Bryn Nelson, PhD

DAVID LICHTMAN, PA, a hospitalist and director of the Johns Hopkins Central Procedure Service, explains the complicated set of factors used by

individual hospitals to determine which procedures fall under the scope of their HM practitioners.

DAVID LICHTMAN, PA, a hospitalist and director of the Johns Hopkins Central Procedure Service, explains the complicated set of factors used by

individual hospitals to determine which procedures fall under the scope of their HM practitioners.

DAVID LICHTMAN, PA, a hospitalist and director of the Johns Hopkins Central Procedure Service, explains the complicated set of factors used by

individual hospitals to determine which procedures fall under the scope of their HM practitioners.

Adam E. Fall, MD, SFHM, who recently worked as the senior regional medical director for hospital medicine at TeamHealth in Chattanooga, Tenn., discusses the importance of allowing nuance and gradation to govern patient care in the treatment of thromboembolism in an era where hospitalists can be overly reliant on electronic medical records.

Adam E. Fall, MD, SFHM, who recently worked as the senior regional medical director for hospital medicine at TeamHealth in Chattanooga, Tenn., discusses the importance of allowing nuance and gradation to govern patient care in the treatment of thromboembolism in an era where hospitalists can be overly reliant on electronic medical records.

Adam E. Fall, MD, SFHM, who recently worked as the senior regional medical director for hospital medicine at TeamHealth in Chattanooga, Tenn., discusses the importance of allowing nuance and gradation to govern patient care in the treatment of thromboembolism in an era where hospitalists can be overly reliant on electronic medical records.

A dedicated procedure team or service can give hospitals needed expertise without requiring a one-size-fits-all approach. In many cases, hospitalists run procedure services, but interventional radiologists and pulmonary critical care specialists also oversee some of them.

At The Johns Hopkins Hospital, the bedside procedure service began in the department of medicine and has since expanded throughout the hospital.

“I think a proceduralist service is as important as the hospitalist service,” says David Lichtman, PA, director of the service. He calls it “essential” for good patient care because it can allow experienced providers to be consistently involved in the process, whether proceduralists, medical students, or new interns perform the procedure.

“Patients have the benefit of expert care, and the trainees have the ability to learn and do without having to worry about working without a safety net,” he says. As a result, the service keeps patients safe while maximizing medical education.

At many institutions, a service or team can also meet a pressing need. In its seven years of existence, for example, the hospitalist-led procedures team at the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital Medical Campus has been called upon to do more than 7,500 procedures.

“The idea behind procedure services is that you consolidate the expertise and training within a few people, be it a few hospitalists or a few proceduralists,” says Michelle Mourad, MD, director of quality improvement and patient safety for the division of hospital medicine at the University of California

San Francisco (UCSF). But a successful service can require significant investments in infrastructure and other resources. When they run the numbers, many hospitalist groups are forced to conclude that they simply don’t have sufficient demand to justify the expense of maintaining provider competency.

“People are really struggling with this,” she says.

I derive a tremendous amount of enjoyment from working with my hands, from being able to provide my patients this service, from often giving them relief from excessive fluid buildup, and from being able to do these procedures at the bedside. —Michelle Mourad, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine and director of quality improvement and patient safety, division of hospital medicine, University of California San Francisco

The few studies conducted on procedure services, however, suggest that hospitals can benefit from improved patient satisfaction and a potential reduction in some complications.

“We were worried that that use of trainees and the teaching that went on at the bedside might be a concern for patients,” Dr. Mourad says of the UCSF procedures program. “We found that, instead, patients were reassured by having a designated expert in the room and recognized that it hadn’t always been the case in the past.” Accordingly, she says, a survey of satisfaction recorded “exceptionally high” rates.³

Initial research also suggests a reduction in such complications as thoracentesis-related pneumothorax.

“We have some inkling that perhaps the rigor with which we approach procedures, the high level of experience that we bring to procedures, and the presence of an expert in the room for every procedure may have decreased the complication rate for thoracentesis at our institution,” Dr. Mourad says.

At Boston University, the procedure service is based in the department of pulmonary critical care, and the department’s attending physicians supervise internal medicine residents. It was developed after “identifying some potential patient safety concerns with unsupervised resident procedures,” says Melissa Tukey, MD, MSc, now a pulmonology critical care physician at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass. A major aim of the procedure service, she says, is to provide supervision and teaching to medical house staff performing the procedures.

To test whether the service was delivering on those goals, Dr. Tukey and colleagues studied thoracentesis, paracentesis, central line, and lumbar puncture procedures.⁴ The study, an 18-month comparison of the procedures performed by the dedicated procedure service versus those done by other providers, found no significant difference in what were already quite low complication rates.

Unexpectedly, the researchers didn’t see higher levels of resident engagement in procedures performed by the procedure team, but they did find improvement in “best practice safety process measures,” such as whether ultrasound use followed established recommendations.

“I think that whenever you’re looking at quality improvement initiatives, you have to have an understanding of what might be the potential benefits,”

Dr. Tukey says. Her study, at least, suggests that launching a procedure service primarily to reduce the number of severe complications may not be the most appropriate goal. On the other hand, she says, the data do support the “very realistic goals” of improving residency education and maintaining procedure quality.

A dedicated service may not be a cure-all, in other words. And it’s certainly not for everyone. But given enough resources and buy-in, experts say, it could at least help put a hospital’s ailing bedside procedure strategy on the road to recovery without overextending its providers.

A dedicated procedure team or service can give hospitals needed expertise without requiring a one-size-fits-all approach. In many cases, hospitalists run procedure services, but interventional radiologists and pulmonary critical care specialists also oversee some of them.

At The Johns Hopkins Hospital, the bedside procedure service began in the department of medicine and has since expanded throughout the hospital.

“I think a proceduralist service is as important as the hospitalist service,” says David Lichtman, PA, director of the service. He calls it “essential” for good patient care because it can allow experienced providers to be consistently involved in the process, whether proceduralists, medical students, or new interns perform the procedure.

“Patients have the benefit of expert care, and the trainees have the ability to learn and do without having to worry about working without a safety net,” he says. As a result, the service keeps patients safe while maximizing medical education.

At many institutions, a service or team can also meet a pressing need. In its seven years of existence, for example, the hospitalist-led procedures team at the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital Medical Campus has been called upon to do more than 7,500 procedures.

“The idea behind procedure services is that you consolidate the expertise and training within a few people, be it a few hospitalists or a few proceduralists,” says Michelle Mourad, MD, director of quality improvement and patient safety for the division of hospital medicine at the University of California

San Francisco (UCSF). But a successful service can require significant investments in infrastructure and other resources. When they run the numbers, many hospitalist groups are forced to conclude that they simply don’t have sufficient demand to justify the expense of maintaining provider competency.

“People are really struggling with this,” she says.

I derive a tremendous amount of enjoyment from working with my hands, from being able to provide my patients this service, from often giving them relief from excessive fluid buildup, and from being able to do these procedures at the bedside. —Michelle Mourad, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine and director of quality improvement and patient safety, division of hospital medicine, University of California San Francisco

The few studies conducted on procedure services, however, suggest that hospitals can benefit from improved patient satisfaction and a potential reduction in some complications.

“We were worried that that use of trainees and the teaching that went on at the bedside might be a concern for patients,” Dr. Mourad says of the UCSF procedures program. “We found that, instead, patients were reassured by having a designated expert in the room and recognized that it hadn’t always been the case in the past.” Accordingly, she says, a survey of satisfaction recorded “exceptionally high” rates.³

Initial research also suggests a reduction in such complications as thoracentesis-related pneumothorax.

“We have some inkling that perhaps the rigor with which we approach procedures, the high level of experience that we bring to procedures, and the presence of an expert in the room for every procedure may have decreased the complication rate for thoracentesis at our institution,” Dr. Mourad says.

At Boston University, the procedure service is based in the department of pulmonary critical care, and the department’s attending physicians supervise internal medicine residents. It was developed after “identifying some potential patient safety concerns with unsupervised resident procedures,” says Melissa Tukey, MD, MSc, now a pulmonology critical care physician at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass. A major aim of the procedure service, she says, is to provide supervision and teaching to medical house staff performing the procedures.

To test whether the service was delivering on those goals, Dr. Tukey and colleagues studied thoracentesis, paracentesis, central line, and lumbar puncture procedures.⁴ The study, an 18-month comparison of the procedures performed by the dedicated procedure service versus those done by other providers, found no significant difference in what were already quite low complication rates.

Unexpectedly, the researchers didn’t see higher levels of resident engagement in procedures performed by the procedure team, but they did find improvement in “best practice safety process measures,” such as whether ultrasound use followed established recommendations.

“I think that whenever you’re looking at quality improvement initiatives, you have to have an understanding of what might be the potential benefits,”

Dr. Tukey says. Her study, at least, suggests that launching a procedure service primarily to reduce the number of severe complications may not be the most appropriate goal. On the other hand, she says, the data do support the “very realistic goals” of improving residency education and maintaining procedure quality.

A dedicated service may not be a cure-all, in other words. And it’s certainly not for everyone. But given enough resources and buy-in, experts say, it could at least help put a hospital’s ailing bedside procedure strategy on the road to recovery without overextending its providers.

A dedicated procedure team or service can give hospitals needed expertise without requiring a one-size-fits-all approach. In many cases, hospitalists run procedure services, but interventional radiologists and pulmonary critical care specialists also oversee some of them.

At The Johns Hopkins Hospital, the bedside procedure service began in the department of medicine and has since expanded throughout the hospital.

“I think a proceduralist service is as important as the hospitalist service,” says David Lichtman, PA, director of the service. He calls it “essential” for good patient care because it can allow experienced providers to be consistently involved in the process, whether proceduralists, medical students, or new interns perform the procedure.

“Patients have the benefit of expert care, and the trainees have the ability to learn and do without having to worry about working without a safety net,” he says. As a result, the service keeps patients safe while maximizing medical education.

At many institutions, a service or team can also meet a pressing need. In its seven years of existence, for example, the hospitalist-led procedures team at the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital Medical Campus has been called upon to do more than 7,500 procedures.

“The idea behind procedure services is that you consolidate the expertise and training within a few people, be it a few hospitalists or a few proceduralists,” says Michelle Mourad, MD, director of quality improvement and patient safety for the division of hospital medicine at the University of California

San Francisco (UCSF). But a successful service can require significant investments in infrastructure and other resources. When they run the numbers, many hospitalist groups are forced to conclude that they simply don’t have sufficient demand to justify the expense of maintaining provider competency.

“People are really struggling with this,” she says.

I derive a tremendous amount of enjoyment from working with my hands, from being able to provide my patients this service, from often giving them relief from excessive fluid buildup, and from being able to do these procedures at the bedside. —Michelle Mourad, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine and director of quality improvement and patient safety, division of hospital medicine, University of California San Francisco

The few studies conducted on procedure services, however, suggest that hospitals can benefit from improved patient satisfaction and a potential reduction in some complications.

“We were worried that that use of trainees and the teaching that went on at the bedside might be a concern for patients,” Dr. Mourad says of the UCSF procedures program. “We found that, instead, patients were reassured by having a designated expert in the room and recognized that it hadn’t always been the case in the past.” Accordingly, she says, a survey of satisfaction recorded “exceptionally high” rates.³

Initial research also suggests a reduction in such complications as thoracentesis-related pneumothorax.

“We have some inkling that perhaps the rigor with which we approach procedures, the high level of experience that we bring to procedures, and the presence of an expert in the room for every procedure may have decreased the complication rate for thoracentesis at our institution,” Dr. Mourad says.

At Boston University, the procedure service is based in the department of pulmonary critical care, and the department’s attending physicians supervise internal medicine residents. It was developed after “identifying some potential patient safety concerns with unsupervised resident procedures,” says Melissa Tukey, MD, MSc, now a pulmonology critical care physician at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass. A major aim of the procedure service, she says, is to provide supervision and teaching to medical house staff performing the procedures.

To test whether the service was delivering on those goals, Dr. Tukey and colleagues studied thoracentesis, paracentesis, central line, and lumbar puncture procedures.⁴ The study, an 18-month comparison of the procedures performed by the dedicated procedure service versus those done by other providers, found no significant difference in what were already quite low complication rates.

Unexpectedly, the researchers didn’t see higher levels of resident engagement in procedures performed by the procedure team, but they did find improvement in “best practice safety process measures,” such as whether ultrasound use followed established recommendations.

“I think that whenever you’re looking at quality improvement initiatives, you have to have an understanding of what might be the potential benefits,”

Dr. Tukey says. Her study, at least, suggests that launching a procedure service primarily to reduce the number of severe complications may not be the most appropriate goal. On the other hand, she says, the data do support the “very realistic goals” of improving residency education and maintaining procedure quality.

A dedicated service may not be a cure-all, in other words. And it’s certainly not for everyone. But given enough resources and buy-in, experts say, it could at least help put a hospital’s ailing bedside procedure strategy on the road to recovery without overextending its providers.

On his way to a recent conference, David Lichtman, PA, stopped to talk with medical residents at a nearby medical center about their experiences performing bedside procedures. “How many times have you guys done something that you knew you weren’t fully trained for but you didn’t want to say anything?” asked Lichtman, a hospitalist and director of the Johns Hopkins Central Procedure Service in Baltimore, Md. “At least once?”

Everyone raised a hand.

When Lichtman asked how many of the residents had ever spoken up and admitted being uncomfortable about doing a procedure, however, only about 20% raised their hands.

It’s one thing to struggle with a procedure like drawing blood. But a less-than-confident or unskilled provider who attempts more invasive procedures, such as a central line insertion or thoracentesis, can do major harm. And observers say confidence and competence levels, particularly among internal medicine residents, are heading in the wrong direction.

Two years ago, in fact, three hospitalists penned an article in The Hospitalist lamenting the “sharp decline” of HM proficiency in bedside procedures.¹ Co-author Joshua Lenchus, DO, RPh, FACP, SFHM, associate director of the University of Miami-Jackson Memorial Hospital Center for Patient Safety and medical director of the hospital’s Procedure Service, says the trend is continuing for several reasons.

“One is internal medicine’s willingness to surrender these bedside procedures to others,” Dr. Lenchus says, perhaps due to time constraints, a lack of confidence, or a perception that it’s not cost effective for HM providers to take on the role. Several medical organizations have loosened their competency standards, and the default in many cases has been for interventional radiologists to perform the procedures instead.

Another reason may be more practical: Perhaps there just isn’t a need for all hospitalists to perform them. Many new hospitalist positions advertised through employment agencies, Dr. Lenchus says, do not require competency in bedside procedures.

“The question is, did that happen first and then we reacted to it as hospitalists, or did we stop doing them and employment agencies then modified their process to reflect that?” he says.

For hospitalists, perhaps the bigger question is this: Is there a need to address the decline?

For Lichtman, Dr. Lenchus, and many other leaders, the answer is an emphatic yes—an opportunity to carve out a niche of skilled and patient-focused bedside care and to demonstrate real value to hospitals.

“I think it makes perfect sense from a financial and throughput and healthcare system perspective,” he says. The talent, knowledge, and experience of interventional radiologists, Dr. Lenchus says, is far better spent on procedures that cannot be conducted at a patient’s bedside.

It’s also a matter of professional pride for hospitalists like Michelle Mourad, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine and director of quality improvement and patient safety for the division of hospital medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

“I derive a tremendous amount of enjoyment from working with my hands, from being able to provide my patients this service, from often giving them relief from excessive fluid buildup, and from being able to do these procedures at the bedside,” she says.

Reversing the recent slide of hospitalist involvement in procedures, however, may require more cohesive expectations, an emphasis on minimizing complications, identification of willing and able procedure champions, and comprehensive technology-aided training.

Confounding Expectations

Paracentesis, thoracentesis, arthrocentesis, lumbar puncture, and central line placement generally are considered “core” bedside procedures. Experts like Lichtman, however, say little agreement exists on the main procedures for which hospitalists should demonstrate competency.

“We don’t have any semblance of that,” he says. “The reality is that different groups have different beliefs, and different hospitals have different protocols that they follow.”

Pinning down a consistent list can be difficult, because HM providers can play different roles depending on the setting, says hospitalist Sally Wang, MD, FHM, director of procedure education at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“You could be in an academic center. You could be in a community hospital. You could be in a rural setting where there’s no other access to anyone else doing these procedures, or you can have a robust interventional radiology service that will do all the procedures for you,” she says.

In 2007, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) revised its procedure-related requirements for board certification. Physicians still had to understand indications and contraindications, recognize the risks and benefits and manage complications, and interpret procedure results. But they no longer had to perform a minimum number to demonstrate competency. To assure “adequate knowledge and understanding” of each procedure, however, ABIM recommended that residents be active participants five or more times. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) followed suit in its program requirements for internal medicine.

Furman McDonald, MD, ABIM’s vice president of graduate medical education, says the board isn’t suggesting that procedure training should be limited to “book learning.” Rather, he says, the revision reflects the broad range of practice among internists and the recognition that not all of them will be conducting bedside procedures as part of their daily responsibilities. In that context, then, perhaps more rigorous training should be linked to the honing of a subspecialty practice that demands competency in specific procedures.

“It really is one of those areas where I don’t think one size fits all when it comes to training needs,” Dr. McDonald says, “and it’s also an area where practices vary so much depending on the size of the institution and availability of the people who can do the procedures.”

Nevertheless, observers say the retreat from an absolute numerical threshold—itself a debatable standard—set the tone for many hospitalist groups and has contributed to a lack of consistency in expectations.

“If someone is never going to be doing these procedures in their career, we can argue whether they should be trained,” says Jeffrey Barsuk, MD, MS, associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. But evidence suggests that internal medicine residents are still performing many bedside procedures in academic hospitals, he says. A recent study of his, in fact, found that internal medicine and family medicine-trained clinicians frequently perform paracentesis procedures on complex inpatients.² If they’re expected to be able to do these procedures safely on the first day of residency, he says, the lack of a requirement for hands-on competency is “ridiculous.”

Whatever the reasons, observers say, fewer well-trained hospitalists are performing bedside procedures on a routine basis.

“I think we’re seeing a trend away from an expectation that all residents are going to be comfortable and qualified to perform these procedures,” says Melissa Tukey, MD, MSc, a pulmonology critical care physician at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., who has studied procedural training and outcomes. “That is reflected in the literature showing that a lot of graduating residents, even before these changes were made, felt uncomfortable performing these procedures unsupervised, even later into their residency.”

By changing their requirements, however, she says the ABIM and ACGME have effectively accelerated the de-emphasis on procedures among internal medicine generalists and put the onus on individual hospitals to ensure that they have qualified and capable staff to perform them. As a result, some medical institutions are opting to train a smaller subset of internal medicine physicians, while others are shifting the workload to other subspecialists.

Lichtman says he’s frustrated that many medical boards and programs continue to link competency in bedside procedures to arbitrary numbers that seem to come out of “thin air.” While studies suggest that practitioners aren’t experienced until they’ve performed 50 central line insertions, for example, many guidelines suggest that they can perform the procedure on their own after only five supervised insertions. “My thought is, you need as many as it takes for you, as an individual, to become good,” Lichtman says. “That may be five. It may be 10. It may be 100.”

Virtually all of us started doing this because we were asked to do cases that couldn’t be done by others because we had imaging—usually ultrasound guidance—and that yielded superior results. —Robert L. Vogelzang, MD, FSIR, professor of radiology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, and past president, Society for Interventional Radiology

Complicating Factors

Central venous line placement has been a lightning rod in the debate over training, standardization, and staffing roles for bedside procedures, Lichtman says, due in large part to the seriousness of a central line-associated bloodstream infection, or CLABSI. In 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services deemed the preventable and life-threatening infection a “never” event and stopped reimbursing hospitals for any CLABSI-related treatment costs.

“If I’m trying to stick a needle in your knee to drain fluid out, there’s a really low risk of something catastrophically bad happening,” he says. But patients can die from faulty central line insertion and management. Stick the needle in the wrong place, and you could cause unnecessary bleeding, a stroke, or complications ranging from a fistula to a hemopneumothorax.

If discomfort and concern over potential complications are contributing to a decline in hospitalist-led bedside procedures, many experts agree that the role may not always make economic or practical sense either. “It doesn’t make sense to train all hospitalists to do all of these procedures,” Dr. Lenchus says. “If you’re at a small community hospital where the procedures are done in the ICU and you have no ICU coverage, then, frankly, that skill’s going to be lost on you, because you’re never going to do it in the real world in the course of your normal, everyday activities.”

Even at bigger institutions, he says, it makes sense to identify and train a core group of providers who have both the skill and the desire to perform procedures on a consistent basis. “It’s a technical skill. Not all of us could be concert pianists, even if we were trained,” Dr. Lenchus says.

Dr. Wang says it will be particularly important for hospitalist groups to identify a subset of “procedure champions” who enjoy doing the procedures, are good at it, have been properly trained, and can maintain their competency with regular practice.

Familiar Territory

At first glance, the significant time commitment and lackluster reimbursement of many bedside procedures would seem to do little to up the incentive for busy hospitalists. “If they have to stop and take two hours to do a procedure that 1) they don’t feel comfortable with and 2) they get very little reimbursement for, why not just put an order in and have interventional radiologists whisk them off and do these procedures?” Dr. Wang says.

Robert L. Vogelzang, MD, FSIR, professor of radiology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and a past president of the Society of Interventional Radiology, says radiologists are regularly called upon to perform bedside procedures because of their imaging expertise.

“Virtually all of us started doing this because we were asked to do cases that couldn’t be done by others because we had imaging—usually ultrasound guidance—and that yielded superior results,” he says.

Dr. Vogelzang says he’s “specialty-agnostic” about who should perform the procedures, as long as they’re done by well-trained providers who use imaging guidance and do them on a regular basis. Hospitalists could defer to radiologists if they’re uncomfortable with any procedure, he says, while teams of physician assistants and nurse practitioners might offer another cost-effective solution. Ultimately, the question over who performs minor bedside procedures “is going to reach a solution that involves dedicated teams in some fashion, because as a patient, you don’t want someone who does five a year,” he says. “Patient care is improved by trained people who do enough of them to do it consistently.”

So why not train designated hospitalists as proceduralists? Dr. Lenchus and other experts say naysayers who believe hospitalists should give up the role aren’t fully considering the impact of a well-trained individual or team. “It’s not just the money that you bring in—it’s the money that you don’t spend,” he says. An initial hospitalist consultation, for example, may determine that a procedure isn’t needed at all for some patients. Perhaps more importantly, a well-trained provider can reduce or eliminate costly complications, such as CLABSIs.

If [busy hospitalists] have to stop and take two hours to do a procedure that 1) they don’t feel comfortable with and 2) they get very little reimbursement for, why not just put an order in and have interventional radiologists whisk them off and do these procedures? —Sally Wang, MD, FHM, director of procedure education, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and clinical instructor, Harvard Medical School, Boston

Dr. Wang agrees, stressing that the profession still has the opportunity to build a niche in providing care that decreases overall hospital costs. Instead of regularly sending patients to the interventional radiology department, she says, hospitalist-performed bedside procedures can allow radiologists to focus on more complex cases.

A hospitalist, she says, can generate additional value by eliminating the need to put in a separate order, provide patient transportation, or spend more time fitting the patient into another specialist’s schedule—potentially extending that patient’s length of stay. The economic case for hospitalist-led procedures could improve even more under a bundled payment structure, Dr. Wang says.

“I see a future here if the accountable care organizations are infiltrated through the United States,” she says.

Future involvement of hospitalists in bedside procedures also could depend on the ability of programs to deliver top-notch teaching and training options. At Harvard Medical School, Dr. Wang regularly trains internal medicine residents, fellows, and even some attending physicians with a “robust” curriculum that includes hands-on practice with ultrasound in a simulation center and one-on-one testing on patients. Since instituting the training program a few years ago, she says, procedure-related infection rates have dropped to zero. Within the hospital’s ICUs, Dr. Wang says, complication rates have dropped as well.

Among the comments she now regularly hears: “Oh my gosh. I can’t believe we used to do this without a training program.”

Bryn Nelson is a freelance medical writer in Seattle and frequent contributor to The Hospitalist.

References

1. Chang W, Lenchus J, Barsuk J. A lost art? The Hospitalist. 2012;16(6):1,28,30,32.
2. Barsuk JH, Feinglass J, Kozmic SE, Hohmann SF, Ganger D, Wayne DB. Specialties performing paracentesis procedures at university hospitals: implications for training and certification. J Hosp Med. 2014;9(3):162-168.
3. Mourad M, Auerbach AD, Maselli J, Sliwka D. Patient satisfaction with a hospitalist procedure service: Is bedside procedure teaching reassuring to patients? J Hosp Med. 2011;6(4):219-224.
4. Tukey MH, Wiener RS. The impact of a medical procedure service on patient safety, procedure quality and resident training opportunities. J Gen Intern Med. 2013;29(3):485-490.
5. Barsuk JH, McGaghie WC, Cohen ER, O’Leary KJ, Wayne DB. Simulation-based mastery learning reduces complications during central venous catheter insertion in a medical intensive care unit. Crit Care Med. 2009;37(10):2697-2701.

On his way to a recent conference, David Lichtman, PA, stopped to talk with medical residents at a nearby medical center about their experiences performing bedside procedures. “How many times have you guys done something that you knew you weren’t fully trained for but you didn’t want to say anything?” asked Lichtman, a hospitalist and director of the Johns Hopkins Central Procedure Service in Baltimore, Md. “At least once?”

Everyone raised a hand.

When Lichtman asked how many of the residents had ever spoken up and admitted being uncomfortable about doing a procedure, however, only about 20% raised their hands.

It’s one thing to struggle with a procedure like drawing blood. But a less-than-confident or unskilled provider who attempts more invasive procedures, such as a central line insertion or thoracentesis, can do major harm. And observers say confidence and competence levels, particularly among internal medicine residents, are heading in the wrong direction.

Two years ago, in fact, three hospitalists penned an article in The Hospitalist lamenting the “sharp decline” of HM proficiency in bedside procedures.¹ Co-author Joshua Lenchus, DO, RPh, FACP, SFHM, associate director of the University of Miami-Jackson Memorial Hospital Center for Patient Safety and medical director of the hospital’s Procedure Service, says the trend is continuing for several reasons.

“One is internal medicine’s willingness to surrender these bedside procedures to others,” Dr. Lenchus says, perhaps due to time constraints, a lack of confidence, or a perception that it’s not cost effective for HM providers to take on the role. Several medical organizations have loosened their competency standards, and the default in many cases has been for interventional radiologists to perform the procedures instead.

Another reason may be more practical: Perhaps there just isn’t a need for all hospitalists to perform them. Many new hospitalist positions advertised through employment agencies, Dr. Lenchus says, do not require competency in bedside procedures.

“The question is, did that happen first and then we reacted to it as hospitalists, or did we stop doing them and employment agencies then modified their process to reflect that?” he says.

For hospitalists, perhaps the bigger question is this: Is there a need to address the decline?

For Lichtman, Dr. Lenchus, and many other leaders, the answer is an emphatic yes—an opportunity to carve out a niche of skilled and patient-focused bedside care and to demonstrate real value to hospitals.

“I think it makes perfect sense from a financial and throughput and healthcare system perspective,” he says. The talent, knowledge, and experience of interventional radiologists, Dr. Lenchus says, is far better spent on procedures that cannot be conducted at a patient’s bedside.

It’s also a matter of professional pride for hospitalists like Michelle Mourad, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine and director of quality improvement and patient safety for the division of hospital medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

“I derive a tremendous amount of enjoyment from working with my hands, from being able to provide my patients this service, from often giving them relief from excessive fluid buildup, and from being able to do these procedures at the bedside,” she says.

Reversing the recent slide of hospitalist involvement in procedures, however, may require more cohesive expectations, an emphasis on minimizing complications, identification of willing and able procedure champions, and comprehensive technology-aided training.

Confounding Expectations

Paracentesis, thoracentesis, arthrocentesis, lumbar puncture, and central line placement generally are considered “core” bedside procedures. Experts like Lichtman, however, say little agreement exists on the main procedures for which hospitalists should demonstrate competency.

“We don’t have any semblance of that,” he says. “The reality is that different groups have different beliefs, and different hospitals have different protocols that they follow.”

Pinning down a consistent list can be difficult, because HM providers can play different roles depending on the setting, says hospitalist Sally Wang, MD, FHM, director of procedure education at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“You could be in an academic center. You could be in a community hospital. You could be in a rural setting where there’s no other access to anyone else doing these procedures, or you can have a robust interventional radiology service that will do all the procedures for you,” she says.

In 2007, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) revised its procedure-related requirements for board certification. Physicians still had to understand indications and contraindications, recognize the risks and benefits and manage complications, and interpret procedure results. But they no longer had to perform a minimum number to demonstrate competency. To assure “adequate knowledge and understanding” of each procedure, however, ABIM recommended that residents be active participants five or more times. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) followed suit in its program requirements for internal medicine.

Furman McDonald, MD, ABIM’s vice president of graduate medical education, says the board isn’t suggesting that procedure training should be limited to “book learning.” Rather, he says, the revision reflects the broad range of practice among internists and the recognition that not all of them will be conducting bedside procedures as part of their daily responsibilities. In that context, then, perhaps more rigorous training should be linked to the honing of a subspecialty practice that demands competency in specific procedures.

“It really is one of those areas where I don’t think one size fits all when it comes to training needs,” Dr. McDonald says, “and it’s also an area where practices vary so much depending on the size of the institution and availability of the people who can do the procedures.”

Nevertheless, observers say the retreat from an absolute numerical threshold—itself a debatable standard—set the tone for many hospitalist groups and has contributed to a lack of consistency in expectations.

“If someone is never going to be doing these procedures in their career, we can argue whether they should be trained,” says Jeffrey Barsuk, MD, MS, associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. But evidence suggests that internal medicine residents are still performing many bedside procedures in academic hospitals, he says. A recent study of his, in fact, found that internal medicine and family medicine-trained clinicians frequently perform paracentesis procedures on complex inpatients.² If they’re expected to be able to do these procedures safely on the first day of residency, he says, the lack of a requirement for hands-on competency is “ridiculous.”

Whatever the reasons, observers say, fewer well-trained hospitalists are performing bedside procedures on a routine basis.

“I think we’re seeing a trend away from an expectation that all residents are going to be comfortable and qualified to perform these procedures,” says Melissa Tukey, MD, MSc, a pulmonology critical care physician at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., who has studied procedural training and outcomes. “That is reflected in the literature showing that a lot of graduating residents, even before these changes were made, felt uncomfortable performing these procedures unsupervised, even later into their residency.”

By changing their requirements, however, she says the ABIM and ACGME have effectively accelerated the de-emphasis on procedures among internal medicine generalists and put the onus on individual hospitals to ensure that they have qualified and capable staff to perform them. As a result, some medical institutions are opting to train a smaller subset of internal medicine physicians, while others are shifting the workload to other subspecialists.

Lichtman says he’s frustrated that many medical boards and programs continue to link competency in bedside procedures to arbitrary numbers that seem to come out of “thin air.” While studies suggest that practitioners aren’t experienced until they’ve performed 50 central line insertions, for example, many guidelines suggest that they can perform the procedure on their own after only five supervised insertions. “My thought is, you need as many as it takes for you, as an individual, to become good,” Lichtman says. “That may be five. It may be 10. It may be 100.”

Virtually all of us started doing this because we were asked to do cases that couldn’t be done by others because we had imaging—usually ultrasound guidance—and that yielded superior results. —Robert L. Vogelzang, MD, FSIR, professor of radiology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, and past president, Society for Interventional Radiology

Complicating Factors

Central venous line placement has been a lightning rod in the debate over training, standardization, and staffing roles for bedside procedures, Lichtman says, due in large part to the seriousness of a central line-associated bloodstream infection, or CLABSI. In 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services deemed the preventable and life-threatening infection a “never” event and stopped reimbursing hospitals for any CLABSI-related treatment costs.

“If I’m trying to stick a needle in your knee to drain fluid out, there’s a really low risk of something catastrophically bad happening,” he says. But patients can die from faulty central line insertion and management. Stick the needle in the wrong place, and you could cause unnecessary bleeding, a stroke, or complications ranging from a fistula to a hemopneumothorax.

If discomfort and concern over potential complications are contributing to a decline in hospitalist-led bedside procedures, many experts agree that the role may not always make economic or practical sense either. “It doesn’t make sense to train all hospitalists to do all of these procedures,” Dr. Lenchus says. “If you’re at a small community hospital where the procedures are done in the ICU and you have no ICU coverage, then, frankly, that skill’s going to be lost on you, because you’re never going to do it in the real world in the course of your normal, everyday activities.”

Even at bigger institutions, he says, it makes sense to identify and train a core group of providers who have both the skill and the desire to perform procedures on a consistent basis. “It’s a technical skill. Not all of us could be concert pianists, even if we were trained,” Dr. Lenchus says.

Dr. Wang says it will be particularly important for hospitalist groups to identify a subset of “procedure champions” who enjoy doing the procedures, are good at it, have been properly trained, and can maintain their competency with regular practice.

Familiar Territory

At first glance, the significant time commitment and lackluster reimbursement of many bedside procedures would seem to do little to up the incentive for busy hospitalists. “If they have to stop and take two hours to do a procedure that 1) they don’t feel comfortable with and 2) they get very little reimbursement for, why not just put an order in and have interventional radiologists whisk them off and do these procedures?” Dr. Wang says.

Robert L. Vogelzang, MD, FSIR, professor of radiology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and a past president of the Society of Interventional Radiology, says radiologists are regularly called upon to perform bedside procedures because of their imaging expertise.

“Virtually all of us started doing this because we were asked to do cases that couldn’t be done by others because we had imaging—usually ultrasound guidance—and that yielded superior results,” he says.

Dr. Vogelzang says he’s “specialty-agnostic” about who should perform the procedures, as long as they’re done by well-trained providers who use imaging guidance and do them on a regular basis. Hospitalists could defer to radiologists if they’re uncomfortable with any procedure, he says, while teams of physician assistants and nurse practitioners might offer another cost-effective solution. Ultimately, the question over who performs minor bedside procedures “is going to reach a solution that involves dedicated teams in some fashion, because as a patient, you don’t want someone who does five a year,” he says. “Patient care is improved by trained people who do enough of them to do it consistently.”

So why not train designated hospitalists as proceduralists? Dr. Lenchus and other experts say naysayers who believe hospitalists should give up the role aren’t fully considering the impact of a well-trained individual or team. “It’s not just the money that you bring in—it’s the money that you don’t spend,” he says. An initial hospitalist consultation, for example, may determine that a procedure isn’t needed at all for some patients. Perhaps more importantly, a well-trained provider can reduce or eliminate costly complications, such as CLABSIs.

If [busy hospitalists] have to stop and take two hours to do a procedure that 1) they don’t feel comfortable with and 2) they get very little reimbursement for, why not just put an order in and have interventional radiologists whisk them off and do these procedures? —Sally Wang, MD, FHM, director of procedure education, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and clinical instructor, Harvard Medical School, Boston

Dr. Wang agrees, stressing that the profession still has the opportunity to build a niche in providing care that decreases overall hospital costs. Instead of regularly sending patients to the interventional radiology department, she says, hospitalist-performed bedside procedures can allow radiologists to focus on more complex cases.

A hospitalist, she says, can generate additional value by eliminating the need to put in a separate order, provide patient transportation, or spend more time fitting the patient into another specialist’s schedule—potentially extending that patient’s length of stay. The economic case for hospitalist-led procedures could improve even more under a bundled payment structure, Dr. Wang says.

“I see a future here if the accountable care organizations are infiltrated through the United States,” she says.

Future involvement of hospitalists in bedside procedures also could depend on the ability of programs to deliver top-notch teaching and training options. At Harvard Medical School, Dr. Wang regularly trains internal medicine residents, fellows, and even some attending physicians with a “robust” curriculum that includes hands-on practice with ultrasound in a simulation center and one-on-one testing on patients. Since instituting the training program a few years ago, she says, procedure-related infection rates have dropped to zero. Within the hospital’s ICUs, Dr. Wang says, complication rates have dropped as well.

Among the comments she now regularly hears: “Oh my gosh. I can’t believe we used to do this without a training program.”

Bryn Nelson is a freelance medical writer in Seattle and frequent contributor to The Hospitalist.

References

1. Chang W, Lenchus J, Barsuk J. A lost art? The Hospitalist. 2012;16(6):1,28,30,32.
2. Barsuk JH, Feinglass J, Kozmic SE, Hohmann SF, Ganger D, Wayne DB. Specialties performing paracentesis procedures at university hospitals: implications for training and certification. J Hosp Med. 2014;9(3):162-168.
3. Mourad M, Auerbach AD, Maselli J, Sliwka D. Patient satisfaction with a hospitalist procedure service: Is bedside procedure teaching reassuring to patients? J Hosp Med. 2011;6(4):219-224.
4. Tukey MH, Wiener RS. The impact of a medical procedure service on patient safety, procedure quality and resident training opportunities. J Gen Intern Med. 2013;29(3):485-490.
5. Barsuk JH, McGaghie WC, Cohen ER, O’Leary KJ, Wayne DB. Simulation-based mastery learning reduces complications during central venous catheter insertion in a medical intensive care unit. Crit Care Med. 2009;37(10):2697-2701.

On his way to a recent conference, David Lichtman, PA, stopped to talk with medical residents at a nearby medical center about their experiences performing bedside procedures. “How many times have you guys done something that you knew you weren’t fully trained for but you didn’t want to say anything?” asked Lichtman, a hospitalist and director of the Johns Hopkins Central Procedure Service in Baltimore, Md. “At least once?”

Everyone raised a hand.

When Lichtman asked how many of the residents had ever spoken up and admitted being uncomfortable about doing a procedure, however, only about 20% raised their hands.

It’s one thing to struggle with a procedure like drawing blood. But a less-than-confident or unskilled provider who attempts more invasive procedures, such as a central line insertion or thoracentesis, can do major harm. And observers say confidence and competence levels, particularly among internal medicine residents, are heading in the wrong direction.

Two years ago, in fact, three hospitalists penned an article in The Hospitalist lamenting the “sharp decline” of HM proficiency in bedside procedures.¹ Co-author Joshua Lenchus, DO, RPh, FACP, SFHM, associate director of the University of Miami-Jackson Memorial Hospital Center for Patient Safety and medical director of the hospital’s Procedure Service, says the trend is continuing for several reasons.

“One is internal medicine’s willingness to surrender these bedside procedures to others,” Dr. Lenchus says, perhaps due to time constraints, a lack of confidence, or a perception that it’s not cost effective for HM providers to take on the role. Several medical organizations have loosened their competency standards, and the default in many cases has been for interventional radiologists to perform the procedures instead.

Another reason may be more practical: Perhaps there just isn’t a need for all hospitalists to perform them. Many new hospitalist positions advertised through employment agencies, Dr. Lenchus says, do not require competency in bedside procedures.

“The question is, did that happen first and then we reacted to it as hospitalists, or did we stop doing them and employment agencies then modified their process to reflect that?” he says.

For hospitalists, perhaps the bigger question is this: Is there a need to address the decline?

For Lichtman, Dr. Lenchus, and many other leaders, the answer is an emphatic yes—an opportunity to carve out a niche of skilled and patient-focused bedside care and to demonstrate real value to hospitals.

“I think it makes perfect sense from a financial and throughput and healthcare system perspective,” he says. The talent, knowledge, and experience of interventional radiologists, Dr. Lenchus says, is far better spent on procedures that cannot be conducted at a patient’s bedside.

It’s also a matter of professional pride for hospitalists like Michelle Mourad, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine and director of quality improvement and patient safety for the division of hospital medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

“I derive a tremendous amount of enjoyment from working with my hands, from being able to provide my patients this service, from often giving them relief from excessive fluid buildup, and from being able to do these procedures at the bedside,” she says.

Reversing the recent slide of hospitalist involvement in procedures, however, may require more cohesive expectations, an emphasis on minimizing complications, identification of willing and able procedure champions, and comprehensive technology-aided training.

Confounding Expectations

Paracentesis, thoracentesis, arthrocentesis, lumbar puncture, and central line placement generally are considered “core” bedside procedures. Experts like Lichtman, however, say little agreement exists on the main procedures for which hospitalists should demonstrate competency.

“We don’t have any semblance of that,” he says. “The reality is that different groups have different beliefs, and different hospitals have different protocols that they follow.”

Pinning down a consistent list can be difficult, because HM providers can play different roles depending on the setting, says hospitalist Sally Wang, MD, FHM, director of procedure education at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“You could be in an academic center. You could be in a community hospital. You could be in a rural setting where there’s no other access to anyone else doing these procedures, or you can have a robust interventional radiology service that will do all the procedures for you,” she says.

In 2007, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) revised its procedure-related requirements for board certification. Physicians still had to understand indications and contraindications, recognize the risks and benefits and manage complications, and interpret procedure results. But they no longer had to perform a minimum number to demonstrate competency. To assure “adequate knowledge and understanding” of each procedure, however, ABIM recommended that residents be active participants five or more times. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) followed suit in its program requirements for internal medicine.

Furman McDonald, MD, ABIM’s vice president of graduate medical education, says the board isn’t suggesting that procedure training should be limited to “book learning.” Rather, he says, the revision reflects the broad range of practice among internists and the recognition that not all of them will be conducting bedside procedures as part of their daily responsibilities. In that context, then, perhaps more rigorous training should be linked to the honing of a subspecialty practice that demands competency in specific procedures.

“It really is one of those areas where I don’t think one size fits all when it comes to training needs,” Dr. McDonald says, “and it’s also an area where practices vary so much depending on the size of the institution and availability of the people who can do the procedures.”

Nevertheless, observers say the retreat from an absolute numerical threshold—itself a debatable standard—set the tone for many hospitalist groups and has contributed to a lack of consistency in expectations.

“If someone is never going to be doing these procedures in their career, we can argue whether they should be trained,” says Jeffrey Barsuk, MD, MS, associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. But evidence suggests that internal medicine residents are still performing many bedside procedures in academic hospitals, he says. A recent study of his, in fact, found that internal medicine and family medicine-trained clinicians frequently perform paracentesis procedures on complex inpatients.² If they’re expected to be able to do these procedures safely on the first day of residency, he says, the lack of a requirement for hands-on competency is “ridiculous.”

Whatever the reasons, observers say, fewer well-trained hospitalists are performing bedside procedures on a routine basis.

“I think we’re seeing a trend away from an expectation that all residents are going to be comfortable and qualified to perform these procedures,” says Melissa Tukey, MD, MSc, a pulmonology critical care physician at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., who has studied procedural training and outcomes. “That is reflected in the literature showing that a lot of graduating residents, even before these changes were made, felt uncomfortable performing these procedures unsupervised, even later into their residency.”

By changing their requirements, however, she says the ABIM and ACGME have effectively accelerated the de-emphasis on procedures among internal medicine generalists and put the onus on individual hospitals to ensure that they have qualified and capable staff to perform them. As a result, some medical institutions are opting to train a smaller subset of internal medicine physicians, while others are shifting the workload to other subspecialists.

Lichtman says he’s frustrated that many medical boards and programs continue to link competency in bedside procedures to arbitrary numbers that seem to come out of “thin air.” While studies suggest that practitioners aren’t experienced until they’ve performed 50 central line insertions, for example, many guidelines suggest that they can perform the procedure on their own after only five supervised insertions. “My thought is, you need as many as it takes for you, as an individual, to become good,” Lichtman says. “That may be five. It may be 10. It may be 100.”

Virtually all of us started doing this because we were asked to do cases that couldn’t be done by others because we had imaging—usually ultrasound guidance—and that yielded superior results. —Robert L. Vogelzang, MD, FSIR, professor of radiology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, and past president, Society for Interventional Radiology

Complicating Factors

Central venous line placement has been a lightning rod in the debate over training, standardization, and staffing roles for bedside procedures, Lichtman says, due in large part to the seriousness of a central line-associated bloodstream infection, or CLABSI. In 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services deemed the preventable and life-threatening infection a “never” event and stopped reimbursing hospitals for any CLABSI-related treatment costs.

“If I’m trying to stick a needle in your knee to drain fluid out, there’s a really low risk of something catastrophically bad happening,” he says. But patients can die from faulty central line insertion and management. Stick the needle in the wrong place, and you could cause unnecessary bleeding, a stroke, or complications ranging from a fistula to a hemopneumothorax.

If discomfort and concern over potential complications are contributing to a decline in hospitalist-led bedside procedures, many experts agree that the role may not always make economic or practical sense either. “It doesn’t make sense to train all hospitalists to do all of these procedures,” Dr. Lenchus says. “If you’re at a small community hospital where the procedures are done in the ICU and you have no ICU coverage, then, frankly, that skill’s going to be lost on you, because you’re never going to do it in the real world in the course of your normal, everyday activities.”

Even at bigger institutions, he says, it makes sense to identify and train a core group of providers who have both the skill and the desire to perform procedures on a consistent basis. “It’s a technical skill. Not all of us could be concert pianists, even if we were trained,” Dr. Lenchus says.

Dr. Wang says it will be particularly important for hospitalist groups to identify a subset of “procedure champions” who enjoy doing the procedures, are good at it, have been properly trained, and can maintain their competency with regular practice.

Familiar Territory

At first glance, the significant time commitment and lackluster reimbursement of many bedside procedures would seem to do little to up the incentive for busy hospitalists. “If they have to stop and take two hours to do a procedure that 1) they don’t feel comfortable with and 2) they get very little reimbursement for, why not just put an order in and have interventional radiologists whisk them off and do these procedures?” Dr. Wang says.

Robert L. Vogelzang, MD, FSIR, professor of radiology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and a past president of the Society of Interventional Radiology, says radiologists are regularly called upon to perform bedside procedures because of their imaging expertise.

“Virtually all of us started doing this because we were asked to do cases that couldn’t be done by others because we had imaging—usually ultrasound guidance—and that yielded superior results,” he says.

Dr. Vogelzang says he’s “specialty-agnostic” about who should perform the procedures, as long as they’re done by well-trained providers who use imaging guidance and do them on a regular basis. Hospitalists could defer to radiologists if they’re uncomfortable with any procedure, he says, while teams of physician assistants and nurse practitioners might offer another cost-effective solution. Ultimately, the question over who performs minor bedside procedures “is going to reach a solution that involves dedicated teams in some fashion, because as a patient, you don’t want someone who does five a year,” he says. “Patient care is improved by trained people who do enough of them to do it consistently.”

So why not train designated hospitalists as proceduralists? Dr. Lenchus and other experts say naysayers who believe hospitalists should give up the role aren’t fully considering the impact of a well-trained individual or team. “It’s not just the money that you bring in—it’s the money that you don’t spend,” he says. An initial hospitalist consultation, for example, may determine that a procedure isn’t needed at all for some patients. Perhaps more importantly, a well-trained provider can reduce or eliminate costly complications, such as CLABSIs.

If [busy hospitalists] have to stop and take two hours to do a procedure that 1) they don’t feel comfortable with and 2) they get very little reimbursement for, why not just put an order in and have interventional radiologists whisk them off and do these procedures? —Sally Wang, MD, FHM, director of procedure education, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and clinical instructor, Harvard Medical School, Boston

Dr. Wang agrees, stressing that the profession still has the opportunity to build a niche in providing care that decreases overall hospital costs. Instead of regularly sending patients to the interventional radiology department, she says, hospitalist-performed bedside procedures can allow radiologists to focus on more complex cases.

A hospitalist, she says, can generate additional value by eliminating the need to put in a separate order, provide patient transportation, or spend more time fitting the patient into another specialist’s schedule—potentially extending that patient’s length of stay. The economic case for hospitalist-led procedures could improve even more under a bundled payment structure, Dr. Wang says.

“I see a future here if the accountable care organizations are infiltrated through the United States,” she says.

Future involvement of hospitalists in bedside procedures also could depend on the ability of programs to deliver top-notch teaching and training options. At Harvard Medical School, Dr. Wang regularly trains internal medicine residents, fellows, and even some attending physicians with a “robust” curriculum that includes hands-on practice with ultrasound in a simulation center and one-on-one testing on patients. Since instituting the training program a few years ago, she says, procedure-related infection rates have dropped to zero. Within the hospital’s ICUs, Dr. Wang says, complication rates have dropped as well.

Among the comments she now regularly hears: “Oh my gosh. I can’t believe we used to do this without a training program.”

Bryn Nelson is a freelance medical writer in Seattle and frequent contributor to The Hospitalist.

References

1. Chang W, Lenchus J, Barsuk J. A lost art? The Hospitalist. 2012;16(6):1,28,30,32.
2. Barsuk JH, Feinglass J, Kozmic SE, Hohmann SF, Ganger D, Wayne DB. Specialties performing paracentesis procedures at university hospitals: implications for training and certification. J Hosp Med. 2014;9(3):162-168.
3. Mourad M, Auerbach AD, Maselli J, Sliwka D. Patient satisfaction with a hospitalist procedure service: Is bedside procedure teaching reassuring to patients? J Hosp Med. 2011;6(4):219-224.
4. Tukey MH, Wiener RS. The impact of a medical procedure service on patient safety, procedure quality and resident training opportunities. J Gen Intern Med. 2013;29(3):485-490.
5. Barsuk JH, McGaghie WC, Cohen ER, O’Leary KJ, Wayne DB. Simulation-based mastery learning reduces complications during central venous catheter insertion in a medical intensive care unit. Crit Care Med. 2009;37(10):2697-2701.

The Hospitalist has grabbed the attention and interest of physicians and industry professionals across the country for 18 years. Now, it has the attention of another type of professional

body—the Awards for Publication Excellence (APEX), which presented the publication with the APEX Grand Award for Magazines, Journals, and Tabloids. [http://www.apexawards.com/A2014_Win.List.pdf].

The annual awards, presented to corporate and nonprofit publications, received 2,075 total applications, including nearly 500 entries to the Magazines, Journals, and Tabloids category. Only 10 Grand Awards were presented in the category.

The Hospitalist also received an Award of Excellence in Health and Medical Writing for writer Bryn Nelson’s special report on the Affordable Care Act in the January 2014 issue.

On the APEX website [www.apexawards.com/apex2014grandawardcomments], category judges complimented The Hospitalist for its “appealing spreads, effective use of sidebars, numbered lists, and a bold headline schedule—all combining to complement the well written copy, which is informative and clearly well researched. The Obamacare special report insert is particularly informative and well designed.”

Published by Wiley Inc., The Hospitalist is the official newsmagazine of the Society of Hospital Medicine. The monthly newsmagazine has a circulation of about 25,000 and provides news, features, and information specific to hospitalists and the healthcare industry.

SHM President Burke Kealey, MD, SFHM, expressed his pride for the individuals who bring The Hospitalist together.

“SHM constantly strives to bring the very best to our members and other leaders in healthcare. These two APEX awards, especially the Grand Award, are evidence that we are delivering on that goal,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The Hospitalist has garnered seven APEX Awards in the past six years, as well as attaining finalist status for “Best Healthcare Business Publication” from Medical Marketing and Media in 2009.

Physician Editor Danielle Scheurer, MD, MSCR, SFHM, considers the high quality of writing and practical, relevant article topics two of the magazine’s biggest strengths. She thanked the editors for designing a creative repertoire of stories and for thinking of new ways to cover topics.

“A huge part of our success is keeping our finger on the pulse of our customer base and trying to figure out…what kind of information they’re seeking from a magazine like The Hospitalist,” she said. “We are continuously ensuring that we’re hearing the voice of the customer.”

Erin Petenko is a contributing writer for The Hospitalist.

The Hospitalist has grabbed the attention and interest of physicians and industry professionals across the country for 18 years. Now, it has the attention of another type of professional

body—the Awards for Publication Excellence (APEX), which presented the publication with the APEX Grand Award for Magazines, Journals, and Tabloids. [http://www.apexawards.com/A2014_Win.List.pdf].

The annual awards, presented to corporate and nonprofit publications, received 2,075 total applications, including nearly 500 entries to the Magazines, Journals, and Tabloids category. Only 10 Grand Awards were presented in the category.

The Hospitalist also received an Award of Excellence in Health and Medical Writing for writer Bryn Nelson’s special report on the Affordable Care Act in the January 2014 issue.

On the APEX website [www.apexawards.com/apex2014grandawardcomments], category judges complimented The Hospitalist for its “appealing spreads, effective use of sidebars, numbered lists, and a bold headline schedule—all combining to complement the well written copy, which is informative and clearly well researched. The Obamacare special report insert is particularly informative and well designed.”

Published by Wiley Inc., The Hospitalist is the official newsmagazine of the Society of Hospital Medicine. The monthly newsmagazine has a circulation of about 25,000 and provides news, features, and information specific to hospitalists and the healthcare industry.

SHM President Burke Kealey, MD, SFHM, expressed his pride for the individuals who bring The Hospitalist together.

“SHM constantly strives to bring the very best to our members and other leaders in healthcare. These two APEX awards, especially the Grand Award, are evidence that we are delivering on that goal,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The Hospitalist has garnered seven APEX Awards in the past six years, as well as attaining finalist status for “Best Healthcare Business Publication” from Medical Marketing and Media in 2009.

Physician Editor Danielle Scheurer, MD, MSCR, SFHM, considers the high quality of writing and practical, relevant article topics two of the magazine’s biggest strengths. She thanked the editors for designing a creative repertoire of stories and for thinking of new ways to cover topics.

“A huge part of our success is keeping our finger on the pulse of our customer base and trying to figure out…what kind of information they’re seeking from a magazine like The Hospitalist,” she said. “We are continuously ensuring that we’re hearing the voice of the customer.”

Erin Petenko is a contributing writer for The Hospitalist.

The Hospitalist has grabbed the attention and interest of physicians and industry professionals across the country for 18 years. Now, it has the attention of another type of professional

body—the Awards for Publication Excellence (APEX), which presented the publication with the APEX Grand Award for Magazines, Journals, and Tabloids. [http://www.apexawards.com/A2014_Win.List.pdf].

The annual awards, presented to corporate and nonprofit publications, received 2,075 total applications, including nearly 500 entries to the Magazines, Journals, and Tabloids category. Only 10 Grand Awards were presented in the category.

The Hospitalist also received an Award of Excellence in Health and Medical Writing for writer Bryn Nelson’s special report on the Affordable Care Act in the January 2014 issue.

On the APEX website [www.apexawards.com/apex2014grandawardcomments], category judges complimented The Hospitalist for its “appealing spreads, effective use of sidebars, numbered lists, and a bold headline schedule—all combining to complement the well written copy, which is informative and clearly well researched. The Obamacare special report insert is particularly informative and well designed.”

Published by Wiley Inc., The Hospitalist is the official newsmagazine of the Society of Hospital Medicine. The monthly newsmagazine has a circulation of about 25,000 and provides news, features, and information specific to hospitalists and the healthcare industry.

SHM President Burke Kealey, MD, SFHM, expressed his pride for the individuals who bring The Hospitalist together.

“SHM constantly strives to bring the very best to our members and other leaders in healthcare. These two APEX awards, especially the Grand Award, are evidence that we are delivering on that goal,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The Hospitalist has garnered seven APEX Awards in the past six years, as well as attaining finalist status for “Best Healthcare Business Publication” from Medical Marketing and Media in 2009.

Physician Editor Danielle Scheurer, MD, MSCR, SFHM, considers the high quality of writing and practical, relevant article topics two of the magazine’s biggest strengths. She thanked the editors for designing a creative repertoire of stories and for thinking of new ways to cover topics.

“A huge part of our success is keeping our finger on the pulse of our customer base and trying to figure out…what kind of information they’re seeking from a magazine like The Hospitalist,” she said. “We are continuously ensuring that we’re hearing the voice of the customer.”

Erin Petenko is a contributing writer for The Hospitalist.

The question of whether health insurance equals healthcare access is complicated in the roughly two dozen states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid—an option granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June 2012 decision that upheld the law’s main tenets. Even with the federal government paying the full cost for the first three years (decreasing to 90% by 2020), some states have argued that the economic burden will be too great.

According to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly five million uninsured adults may now fall into a “coverage gap” as a result. In essence, they will earn too much to be covered under the highly variable Medicaid caps established by individual states but too little to receive any federal tax credits to help pay for insurance in the exchanges. With limited options, the report suggests, they are likely to remain uninsured.

Safety net hospitals also may be squeezed between conflicting state and federal Medicaid priorities. During the initial Affordable Care Act (ACA) negotiations, hospitals agreed to $155 billion in cuts over 10 years, including sharp reductions in Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, in anticipation of seeing a significant decrease in uninsured patients. Despite lower DSH payments, the hospitals expected to recoup the money through more Medicaid or private insurance reimbursements.

"The Medicaid expansion being optional throws a kink in all of that,” says Leighton Ku, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington, D.C.

The ongoing open enrollment in insurance exchanges will make up part of the total. But in states that are not expanding Medicaid, the number of newly insured patients may not compensate for the DSH reductions. Robert Berenson, MD, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on social and economic policy, says the resulting net loss could put some hospitals under additional financial strain.

"There will be pressure within the states from hospitals and from the business community to expand Medicaid because, otherwise, they’re bearing the burden of it,” he says.

Bryn Nelson is a freelance medical writer in Seattle.

The question of whether health insurance equals healthcare access is complicated in the roughly two dozen states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid—an option granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June 2012 decision that upheld the law’s main tenets. Even with the federal government paying the full cost for the first three years (decreasing to 90% by 2020), some states have argued that the economic burden will be too great.

According to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly five million uninsured adults may now fall into a “coverage gap” as a result. In essence, they will earn too much to be covered under the highly variable Medicaid caps established by individual states but too little to receive any federal tax credits to help pay for insurance in the exchanges. With limited options, the report suggests, they are likely to remain uninsured.

Safety net hospitals also may be squeezed between conflicting state and federal Medicaid priorities. During the initial Affordable Care Act (ACA) negotiations, hospitals agreed to $155 billion in cuts over 10 years, including sharp reductions in Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, in anticipation of seeing a significant decrease in uninsured patients. Despite lower DSH payments, the hospitals expected to recoup the money through more Medicaid or private insurance reimbursements.

"The Medicaid expansion being optional throws a kink in all of that,” says Leighton Ku, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington, D.C.

The ongoing open enrollment in insurance exchanges will make up part of the total. But in states that are not expanding Medicaid, the number of newly insured patients may not compensate for the DSH reductions. Robert Berenson, MD, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on social and economic policy, says the resulting net loss could put some hospitals under additional financial strain.

"There will be pressure within the states from hospitals and from the business community to expand Medicaid because, otherwise, they’re bearing the burden of it,” he says.

Bryn Nelson is a freelance medical writer in Seattle.

The question of whether health insurance equals healthcare access is complicated in the roughly two dozen states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid—an option granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June 2012 decision that upheld the law’s main tenets. Even with the federal government paying the full cost for the first three years (decreasing to 90% by 2020), some states have argued that the economic burden will be too great.

According to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly five million uninsured adults may now fall into a “coverage gap” as a result. In essence, they will earn too much to be covered under the highly variable Medicaid caps established by individual states but too little to receive any federal tax credits to help pay for insurance in the exchanges. With limited options, the report suggests, they are likely to remain uninsured.

Safety net hospitals also may be squeezed between conflicting state and federal Medicaid priorities. During the initial Affordable Care Act (ACA) negotiations, hospitals agreed to $155 billion in cuts over 10 years, including sharp reductions in Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, in anticipation of seeing a significant decrease in uninsured patients. Despite lower DSH payments, the hospitals expected to recoup the money through more Medicaid or private insurance reimbursements.

"The Medicaid expansion being optional throws a kink in all of that,” says Leighton Ku, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington, D.C.

The ongoing open enrollment in insurance exchanges will make up part of the total. But in states that are not expanding Medicaid, the number of newly insured patients may not compensate for the DSH reductions. Robert Berenson, MD, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on social and economic policy, says the resulting net loss could put some hospitals under additional financial strain.

"There will be pressure within the states from hospitals and from the business community to expand Medicaid because, otherwise, they’re bearing the burden of it,” he says.

Bryn Nelson is a freelance medical writer in Seattle.

Click here to listen to more of our interview with Dr. Lenchus

Click here to listen to more of our interview with Dr. Lenchus

Click here to listen to more of our interview with Dr. Lenchus

Click here to listen to more of our interview with Dr. Hilger

Click here to listen to more of our interview with Dr. Hilger

Click here to listen to more of our interview with Dr. Hilger

Initial Efforts

1965

• President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Social Security Act, which authorizes both Medicare and Medicaid; the law is widely labeled the biggest healthcare reform of the past century.

1993

• President Bill Clinton attempts to craft universal healthcare legislation that includes both individual and employer mandates. He appoints his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as chair of the White House Task Force on Health Reform. The President’s Health Security Act ultimately fails in Congress.

1997

• State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) authorized by Congress, covering low-income children in families above Medicaid eligibility levels.

2006

• Massachusetts (followed by Vermont in 2011) passes legislation that expands healthcare coverage to nearly all state residents; the Massachusetts law is later deemed a template for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)

March 23, 2010

• President Obama signs the ACA into law. Among the law’s early provisions: Medicare beneficiaries who reach the Part D drug coverage gap begin receiving $250 rebates, and the IRS begins allowing tax credits to small employers that offer health insurance to their employees.

July 1, 2010

• Federal government begins enrolling patients with pre-existing conditions in a temporary Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP).

• Healthcare.gov website debuts.

• IRS begins assessing 10% tax on indoor tanning.

Sep. 23, 2010

• Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) launches with 21-member board of directors.

• For new insurance plans or those renewed on or after this date, parents are allowed to keep adult children on their health policies until they turn 26 (many private plans voluntarily offered this option earlier).

• HHS bans insurers from imposing lifetime coverage limits and from denying health coverage to children with pre-existing conditions or excluding specific conditions from coverage.

• HHS requires new and renewing health plans to eliminate cost sharing for certain preventive services recommended by U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

Sep. 30, 2010

• U.S. Comptroller General appoints 15 members to National Health Care Workforce Commission (commission does not secure funding).

December 30, 2010

• Medicare debuts first phase of Physician Compare website.

Jan. 1, 2011

• CMS begins closing Medicare Part D drug coverage gap.

• Medicare begins paying 10% bonus for primary care services (funded through 2015).

• Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation debuts, with a focus on testing new payment and care delivery systems.

March 23, 2011

• HHS begins providing grants to individual states to help set up health insurance exchanges.

July 1, 2011

• CMS stops paying for Medicaid services related to specific hospital-acquired infections.

Oct. 1, 2011

• Fifteen-member Independent Payment Advisory Board is formally established (but no members are nominated). The IPAB is charged with issuing legislative recommendations to lower Medicare spending growth, but only if projected costs exceed a certain threshold.

Jan. 1, 2012

• CMS launches Medicaid bundled-payment demonstration and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) incentive program.

• CMS reduces Medicare Advantage rebates but offers bonuses to high-quality plans.

Aug. 1, 2012

• HHS requires most new and renewing health plans to eliminate cost sharing for women’s preventive health services, including contraception.

Oct. 1, 2012

• CMS begins its Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program in Medicare, starting with a 1% withholding in FY2013.

• CMS begins reducing Medicare payments based on excess hospital readmissions, starting with a 1% penalty in FY2013.

Jan. 1, 2013

• CMS starts five-year bundled payment pilot program for Medicare, covering 10 conditions.

• CMS increases Medicaid payments for primary care services to 100% of Medicare’s rate (funded for two years).

• IRS increases Medicare tax rate to 2.35% on individuals earning more than $200,000 and on married couples earning more than $250,000; also imposes 3.8% tax on unearned income among high-income taxpayers.

• IRS begins assessing excise tax of 2.3% on sale of taxable medical devices.

Jan. 2, 2013

• Sequestration results in across-the-board cuts of 2% in Medicare reimbursements.

July 1, 2013

• DHS officially launches Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) to encourage growth of nonprofit health insurers (roughly $2 billion in loans given to co-ops in 23 states by end of 2012).

Oct. 1, 2013

• Open enrollment begins for state- and federal government-run health insurance exchanges and expanded Medicaid; the rollout is marred by multiple computer glitches.

• CMS lowers Medicare Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments by 75%, starting in FY2014 but plans to supplement these payments based on each hospital’s share of uncompensated care.

• CMS lowers Medicaid DSH payments by $22 billion over 10 years, beginning with $500 million reduction in FY2014.

Jan. 1, 2014

• Coverage begins through health insurance exchanges. Individuals and families with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level can receive subsidies to help pay for premiums.

• Voluntary Medicaid expansions expected to take place in roughly half of all states, for individuals up to 138% of the federal poverty level.

• Insurers banned from imposing annual limits on coverage, from restricting coverage due to pre-existing conditions, and from basing premiums on gender.

• Insurers required to cover 10 “essential health benefits,” including medication and maternity care.

March 31, 2014

• Open enrollment closes for health insurance exchanges; under the “individual mandate,” people who qualify but don’t buy insurance by this date will be penalized up to 1% of income (penalty increases in subsequent years).

Oct. 1, 2014

• CMS imposes 1% reduction in payments to hospitals with excess hospital-acquired conditions (FY2015).

• CMS imposes penalties on hospitals that haven’t met electronic health record (EHR) meaningful use requirements.

Jan. 1, 2015

• Employer Shared Responsibility Payment, or the “employer mandate,” begins (delayed from Jan. 1, 2014). With a few exceptions, employers with more than 50 employees must offer coverage or pay a fine.

• CMS begins imposing fines based on doctors who didn’t meet Physician Quality Reporting System requirements during 2013, with an initial 1.5% penalty that rises to 2% in 2016.

Jan. 1, 2018

• High-cost, or so-called “Cadillac,” insurance plans—those with premiums over $10,200 for individuals or $27,500 for family coverage—will be assessed an excise tax.

Sources: Healthcare.gov, Commonwealth Fund, Kaiser Family Foundation, American Medical Association, Greater New York Hospital Association.

Initial Efforts

1965

• President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Social Security Act, which authorizes both Medicare and Medicaid; the law is widely labeled the biggest healthcare reform of the past century.

1993

• President Bill Clinton attempts to craft universal healthcare legislation that includes both individual and employer mandates. He appoints his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as chair of the White House Task Force on Health Reform. The President’s Health Security Act ultimately fails in Congress.

1997

• State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) authorized by Congress, covering low-income children in families above Medicaid eligibility levels.

2006

• Massachusetts (followed by Vermont in 2011) passes legislation that expands healthcare coverage to nearly all state residents; the Massachusetts law is later deemed a template for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)

March 23, 2010

• President Obama signs the ACA into law. Among the law’s early provisions: Medicare beneficiaries who reach the Part D drug coverage gap begin receiving $250 rebates, and the IRS begins allowing tax credits to small employers that offer health insurance to their employees.

July 1, 2010

• Federal government begins enrolling patients with pre-existing conditions in a temporary Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP).

• Healthcare.gov website debuts.

• IRS begins assessing 10% tax on indoor tanning.

Sep. 23, 2010

• Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) launches with 21-member board of directors.

• For new insurance plans or those renewed on or after this date, parents are allowed to keep adult children on their health policies until they turn 26 (many private plans voluntarily offered this option earlier).

• HHS bans insurers from imposing lifetime coverage limits and from denying health coverage to children with pre-existing conditions or excluding specific conditions from coverage.

• HHS requires new and renewing health plans to eliminate cost sharing for certain preventive services recommended by U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

Sep. 30, 2010

• U.S. Comptroller General appoints 15 members to National Health Care Workforce Commission (commission does not secure funding).

December 30, 2010

• Medicare debuts first phase of Physician Compare website.

Jan. 1, 2011

• CMS begins closing Medicare Part D drug coverage gap.

• Medicare begins paying 10% bonus for primary care services (funded through 2015).

• Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation debuts, with a focus on testing new payment and care delivery systems.

March 23, 2011

• HHS begins providing grants to individual states to help set up health insurance exchanges.

July 1, 2011

• CMS stops paying for Medicaid services related to specific hospital-acquired infections.

Oct. 1, 2011

• Fifteen-member Independent Payment Advisory Board is formally established (but no members are nominated). The IPAB is charged with issuing legislative recommendations to lower Medicare spending growth, but only if projected costs exceed a certain threshold.

Jan. 1, 2012

• CMS launches Medicaid bundled-payment demonstration and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) incentive program.

• CMS reduces Medicare Advantage rebates but offers bonuses to high-quality plans.

Aug. 1, 2012

• HHS requires most new and renewing health plans to eliminate cost sharing for women’s preventive health services, including contraception.

Oct. 1, 2012

• CMS begins its Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program in Medicare, starting with a 1% withholding in FY2013.

• CMS begins reducing Medicare payments based on excess hospital readmissions, starting with a 1% penalty in FY2013.

Jan. 1, 2013

• CMS starts five-year bundled payment pilot program for Medicare, covering 10 conditions.

• CMS increases Medicaid payments for primary care services to 100% of Medicare’s rate (funded for two years).

• IRS increases Medicare tax rate to 2.35% on individuals earning more than $200,000 and on married couples earning more than $250,000; also imposes 3.8% tax on unearned income among high-income taxpayers.

• IRS begins assessing excise tax of 2.3% on sale of taxable medical devices.

Jan. 2, 2013

• Sequestration results in across-the-board cuts of 2% in Medicare reimbursements.

July 1, 2013

• DHS officially launches Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) to encourage growth of nonprofit health insurers (roughly $2 billion in loans given to co-ops in 23 states by end of 2012).

Oct. 1, 2013

• Open enrollment begins for state- and federal government-run health insurance exchanges and expanded Medicaid; the rollout is marred by multiple computer glitches.

• CMS lowers Medicare Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments by 75%, starting in FY2014 but plans to supplement these payments based on each hospital’s share of uncompensated care.

• CMS lowers Medicaid DSH payments by $22 billion over 10 years, beginning with $500 million reduction in FY2014.

Jan. 1, 2014

• Coverage begins through health insurance exchanges. Individuals and families with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level can receive subsidies to help pay for premiums.

• Voluntary Medicaid expansions expected to take place in roughly half of all states, for individuals up to 138% of the federal poverty level.

• Insurers banned from imposing annual limits on coverage, from restricting coverage due to pre-existing conditions, and from basing premiums on gender.

• Insurers required to cover 10 “essential health benefits,” including medication and maternity care.

March 31, 2014

• Open enrollment closes for health insurance exchanges; under the “individual mandate,” people who qualify but don’t buy insurance by this date will be penalized up to 1% of income (penalty increases in subsequent years).

Oct. 1, 2014

• CMS imposes 1% reduction in payments to hospitals with excess hospital-acquired conditions (FY2015).

• CMS imposes penalties on hospitals that haven’t met electronic health record (EHR) meaningful use requirements.

Jan. 1, 2015

• Employer Shared Responsibility Payment, or the “employer mandate,” begins (delayed from Jan. 1, 2014). With a few exceptions, employers with more than 50 employees must offer coverage or pay a fine.

• CMS begins imposing fines based on doctors who didn’t meet Physician Quality Reporting System requirements during 2013, with an initial 1.5% penalty that rises to 2% in 2016.

Jan. 1, 2018

• High-cost, or so-called “Cadillac,” insurance plans—those with premiums over $10,200 for individuals or $27,500 for family coverage—will be assessed an excise tax.

Sources: Healthcare.gov, Commonwealth Fund, Kaiser Family Foundation, American Medical Association, Greater New York Hospital Association.

Initial Efforts

1965

• President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Social Security Act, which authorizes both Medicare and Medicaid; the law is widely labeled the biggest healthcare reform of the past century.

1993

• President Bill Clinton attempts to craft universal healthcare legislation that includes both individual and employer mandates. He appoints his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as chair of the White House Task Force on Health Reform. The President’s Health Security Act ultimately fails in Congress.

1997

• State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) authorized by Congress, covering low-income children in families above Medicaid eligibility levels.

2006

• Massachusetts (followed by Vermont in 2011) passes legislation that expands healthcare coverage to nearly all state residents; the Massachusetts law is later deemed a template for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)

March 23, 2010

• President Obama signs the ACA into law. Among the law’s early provisions: Medicare beneficiaries who reach the Part D drug coverage gap begin receiving $250 rebates, and the IRS begins allowing tax credits to small employers that offer health insurance to their employees.

July 1, 2010

• Federal government begins enrolling patients with pre-existing conditions in a temporary Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP).

• Healthcare.gov website debuts.

• IRS begins assessing 10% tax on indoor tanning.

Sep. 23, 2010

• Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) launches with 21-member board of directors.

• For new insurance plans or those renewed on or after this date, parents are allowed to keep adult children on their health policies until they turn 26 (many private plans voluntarily offered this option earlier).

• HHS bans insurers from imposing lifetime coverage limits and from denying health coverage to children with pre-existing conditions or excluding specific conditions from coverage.

• HHS requires new and renewing health plans to eliminate cost sharing for certain preventive services recommended by U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

Sep. 30, 2010

• U.S. Comptroller General appoints 15 members to National Health Care Workforce Commission (commission does not secure funding).

December 30, 2010

• Medicare debuts first phase of Physician Compare website.

Jan. 1, 2011

• CMS begins closing Medicare Part D drug coverage gap.

• Medicare begins paying 10% bonus for primary care services (funded through 2015).

• Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation debuts, with a focus on testing new payment and care delivery systems.

March 23, 2011

• HHS begins providing grants to individual states to help set up health insurance exchanges.

July 1, 2011

• CMS stops paying for Medicaid services related to specific hospital-acquired infections.

Oct. 1, 2011

• Fifteen-member Independent Payment Advisory Board is formally established (but no members are nominated). The IPAB is charged with issuing legislative recommendations to lower Medicare spending growth, but only if projected costs exceed a certain threshold.

Jan. 1, 2012

• CMS launches Medicaid bundled-payment demonstration and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) incentive program.

• CMS reduces Medicare Advantage rebates but offers bonuses to high-quality plans.

Aug. 1, 2012

• HHS requires most new and renewing health plans to eliminate cost sharing for women’s preventive health services, including contraception.

Oct. 1, 2012

• CMS begins its Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program in Medicare, starting with a 1% withholding in FY2013.

• CMS begins reducing Medicare payments based on excess hospital readmissions, starting with a 1% penalty in FY2013.

Jan. 1, 2013

• CMS starts five-year bundled payment pilot program for Medicare, covering 10 conditions.

• CMS increases Medicaid payments for primary care services to 100% of Medicare’s rate (funded for two years).

• IRS increases Medicare tax rate to 2.35% on individuals earning more than $200,000 and on married couples earning more than $250,000; also imposes 3.8% tax on unearned income among high-income taxpayers.

• IRS begins assessing excise tax of 2.3% on sale of taxable medical devices.

Jan. 2, 2013

• Sequestration results in across-the-board cuts of 2% in Medicare reimbursements.

July 1, 2013

• DHS officially launches Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) to encourage growth of nonprofit health insurers (roughly $2 billion in loans given to co-ops in 23 states by end of 2012).

Oct. 1, 2013

• Open enrollment begins for state- and federal government-run health insurance exchanges and expanded Medicaid; the rollout is marred by multiple computer glitches.

• CMS lowers Medicare Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments by 75%, starting in FY2014 but plans to supplement these payments based on each hospital’s share of uncompensated care.

• CMS lowers Medicaid DSH payments by $22 billion over 10 years, beginning with $500 million reduction in FY2014.

Jan. 1, 2014

• Coverage begins through health insurance exchanges. Individuals and families with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level can receive subsidies to help pay for premiums.

• Voluntary Medicaid expansions expected to take place in roughly half of all states, for individuals up to 138% of the federal poverty level.

• Insurers banned from imposing annual limits on coverage, from restricting coverage due to pre-existing conditions, and from basing premiums on gender.

• Insurers required to cover 10 “essential health benefits,” including medication and maternity care.

March 31, 2014

• Open enrollment closes for health insurance exchanges; under the “individual mandate,” people who qualify but don’t buy insurance by this date will be penalized up to 1% of income (penalty increases in subsequent years).

Oct. 1, 2014

• CMS imposes 1% reduction in payments to hospitals with excess hospital-acquired conditions (FY2015).

• CMS imposes penalties on hospitals that haven’t met electronic health record (EHR) meaningful use requirements.

Jan. 1, 2015

• Employer Shared Responsibility Payment, or the “employer mandate,” begins (delayed from Jan. 1, 2014). With a few exceptions, employers with more than 50 employees must offer coverage or pay a fine.

• CMS begins imposing fines based on doctors who didn’t meet Physician Quality Reporting System requirements during 2013, with an initial 1.5% penalty that rises to 2% in 2016.

Jan. 1, 2018

• High-cost, or so-called “Cadillac,” insurance plans—those with premiums over $10,200 for individuals or $27,500 for family coverage—will be assessed an excise tax.

Sources: Healthcare.gov, Commonwealth Fund, Kaiser Family Foundation, American Medical Association, Greater New York Hospital Association.

Sometimes, numbers do tell a story. The Affordable Care Act has no shortage of them, and amid the densely packed provisions, regulations, pilots, demonstrations, fines, and other elements, a few numbers provide a glimpse of the intense wrangling that created both winners and losers in the healthcare reform effort.

One of the biggest numbers is also the mostly hotly contested: whether Obamacare will blow a hole in the nation’s deficit or lead to a trillion dollars or more in savings over the first two decades. In March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office predicted the latter, with savings of $143 billion through 2019 and a hazier guess of savings equivalent to 0.5% of gross domestic product—equal to $1 trillion or more—through the 2020s.

The problem? “That calculation reflects an assumption that the provisions of the legislation are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation,” the CBO wrote at the time. That prediction, at least, was spot on.

Amid the ongoing political back and forth, one point is often overlooked: Although still unsustainably high, per capita healthcare spending is now increasing at the lowest rate in decades. Robert Berenson, MD, an Institute Fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on social and economic policy, notes that the trend (starting in 2006) predated the recession. Likewise, it is occurring in Medicare, where most beneficiaries have first-dollar coverage. Instead of being a side effect of the sluggish economy, Dr. Berenson believes fundamental change is occurring on the provider side, and that the additional focus on reform may be making a difference.

Some analysts, he says, believe that providers are responding to the anticipation of change in the system and are beginning to change their own behavior accordingly.

“That means we have more time to get it right, in terms of wholesale change in how healthcare is delivered, and, for me, that’s a good thing,” he says.

A few other numbers of note:

$1.075 trillion

The state- and federal-run healthcare exchanges are expected to cost $1.075 trillion through 2023, according to the CBO. That eye-popping number includes spending for “high-risk pools, premium review activities, loans to consumer-operated and -oriented plans, and grants to states for the establishment of exchanges.”

The big question, of course, is whether that investment will pay off, and a big part of the answer will rest with a well-balanced risk pool. In other words, long-term financial stability means getting as many young and healthy people into the exchanges as possible.

$2 billion

The ACA sought to increase competition by supporting the creation of consumer co-ops, despite opposition from the insurance industry. By the end of last year, HHS had doled out roughly $2 billion in loans to nonprofit co-ops in 23 states, as part of its Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP). Backers of these co-ops had initially sought $10 billion, however, based on estimates of what would be required to ensure a higher likelihood of success.

Although preliminary evidence suggests that these newcomers may be helping to drive down costs in some states, a lack of additional funding has prevented other potential co-ops from receiving startup loans. The co-ops also are barred from using any federal money for marketing, cannot jointly negotiate contracts with doctors, and have limited access to the large employer insurance market—casting doubt on their continued viability.

$0

On Sep. 30, 2010, the U.S. comptroller general appointed 15 members to the National Health Care Workforce Commission, an acknowledgment that the country needs more guidance in how to address existing shortages—expected to widen—in doctors and other healthcare providers. The commission, authorized by the ACA, has never met, however. The act didn’t appropriate any money for it, and Congress has yet to approve any funding either, meaning that the commission’s members are legally barred from conducting any work.

—Bryn Nelson, PhD

Sometimes, numbers do tell a story. The Affordable Care Act has no shortage of them, and amid the densely packed provisions, regulations, pilots, demonstrations, fines, and other elements, a few numbers provide a glimpse of the intense wrangling that created both winners and losers in the healthcare reform effort.

One of the biggest numbers is also the mostly hotly contested: whether Obamacare will blow a hole in the nation’s deficit or lead to a trillion dollars or more in savings over the first two decades. In March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office predicted the latter, with savings of $143 billion through 2019 and a hazier guess of savings equivalent to 0.5% of gross domestic product—equal to $1 trillion or more—through the 2020s.

The problem? “That calculation reflects an assumption that the provisions of the legislation are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation,” the CBO wrote at the time. That prediction, at least, was spot on.

Amid the ongoing political back and forth, one point is often overlooked: Although still unsustainably high, per capita healthcare spending is now increasing at the lowest rate in decades. Robert Berenson, MD, an Institute Fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on social and economic policy, notes that the trend (starting in 2006) predated the recession. Likewise, it is occurring in Medicare, where most beneficiaries have first-dollar coverage. Instead of being a side effect of the sluggish economy, Dr. Berenson believes fundamental change is occurring on the provider side, and that the additional focus on reform may be making a difference.

Some analysts, he says, believe that providers are responding to the anticipation of change in the system and are beginning to change their own behavior accordingly.

“That means we have more time to get it right, in terms of wholesale change in how healthcare is delivered, and, for me, that’s a good thing,” he says.

A few other numbers of note:

$1.075 trillion

The state- and federal-run healthcare exchanges are expected to cost $1.075 trillion through 2023, according to the CBO. That eye-popping number includes spending for “high-risk pools, premium review activities, loans to consumer-operated and -oriented plans, and grants to states for the establishment of exchanges.”

The big question, of course, is whether that investment will pay off, and a big part of the answer will rest with a well-balanced risk pool. In other words, long-term financial stability means getting as many young and healthy people into the exchanges as possible.

$2 billion

The ACA sought to increase competition by supporting the creation of consumer co-ops, despite opposition from the insurance industry. By the end of last year, HHS had doled out roughly $2 billion in loans to nonprofit co-ops in 23 states, as part of its Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP). Backers of these co-ops had initially sought $10 billion, however, based on estimates of what would be required to ensure a higher likelihood of success.

Although preliminary evidence suggests that these newcomers may be helping to drive down costs in some states, a lack of additional funding has prevented other potential co-ops from receiving startup loans. The co-ops also are barred from using any federal money for marketing, cannot jointly negotiate contracts with doctors, and have limited access to the large employer insurance market—casting doubt on their continued viability.

$0

On Sep. 30, 2010, the U.S. comptroller general appointed 15 members to the National Health Care Workforce Commission, an acknowledgment that the country needs more guidance in how to address existing shortages—expected to widen—in doctors and other healthcare providers. The commission, authorized by the ACA, has never met, however. The act didn’t appropriate any money for it, and Congress has yet to approve any funding either, meaning that the commission’s members are legally barred from conducting any work.

—Bryn Nelson, PhD

Sometimes, numbers do tell a story. The Affordable Care Act has no shortage of them, and amid the densely packed provisions, regulations, pilots, demonstrations, fines, and other elements, a few numbers provide a glimpse of the intense wrangling that created both winners and losers in the healthcare reform effort.

One of the biggest numbers is also the mostly hotly contested: whether Obamacare will blow a hole in the nation’s deficit or lead to a trillion dollars or more in savings over the first two decades. In March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office predicted the latter, with savings of $143 billion through 2019 and a hazier guess of savings equivalent to 0.5% of gross domestic product—equal to $1 trillion or more—through the 2020s.

The problem? “That calculation reflects an assumption that the provisions of the legislation are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation,” the CBO wrote at the time. That prediction, at least, was spot on.

Amid the ongoing political back and forth, one point is often overlooked: Although still unsustainably high, per capita healthcare spending is now increasing at the lowest rate in decades. Robert Berenson, MD, an Institute Fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on social and economic policy, notes that the trend (starting in 2006) predated the recession. Likewise, it is occurring in Medicare, where most beneficiaries have first-dollar coverage. Instead of being a side effect of the sluggish economy, Dr. Berenson believes fundamental change is occurring on the provider side, and that the additional focus on reform may be making a difference.

Some analysts, he says, believe that providers are responding to the anticipation of change in the system and are beginning to change their own behavior accordingly.

“That means we have more time to get it right, in terms of wholesale change in how healthcare is delivered, and, for me, that’s a good thing,” he says.

A few other numbers of note:

$1.075 trillion

The state- and federal-run healthcare exchanges are expected to cost $1.075 trillion through 2023, according to the CBO. That eye-popping number includes spending for “high-risk pools, premium review activities, loans to consumer-operated and -oriented plans, and grants to states for the establishment of exchanges.”

The big question, of course, is whether that investment will pay off, and a big part of the answer will rest with a well-balanced risk pool. In other words, long-term financial stability means getting as many young and healthy people into the exchanges as possible.

$2 billion

The ACA sought to increase competition by supporting the creation of consumer co-ops, despite opposition from the insurance industry. By the end of last year, HHS had doled out roughly $2 billion in loans to nonprofit co-ops in 23 states, as part of its Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP). Backers of these co-ops had initially sought $10 billion, however, based on estimates of what would be required to ensure a higher likelihood of success.

Although preliminary evidence suggests that these newcomers may be helping to drive down costs in some states, a lack of additional funding has prevented other potential co-ops from receiving startup loans. The co-ops also are barred from using any federal money for marketing, cannot jointly negotiate contracts with doctors, and have limited access to the large employer insurance market—casting doubt on their continued viability.

$0

On Sep. 30, 2010, the U.S. comptroller general appointed 15 members to the National Health Care Workforce Commission, an acknowledgment that the country needs more guidance in how to address existing shortages—expected to widen—in doctors and other healthcare providers. The commission, authorized by the ACA, has never met, however. The act didn’t appropriate any money for it, and Congress has yet to approve any funding either, meaning that the commission’s members are legally barred from conducting any work.

—Bryn Nelson, PhD