By Anne Montgomery
Call Ezekiel (“Zeke”) Emanuel an optimist. Currently serving as Vice Provost and professor of bioethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, much of his career has been about bucking mainstream medical thinking. These days, Emanuel is using his background in medicine and ethics to lead conversations among health care policymakers and stakeholders in directions they must take: the impact of multiple, simultaneous delivery system reforms on costs.
“Keep an eye on 2020,” Emanuel told a crowd gathered by Disruptive Women in Health Care (http://www.disruptivewomen.net) at a March briefing in Washington, D.C. It will take that long, Emanuel suggests, to determine whether costs will begin to drop on a sustained basis.
Although critics continue to pound against the Affordable Care Act ceaselessly, Emanuel said, health care reform law is only now starting to unfurl its sails. To assign the law a grade at this point is “far too early. We’re not even close to the midterm yet.” But by 2016, state exchanges will be up and running, and other game-changing developments are likely to be on the horizon, including the possibility of “interoperable health records” created by “two young kids in a garage somewhere.”
By the end of the decade, “we’ll have better quality measures,” Emanuel continued, and “lower rates of infection in hospitals.” Such developments can help the U.S. health care system “get off fee-for-service” medicine, and chart a course toward other delivery system reforms and payment reforms. Whether these are Accountable Care Organizations, bundled payments, or global capitation — “whatever mix is fine,” he said. At the same time, Emanuel acknowledged that success “won’t happen overnight,” and “a lot of different payment models” will need to be tried.
“The problem is that fee-for-service and delivery system changes do not line up,” Emanuel said. For example, marketing and advertising for costly procedures and treatments influence patient decision making. More important, he observed, health care providers, many of whom are not primarily focused on delivering the best possible care for the most efficient price, follow entrenched patterns of practice. The result is that “rising [health care] costs are threatening wage growth and all of the other things we human beings care about.”
Despite the large challenges inherent in bending the health care cost growth curve, Emanuel does not advocate abandoning U.S. social insurance programs. Instead, he advocates serial systemic reforms. For example, he notes that although “we don’t have a good alternative to peer review” (which some critics call a bottleneck to rapid reform) he believes it is feasible and imperative to develop new protocols for more rapid testing and dissemination of pilots, demonstrations, and other types of initiatives. “We need a frame shift to look at multiple factors at the same time,” he said. “We need to evaluate differently – with different standards and perhaps larger numbers.”
It is within this broader measurement context that Zeke Emanuel believes transparency will be an essential driver of change. “Doctors are highly competitive,” Emanuel told the crowd of Disruptive Women. “They are trained to want to be number one.” The current dilemma, he says, is that “the driven nature [inherent in] training physicians goes out the window when they start practicing.” But as quality measures increasingly become public, spotlighting how good processes of care and delivery are, along with patient outcomes and patient experience, “the big push for change” will come from providers, he predicted.
Emanuel also acknowledged that the quest to coordinate services and drive down costs must involve and engage individual patients. “Right now [patients] are not focused on costs,” he said. “They are not going through websites” to compare the costs of various procedures and treatments. But if metrics of cost and quality can be “arrayed in a simple way” and if a “selection among them” can be developed to include price, this could help to drive costs “to a more reasonable level,” he said. To that end, Emanuel is currently writing a concept paper on shared savings that discusses the possibility of sharing savings not only between health care providers, but also with patients. If there is a choice between treatments that are clinically equivalent,” he reasoned, “why shouldn’t patients get part of the savings?”
Why not indeed?
Anne Montgomery is a Senior Policy Analyst for the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness at Altarum Institute.
