  That means if your clinic has 5 doctors in it - 100 hours per week of the total hours worked is used strictly to deal with insurance companies.  It also adds another job to what the doctor already does.

So in the time I have been practicing medicine let's add the number of jobs that have been accreted into the administrative side of medicine for all physicians.  Billing and coding expert + transcriptionist + EHR interface user + voice recognition user + utilization review responder + prior authorization responder totals 6 new jobs in the past two decades, none of which came up in medical school.

With all of that "efficiency" we should expect health care costs to plummet or at least stay the same.  As we all know that has not happened.  The politics and business interests driving this are in the business of making money.  Physician and hospital reimbursement is essentially flat.  One of the easiest ways to make a buck is to have the physicians doing way more administrative tasks and fire the employees that used to do them.  You can also make money by putting up the usual obstacles to doctors doing their jobs of treating patients in hospitals or clinics until they just give up.  I have been so burned out at times that I put a cursory note in the chart to say exactly what I did.  That note did not meet coding requirements so I did not submit a bill.  At some point you just have to stop working.  I know that I am not alone in getting to that point.

So congratulations to all of the docs who are now laboring on this vast assembly line that we now call American medicine.  It is the ultimate product of what Congress, the White House and big business can do.  We can only expect continued "improvements" or "efficiencies" under the new health care law.  It is an assembly line that discourages quality or innovation and that also makes it unique.

Happy Labor Day!

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Managed Care - A Variant of Looterism?

I follow several economic and financial blogs and I came across this piece on looterism yesterday.  For those of you not interested in clicking on the blog post, looterism is defined as maximizing private benefit irrespective of a goal of creating value or "private benefit regardless of the damage."  The author is focused on economic examples like banking corruption.  If you actually follow the politics and corruption in our financial system there turn out to be endless examples.  Dao references an earlier paper that nicely describes the current dynamic of maximizing extractable value rather than net economic worth so that the current creditors are left holding the bag.

I can't think of  better example of looterism than managed care.  Starting at the top end, what exactly occurs when a managed care company decides that they are not going to pay for an inpatient hospitalization for a patient with suicidal thinking.  It gets more complicated in a hurry if that person has no housing, a history of actual suicide attempts, and a substance abuse problem.  What happens if they say that they can be seen in an outpatient visit despite the fact that visit is two weeks away and it will involve a 15 minute conversation and a prescription that  also may not be covered by the managed care company?  I am a psychiatrist - so all of these denials are abhorrent to me, but what is the economic analysis of this situation?

The economic analysis is straightforward.  The managed care company is not creating any value.  Their product is supposed to be patient care and the situation as I described it is anything but patient care.  Managed care advocates might say they are creating value by being better stewards of the resources.  That is quite a stretch when they have essentially destroyed inpatient psychiatric care by promoting their mantra that a person needs to be "dangerous to oneself or others" in order to get admitted.  Forget the notion that things are out of control at home and nobody has slept for a week.  If the patient doesn't use the suicide word in the emergency department they are not getting in.

That completely artificial barrier to hospitalization has destroyed inpatient psychiatric care as a resource.  People come in a crisis and many leave in the same crisis.  There is no time for stabilization or a thoughtful analysis of the problem.  Short crisis stays and inadequate reimbursement has a corrosive effect on staff morale, resources for the physical plant, and the quality of care delivered.    Less and less value is created.

Eventually, staff with expertise can no longer tolerate the environment - especially when they are seeing more people and they are less able to help them given the managed care restraints.  These staff leave and move to a more suitable patient care environment.  The loss of knowledge workers creates even less value but it is a critical strategy in extracting value from mental health services and putting it somewhere else.  If knowledge workers can't be demoralized managed care can always come up with a strategy to simply not pay them or pay them very little.  The outpatient equivalent of inpatient care is seeing high volumes of outpatients - often for the sake of producing billing documents.  The associated appointments are often low in value.

I would say that looterism is alive and well in the medical industry.  You don't have to look very far in the health care economics field or your own health plan.  The associated marketing campaigns that talk about high quality care associated with looterism should be cautiously approached.  But that is a story for a different day.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Francisco Dao. Looterism: The Cancerous Ethos That is Gutting America.  August 7, 2012.

Politics and Prescribing: The Case of Atomoxetine

Prior authorizations for medications have been a huge waste of physician time and they are a now classic strategy used by PBMs and managed care companies to force physicians to prescribe the cheapest possible medication. The politics for the past 20 years is that all of the medications in a particular class (like all selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are equivalent and therefore the cheapest member of that class could be substituted for any other drug. The managed care rhetoric ignores the fact that the members of that class do not necessarily have the same FDA approved indications. It also ignores basic science that clearly shows some members of the class may have unique receptor characteristics that are not shared by all the members in that class. Most of all it ignores the relationship between the physician and the patient especially when both have special knowledge about the patient's drug response and are basing their decision-making on that and not the way to optimize profits for the managed care industry.

The latest best example is atomoxetine ( brand name Strattera.).  Atomoxetine is indicated by the FDA for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It is unique in that it is not a stimulant and that it is not potentially addicting. Many people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder prefer not to take stimulants because they feel like they are medicated and it dulls their personality. In that case, they may benefit from taking atomoxetine. The problem at this time is there are no generic forms of atomoxetine in spite of the fact that there are many good reasons for taking it rather than a stimulant. As a result physicians are getting faxes from pharmacies requesting a "substitute" medication for the atomoxetine. Stimulants are clearly not a substitute. Some people respond to bupropion or venlafaxine but they are not FDA indicated medications for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Guanfacine in the extended release form is indicated for ADHD in children, but it is also not a generic and is probably at least as expensive.  There is no equivalent medication that can be substituted especially after the patient has been out of the office for a week or two and a discussion of a different strategy is not possible.

I am sure that in many cases the substitutions are made and what was previously a unique decision becomes a decision that is financially favoring the managed care industry. I would like to encourage anyone in that situation to complain about this to the insurance commissioner of your state.  It is one of the best current examples I can think of to demonstrate the inappropriate intrusion of managed care into the practice of medicine and psychiatry.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

SAMHSA Aligned with Managed Care

When you have been as sensitized as I have to the rebranding of mental health services as "behavioral health" by the managed care industry - seeing a government agency promoting that brand is difficult to take.  I got an e-mail from SAMHSA this morning that does exactly that. The subsequent spin on behavioral health and health care reform needs to be read to be believed.  It is something that only a government bureaucrat or managed care administrator could actually believe.

This is an interesting excerpt: "Twenty years ago, even some in the behavioral health field didn't think recovery was possible."  Maybe that was why they were telling me that people in the throes of detoxification were now stable after three days.  Insisting that subscribers to their managed care insurance should be discharged home and that they could go to outpatient treatment despite repeated failures is certainly consistent with that statement.

Their spin on the PPACA is even more incredible with this summary statement: "Providers will also face new payment mechanisms such as capitation, episode rates, and team based payments rather than based on services provided."  That statement alone is proof that nobody at SAMHSA seems to understand that capitation was the primary mechanism that managed care used to dismantle mental health and addiction services to the abysmal level that they currently exist at.   Either that or they understand perfectly. 

This web page confirms what I have been saying for the past twenty years.  The government, in this case the federal government has been colluding with the managed care industry to marginalize the expertise of professionals and to continue to disproportionately ration care to anyone with a mental illness or an addiction.  The managed care industry and federal and state governments can spin that anyway that they want, but they can't get rid of the dismal record of the past 20 years or the fact that the government is now obviously promoting it.

Myths in the Huffington Post

Let me start out by saying that I have a low opinion of the Huffington Post largely because of its rhetorical approach to psychiatry.  Tales about the pharmaceutical company corruption of psychiatry, ongoing articles about the myth of mental illness, references to very poorly done research that supposedly discredits psychiatry, the idea that the DSM is either a manual for everyman instead of clinical psychiatrists or a book written to manipulate the general public - the Huffington Post has it all and then some.  Interestingly, the Huffington Post lists these postings under "Science" when it is clear that nobody there seems to know the first thing about science or how it differs from personal opinion.  From what I have seen, listing yourself as an authority on science apparently makes it so on the Internet.  "Rhetoric/Politics" would be a much more accurate heading.

Enter Allen Frances commenting in blog form.  I have already responded to one of the Dr. Frances editorials that seem to pop up everywhere.  I find the whole process of taking a scientific debate within a professional society into a public forum somewhat appalling.  In this case, the rhetorical device of applying a decision made about an entirely different process - withdrawing a paper that the author believes was incorrectly done due to a methodological error ( one that is common to much psychosocial research) to the DSM process seems rhetorical to me.  That occurs after the process has been thoroughly politicized in the media.

The arguments themselves are either red herring or they make it seem like the very public decrying of the DSM process has shamed the APA into not declaring grief and psychosis risk to be diagnoses.  The public will never know what the APA process would have decided on these issues and of course every critic wants to take credit for exposing the APA as a group of money grubbing scoundrels whose only mission in life is to appease Big Pharma or generate huge revenue for the organization.

I wish I could count on the public to be as skeptical of these opinions as they are of other political opinions.  Unfortunately after 25 years of practice, I can say with certainty that only a few people know what a psychiatrist is or how they are trained.  Today there is more misinformation than ever about psychiatry via the Internet.

As a reminder, the DSM is for clinical psychiatrists and psychiatric research.  Reading criteria without the associated training is not the same thing as making a diagnosis.  There are many nonpsychiatric mental health professionals and many nonpsychiatric physicians.  In fact, the bulk of psychotropic medications in this country are prescribed by nonpsychiatric physicians.  Access to psychiatrists is tightly controlled by managed care companies and state governments. It is difficult to see a psychiatrist initially and over time.  These same managed care organizations control who is admitted to and discharged from inpatient psychiatric units and the type of care provided there.

The idea that the APA is an omnipotent organization with the power to manipulate and control the provision of mental health care through out the USA is a myth of massive proportions.  The idea that the DSM is a potential tool for that manipulation is another.

You can probably read about that first on the Huffington Post.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

"The land of 10,000 90862s"

The title of this post is an inside joke for psychiatrists.  90862 is the billing code associated with a psychiatric visit that is commonly referred to as the "med check."  It is an example of what can happen to a profession when government bureaucrats and businesses run amok in determining what they think you do or what you should be doing when you provide patient care.

I first became aware of the political importance of this system in the 1990s, when I had to attend mandatory billing and coding seminars at my place of employment.   In those seminars I learned that the politicians and insurance companies were so desperate to use this arbitrary system that they told us we could go to federal prison for a long time if we submitted a "fraudulent" billing document.  The "fraudulent" document they were talking about was any bill connected to the document of a patient encounter that did not have enough bullet points to qualify for that level of billing.

That is an important concept so let me say it another way.  After every patient encounter, the physician needs to document a note about what happened and indicate a level of billing for that encounter.  When I first started training the note could be as little as one or two lines.  For example, at one point in my training I covered an entire surgical service with a team of doctors.  We could round on 25-30 patients with very complicated problems and write all of the documentation in about 2 hours.  The documentation was "Pain is well controlled, surgical site looks good, vital signs are stable."  We did not have to bother with any billing documents because a hospital billing specialist came by and confirmed that we had seen the patient and submitted the bill.

Somewhere  in the 1990s, a government initiative changed all of that.  The government decided that they needed a way to control the global budget for physician salaries and they decided to develop a system of codes for patient encounters that they assign relative values to and then multiply that by a certain number to set reimbursement for that code.  The entire system rests on the assumption that somebody can look at the description of a patient encounter as written in a note and audit the associated billing document.  It turns out that when this assumption was tested several years later - it was determined to be false, but that did not deter the federal government or the health insurance industry (see reference).

The 90862 is probably the most abused billing code in the psychiatric profession.  The interpretation of what constitutes an encounter that qualifies for this code varies from practice to practice and between organizations.  Patient experience varies from literally talking to a psychiatrist for 5 minutes with the goal of getting a prescription refill to a much richer encounter that includes a discussion of other current problems, additional medical diagnostic discussions and psychological advice.  In some cases, acute medical problems requiring emergency care have been identified in these sessions.  There is no doubt that a considerable amount of gaming occurs on the part of some clinicians and most insurance companies and government payers.

The only gaming possible by the clinician occurs at two levels.  The first is total time spent with the patient.  The folklore is that these are all 15 minute encounters.  Some clinicians insist on seeing patients in half hour blocks and others see 3 - 4 people per hour.  The second is total documentation.  You can literally do a few lines or you can write several paragraphs and stay after work just to do the documentation.  A lot depends on whether you think you will be audited and somebody will be making an arbitrary decision about whether your note qualifies for the charge that you assign to it.

There are myriad ways that a managed care company can game the system.  First of all, they can assign any level of reimbursement to any billing code that they want.  I quoted a New York Times article in another post as saying that a psychiatrist could see three patients for medications and get reimbursed at $50 per session, but the actual reimbursement can be less than half of that.  That same managed care company can also take any bills submitted for patient encounters with higher reimbursement levels and say: "we are only paying you for a 90862 no matter what you do."  If you happen to be working in an institutional setting, a managed care company can negotiate a per diem rate with your employer and not pay the 90862 billing at all.

Stated another way, a psychiatrist can see a patient with complex medical and psychiatric problems and get reimbursed at a level that might lead to them break even - to getting no reimbursement at all depending on the insurance company and contracting arrangements.  Within organizations the relative values for these codes are the basic way that physicians are manipulated to see more patients.  It is referred to as their "productivity" even though producing work for little or no reimbursement is not really productive activity.  The physician managers can demand that they see more and more patients to compensate for the poor or nonexistent rate of reimbursement by managed care companies.

Another artifact of this system is that procedures like surgeries, endoscopies, and angioplasties are reimbursed at a higher rates than a doctor talking with you and discussing the diagnosis and treatment.  That lead to a movement to reimburse the cognitive or nonproceduralist specialties at higher rates.  But given the amount of government payer and insurance company leverage it is impossible to make that happen.

Is there a solution to this problem that in effect makes physicians work impossibly harder to earn a professional salary?  The solution is as easy as considering how I pay my attorney, accountant, mechanic, plumber, electrician, and chimney sweep.  I pay them all by the hour.  In some cases there is an agreed fixed amount, but it is generally many times more than what I would get reimbursed for the lowest 90862 reimbursement.

Getting back to the title of this post, when I looked at the lowest current reimbursement for a 90862 and calculated how many of those bills would need to be submitted to make a professional wage, it came out to about 10,000 patient encounters per year.  Working 50 weeks per year that would mean seeing 40 established patients per day.  The only clinic where I have ever observed those numbers had three nurses rooming the patients and doing all of the documentation before they were briefly seen by a psychiatrist.

As I contemplated all of this I had the thought: "I am living in the 'Land of 10,000 lakes' - maybe we should just change that to the 'Land of 10,000 90862s.' "

George Dawson, MD

King MS, Lipsky MS, Sharp L. Expert agreement in Current Procedural Terminology evaluation and management coding. Arch Intern Med. 2002 Feb 11;162(3):316-20.

90862 Redux? An Update.

Is it the economy?

The lead story in this week's Psychiatric Times was sent to me in e-mail this morning under the subject "Economy Threatens Psychiatry Programs". It provides the news that the Cedars-Sinai Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences is essentially being phased out except for "staffing of psychiatric support that is an adjunct to patient care throughout the medical center." It quotes an unnamed academic psychiatrist as saying that the real reason that psychiatric programs are getting the axe is that they are the least profitable services offered at any hospital. The article goes on to suggest that declining Medicare funding of Graduate Medical Education may threaten additional programs.

The only real explanation and dose of reality in that article was the quote from their anonymous source. Psychiatric programs and bed capacity have been closing down for the past 20 years. It is the direct product of managed care strategies either being applied directly by the managed care cartel or through their friends and allies in the government. I have previously posted on this blog how psychiatric services have been marginalized from an economic standpoint.  That should be obvious from surveying any acute care hospitals in your state. In the state of Minnesota for example, a minority of the total hospitals have psychiatric units and fewer are staffed for chemical dependency services.  That has resulted in the need to transfer patients in crisis in emergency departments across the state or in some cases in different states. As a result any involved family members have to travel hundreds of miles to maintain contact with that person.  The economy for psychiatry has been bad for the last 20 years.

The evolution of this process is apparently so insidious that nobody pays attention to it. The only way that the minority of hospitals with psychiatric units can continue to operate and staff those units with psychiatrists is if they do a high volume, low quality DRG based business or they are subsidized to some degree out of the profit margin of other departments. In that case, an economic argument can be made that more severely ill psychiatric patients or medically ill psychiatric patients would never leave medical or surgical units if there were not psychiatric units available to receive them in transfer.

This process is easily reversed by providing adequate compensation for psychiatric care. The reimbursement levels for inpatient care are so trivial that an inpatient psychiatric unit is currently the least expensive place to maintain the patient.  At some point, treatment on a DRG based inpatient unit is cheaper than a group home and much cheaper than a state hospital.  That creates additional incentives and barriers to discharge from the hospital.

The bottom line is that it is not the economy.  There has been a systematic bias against mental health services for at least 20 years.  It is well past the time for psychiatrists and other advocates to remove the term "cost effective" from their dialogue. Psychiatric and mental health services have been the most cost effective medical services for at least the past 20 years and there is no reason for expecting them to get less expensive. Reversing that trend and providing compensation that is at least on par with the rest of medicine will allow for quality psychiatric hospital services and outpatient clinics.

George Dawson, MD

Stephen Barlas. Elimination of Psych Services at Cedars-Sinai Could Foreshadow Similar Cutbacks Elsewhere.  Psychiatric Times Vol 29, No2, February 8, 2012 

Endnote:  According to the Minnesota Hospital Association 29 of 136 acute care hospitals have beds staffed for mental health care and 6 of 136 have beds staffed for chemical dependency care.

Managed Care 101 – The Prior Authorization Hoax

As managed care organizations worked on how they could prioritize pricing over medical decisions they came up with various plans to “manage” how physicians prescribed medications.  I was a member of two Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committees (P & T) that  both had this as a goal.  One of those committees had a much stricter mandate in terms of saving money.  The basic strategy used by that committee was to place a drug “on formulary” or “off formulary”.  If it was “off formulary” it was not available to any doctors within the HMO to prescribe.

The idea that all drugs within a class that had the same purported mechanism of action ruled the day.  As an example, all of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (fluoxetine, paroxetine, sertraline, citalopram, escitalopram, fluvoxamine) would be considered equivalent medications and the committee would decide to place the least expensive ones on the formulary.  At the time, the major controversy was fluoxetine because there was no generic brand available and the company that produced it was notorious for not negotiating prices with hospitals and health care systems.  There was an eventual appeal by psychiatrists who presented to the committee on the unique qualities of fluoxetine.  At the time it was the only medication studied in adolescent depression for example.  Eventually a rule was passed that it was nonformulary for any physician who was not a psychiatrist.

The total cost of the drug was more of a consideration than the absolute price.  Very expensive drugs were approved that had questionable endpoints based on the fact that utilization would be low and that advocates for a particular untreatable illness would want it.  So the decision of the committee and their mandate was to reduce the use of relatively more expensive drugs that would be used fairly frequently.  In some cases, the off formulary drugs were available by “prior authorization” meaning that the prescribing physician needed to usually write up an appeal and fax it to the pharmacy or health plan and in some cases make additional calls.

The health care business has a long history of introducing layers and layers of management driven largely by the amount of money involved.  If you can successfully insert more management for even a small percentage of the available health care dollars you will potentially have a multi billion dollar business.   The management of pharmaceuticals is no exception and the Pharmacy Benefit Manager or PBM was born.  The task of the PBM like the task of a P & T Committee is to control the prescribing physician and force them to choose a medication based on the lowest cost.  Individual variation between patients and all of the other variables that physicians have to take into account do not matter.  If the physician or the patient thinks that they do – it will take a prior authorization for the alternate medication.  

The PBM model was designed from the outset to take a central role in the management of prescription drugs by replacing the relationship that the patient has with their health plan, their pharmacist, and even their physician.  How do I know this?  Take a look at their game plan from an internal memo in the diagram below.  This diagram was taken from an internal memo from over 15 years ago.  The structure depicted in the diagram is the system of care that exists today and the one that 95% of patient have their benefits managed through 

The prior authorization fallacy is essentially the same as the utilization review fallacy.  The most charitable interpretation is that it assumes that a person who is not necessarily a physician and who has no personal responsibility for your care can substitute their judgment based on a cost consideration.    

The diagram is also instructive in the way that the prescribing decision (and the dispensing decision) is trivialized as a "habit" rather than a decision that takes into account the evaluation and personal knowledge of the individual patient.

Today all physicians are routinely subjected to prior authorization procedures that waste significant amounts of their time and the time of their staff in order to make seem like the PBM decision has some degree of medical legitimacy.  The cost to medical practices is huge and completely unnecessary.  If PBMs are really businesses there is really no legitimate reason that they need to include physicians in their decisions of what medication should be covered.  They just need to plainly state that to their patients and deal with the public relations problems instead of wasting about one million hours of physician time per week.  In the weeks that follow I will demonstrate just how far this business plan has infiltrated medicine and psychiatry and what the response has been to date.

George Dawson, MD

Managed Care 101 – The Utilization Review Hoax

I happened to start practicing psychiatry at a time when managed care was just starting to build momentum. From a political standpoint there was concern in the popular press that healthcare services were being over utilized. There is a famous study by the RAND Corporation looking into whether or not angiography and bypass surgery were being used to frequently to treat cardiovascular disease. There was a concern that medical and surgical procedures in general were being over utilized. This was part of the driving force for a large scale experiment called the Medicare PRO or Peer Review Organizations.

In the late 1980s and throughout much of the 1990s I was a physician reviewer for the Medicare PROs, first in Wisconsin and then in Minnesota. My job was to look at cases selected from all psychiatric hospitalizations in the state and determine whether the total length of time in the hospital was appropriate for the condition and whether or not there were any associated quality problems. There was an extensive list of quality problems that nurse reviewers would identify and forward to me for further assessment. Examples of quality problems ranged from death on a psychiatric unit to abnormal vital signs at the time of discharge to the appropriate monitoring of the therapy like lithium that require close monitoring. All physician reviewers working for this organization had to be carefully screened for conflicts of interest.  I could not review any case if I had any financial interest in the hospital or clinic where the incident occurred.

At about the same time managed care companies were establishing utilization reviewers for their insured members. They had no quality focus or quality markers. Their only focus was whether or not one of their members was entitled to inpatient coverage or a specific course of outpatient therapy. There were no conflict of interest considerations because the reviewers were all paid by the managed care company and therefore their financial interests were aligned with the corporation.

You could consider the two different forms of utilization review to be the great experiments in the provision of medical care in the 1990s. More appropriately the Medicare PROs were probably the experimental side and the managed care utilization reviewers represented a business model that really required no experimentation. It seemed quite obvious that if you could deny care that you would make more money.  What happened to these two models over the next 10 years?

Despite the rigorous screening and structurally defined quality problems used by the Medicare PRO, at one point it was determined that the amount of over utilization found in the state of Minnesota was not enough to justify the cost of the program. After all of the hype in the press about how physicians and hospitals were providing unnecessary care, that was a stunning finding on such a large scale that it should not have been ignored. It essentially meant that from an objective scientific standpoint utilization review is unnecessary. Minnesota stopped its utilization effort and decided to partner on the quality side with health care organizations to improve the treatment of specific conditions.

Utilization review on the managed-care side has not only continued but flourishes despite the fact that there is no objective basis for it and that managed care organizations have complete control over reimbursement to physicians and hospitals and the reimbursement for psychiatric services is the absolute lowest.  The most recent development has been internalizing utilization review directly into the hospital and using care managers to force discharges from hospitals. These care managers often depend on a quasi-scientific set of guidelines or standards that frequently ignore the specific needs of patients

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Psychiatry has been hit particularly hard by this quasi-quality approach that disproportionately rations care to psychiatric patients. We are currently seeing people with complex disorders like unstable bipolar disorder discharged from psychiatric hospital within a few days because the "crisis" is over and yet they are not able to function by themselves at home. We have allowed managed care organizations to essentially dictate a standard that suggests the only reason that a person should be a psychiatric unit is if they are "suicidal" or a threat to others.  There is broad interpretation of what "suicidal" means and of course the physician reviewer for the insurance company has never personally assessed the patient or their circumstances.  The vast majority of patients who would benefit from quality care in a hospital would not meet either of those criteria and frequently have no other resources.

The fallout from this approach has been tremendous. Psychiatric care in hospital settings is generally viewed as being very poor in quality. Many outpatient psychiatrists I have consulted with have told me that there is essentially no place that their unstable outpatients can be stabilized because they are frequently discharged from hospitals in a few days and the treatment has not been changed. There is little collaboration between inpatient and outpatient psychiatrists because of the need for high turnaround and the time constraints.  The actual inpatient environments are frequently so toxic that people with fairly severe problems don't want to be there.  Managed care is focused primarily on providing high-volume, low quality care by the application of a method that has no basis in reality.

Why I don't use the term "Behavioral Health"

It was obvious to me from day one that this was a business strategy.  When I worked in a hospital I wore a standard white coat and embroidered under my name was the word PSYCHIATRY.  I was after all a board certified psychiatrist and every other doctor in the place had their specialty under their name.  One day back in the early 1990s, my boss summoned me into his office and said that were were going to replace PSYCHIATRY with BEHAVIORAL HEALTH.  After all we did not want to alienate the non psychiatrists working in the department who work on our teams.

Something about that explanation did not add up.  The other specialists also worked on teams and did not change the name of their specialty to match  the function of the team.  Besides the term MENTAL HEALTH was a perfectly respectable term that all of us had worked under for decades.  What was the push for BEHAVIORAL HEALTH?

Now we all know that it was part of a business strategy to marginalize professionals and make it seem like a business strategy was somehow good for mental health and psychiatric treatment.

I told my boss that if I was board-certified in behavioral health it might make sense, but barring that I would stick to PSYCHIATRY.  He agreed but over the years that followed the term BEHAVIORAL HEALTH has penetrated the marketplace even in the public sector.  More importantly the associated management strategies have led to rationed care and access to care as well as lower quality of care for all person with mental health problems.

There has been some movement toward renaming BEHAVIORAL HEALTH UNITS to MENTAL HEALTH UNITS.  But I haven't seen that in the Twin Cities or Midwest yet.