Covert's Anechoic Misadventures

We have frequently discussed how health care leaders' compensation seems to reflect the opposite of the pay for performance they often tout.  One example we discussed recently turns out to be even more vivid than we first discovered.

Last week we discussed the case of Mr Michael Cover, the CEO of the small, public Palomar Pomerado Health system in southern California, whose total compensation increased to over $1 mllion a year, while his hospital system was cited for severe, life-threatening medical errors.  The current and previous system board chairmen called his work "excellent, and " phenomenal," and asserted Mr Covert was "one of the nation's leading health administrators."

It turns out that a local weekly newspaper, the Community Paper, investigated Mr Covert's background in 2008, and what they found was not exactly the story of one of the nation's leading health administrators.  Let us summarize his record over 25 or so years.

1980s - Failure to Investigate the Michael Swango Case

As reported by the Community Paper:

Michael J Swango had received a surgical internship at Ohio State University in 1983. Nurses began noticing that apparently healthy patients on floors where Swango worked began dying mysteriously with an alarming frequency. One nurse caught him injecting some 'medicine' into a patient who later became strangely ill. The nurses reported their concerns to the administrators, headed by Michael Covert, but were met with accusations of paranoia. Only a perfunctory investigation was conducted.

In response to the board's inquiries, Surgery Director Dr. Larry Carey expressed misgivings about Swango, citing run-ins with hospital personnel and, specifically, the episode with several patients who became ill after treatment by Swango, one of whom died (and for whom Swango would later plead guilty to having killed).

At no time did Mike Covert, as executive director of the Ohio State University Hospital system, call in either University Police or Columbus, Ohio Police to investigate the matter, even though patients of Dr. Swango had died, even though documented observations and evidence had been submitted to the proper internal authorities.

Later, after Swango had been arrested in Illinois, the Ohio authorities got involved, however:

'It was only then,' says Dick Harp, Lead Investigator for the Ohio State University police department on the Michael Swango case, 'when the Quincy, Illinois, police department called us and told us they had this guy who had been a doctor at Ohio State and he had poisoned some people, that we got involved.' Harp said he contacted the Ohio State Hospital University staff and there appeared to be a collective effort to resist the investigation. They were not terribly cooperative, he said.

Eventually,

The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio’s, daily newspaper, reported in a June 1985 article that as a result of the controversial fallout caused by this failure to notify police authorities, a new hospital policy was implemented. This, following an internal report concerning the allegations against Swango as well as a highly critical internal report against Dr. Swango.

Swango was convicted of aggravated battery for attempting to poison co-workers in Illinois, and in 2000 pleaded guilty to killing three patients, and is in jail for life.

In retrospect, Covert's resistance to investigating complaints about Swango does not seem to have exemplified excellent leadership.

The 1990s - Jury Findings of Illegal Revocation of Privileges

Mr Covert then moved to Kansas, and then to Sarasota, Florida to become CEO of Sarasota Memorial Hospital.

The Community Paper noted that Mr Covert and the Hospital lost a multi-million dollar lawsuit that alleged the they had illegally revoked a physicians' hospital privileges:

Dr. Flynn and his attorneys alleged, and proved, that Michael Henri Covert, president and CEO of Sarasota’s Memorial Hospital, and the Sarasota County Public Hospital Board, doing business as Sarasota Memorial Hospital, unlawfully and without just cause, revoked or terminated the medical privileges of a doctor at the hospital who specialized in pain management, and that they did so because the doctor had earlier (in 1994) filed and pursued a federal lawsuit. Secondly, the jury also found that the Hospital Board had additionally executed the revocation and termination of medical privileges for other than the filing of the federal lawsuit. Under Section II of the jury verdict they also found that the Sarasota County Public Hospital had terminated or revoked the doctor’s privileges as as a result of the doctor having exercised his freedom of speech rights.

Called to the witness stand, Michael Covert was clearly and thoroughly impeached by Plaintiff’s attorney, Tony Leon.

Impeachment is a lawyer’s fancy word that simply means the witness and his veracity is questioned. The witness is accused of not being honest in his actions and statements. Based on his testimony while being impeached, the jury then made their judgment, ruling against Michael R. Covert and the Sarasota Memorial Hospital, finding the Defendant had violated 28 U.S.C., Section 1983 (depriving the plaintiff of his constitutional rights of free speech) and the Plaintiff was entitled to damages.

The Community Paper story also alleged that Sarasota Memorial lost millions of dollars through an ill-advised subsidiary set up by Mr Covert to buy physicians practices.

Losing the trial and losing the money again hardly seem to be the mark of an outstanding leader.

21st Century - Alleged Misrepresentations to Secure Government Funding

Mr Covert became CEO of Palomar Pomerado in 2003. In 2007, the Community Paper reported:

Mike Covert, the president and CEO of the Palomar Pomerado Health District, was quite active in promoting Proposition BB which would deliver $496 million dollars to the district to aid in building a new hospital. It suggested further that Mr. Covert was so active that he and his minions may have, in fact, made substantial misrepresentations in order to persuade the electorate to pass the bond issue. We also documented how the cost overruns had run up to $1.2 billion dollars (from an original projected cost of $753 million). This figure was later trimmed back to $990 million. Further, the downtown business community was concerned that a major promise that was made about importing the administrative staff to the existing downtown Palomar Hospital campus might not be kept. If that promise was broken then downtown Escondido might well become a ghost town.

That story lead the paper to inquire further.  Further, misrepresentations are not the mark of an excellent leader.

2008 - Alleged Dictatorial Management Style

Reporters found:

Talking with medical staff, newspaper reporters from Columbus, Ohio, and Sarasota, Florida, and with medical staff here in North San Diego County, a picture of an energetic, eager, impatient, egotistical, demanding, and often angry chief executive emerges. It was interesting that a parallel term was used by medical staff in Sarasota and in Escondido to describe Mr. Covert’s management style. 'He’s a Little Hitler,' was the common expression used by both medical communities.

According to several medical staffers at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Covert was not well liked, was described as manipulative and that he would do anything to get his way. Former board member Catherine Bowles, who had been at odds with the board and Covert testified at Dr. Flynn’s trial that 'people who complained about patient care were not warmly received by a majority of the board.' Nor, it is said, by Mr. Covert.

A number of others who know him, both within the medical community as well as within the Escondido community at large, agree that he is a highly egotistical man. He has to have things done his way. He is very good at playing politics and is also very good at playing hardball with contracted medical service suppliers.

Yet another doctor gave a somewhat contrasting view: 'He’s affable on one hand . . . a very good salesman; in front of a group he’s almost evangelical in his passion . . he almost bowls you over. Makes me kinda question someone who has so much zeal like . . 'I’m right.''

'Like all CEO’s, he’s very egotistical. He wants to have total control over everything, including the doctors.'

It is said he wields departmental administrative assignments as a tool and dangles the financial remuneration of them, ranging from as little as $10,000 to as much as $150,000 a year, as an incentive to fall in step with his wishes.

A number of doctors who practice at the Escondido campus of Palomar Medical Center confided to us, off the record, that they feared Covert.

One doctor complained, 'Covert is trying to take over as dictator of the hospital. There is supposed to be a separation between the hospital, the medical staff and the administrator. If you have the administrator making all the decisions then all decisions are made on money issues rather than what is best for the patient or the patient population. This poses a threat to the medical population and harms the quality of medical care. Covert is simply Hitler reborn.'

Another doctor agreed, saying, 'At most hospital districts, administrators don't normally show up at Medical Executive Meetings unless invited . . . but here, administrators are present at closed meetings. They should not be privy to private medical meetings/discussions and they tend to dominate the meetings.'

Again, a "brilliant" leader who is manipulative, rebukes criticism, and dictatorial?

2008 - Contrasting Praise from the Board

While the physicians questioned his management style, just as we noted this year, the then board chairman was effusive:

You and your readers need to know that Covert is one of the most highly regarded executives in the industry. He has received a number of very prestigious awards. Some of them puts him in the company of surgeon generals, such as C. Everett Koop. He has held high executive and board membership in national organizations.

At that time, the board chairman claimed that when Mr Covert was hired, after having been recommended by a national search firm, none of the issues noted above had come to light. 

2008 - The Temporary End of the Story

The Community Paper story ended on a disquieting note, suggesting that even the extensive results of their investigation recounted above were not complete, and that there might be grounds for a criminal investigation:

There are many other comments from physicians, other leads to follow in pursuit of the rest of this story. However, we, as a weekly newspaper, have neither the time nor resources to explore the labyrinthine depths of hospital administration committees, subcommittes, advisory councils, etc. Side financial agreements, whether or not their are 'kickback' arrangements within the hospital structure. That additional research and reporting would be better left to someone who has the resources, such as a Grand Jury.

I could find nothing to suggest any further investigation ensued. There appears to have been no local reaction to the Community Paper story. As we noted above, instead Mr Covert got a raise, and is currently getting over $1 million a year in total compensation.

Summary

A more complete look at the record of one CEO of one small, public hospital system suggests even more discrepancies between his ever increasing remuneration, justified by ongoing effusive support by his board, and a record that at best suggests multiple questionable management decisions and multiple bad results.

Note that even though considerable information was available on the public record that should have lead to questions about his leadership, this information remained relatively anechoic, and the questions were not repeated.  We have found that very few have been willing to question or investigate the powers that be in health care, and that direct or implied concerns about how health care is lead tend to be anechoic.

This case demonstrates the sorts of problems in health care governance and leadership that we started Health Care Renewal to discuss. Perverse incentives and poor oversight seem to encourage leadership by the wrong people, hired for the wrong reasons, to do the wrong thing.

There is again an ongoing discussion in the US about the costs of health care. Bad leadership of health care organizations is not only directly costly, but leads to huge indirect costs as the results of bad, if not sometimes corrupt decisions. As Matthew Holt pointed out in a comment on our earlier post on Palomar Pomerado, it is not that the case above is an outlier. It is likely just a better documented version of what is going on throughout health care.

Yet outside of a few lonely bloggers, not many people talk about bad leadership and bad governance as fundamental, major causes of our ongoing health care crisis.

We say again, true health care reform will require having health care leadership and governance that displays accountability, integrity, transparency, and honesty.  But first, we have to be willing to openly discuss bad, that is unaccountable, opaque, dishonest, and corrupt leadership. 

Hat tip to our own Health Care Renewal blogger Dr Scot Silverstein for finding the 2008 Community Paper story (see his comment here).

Blast from the Anechoic Past: Former UCI Fertility Doctor Arrested in Mexico

Soon after we started Health Care Renewal, we ran a series of posts about the University of California-Irvine (UCI) medical school and medical center, featuring stories of mismanagement of major programs, especially those involving organ transplantation (liver, kidney, and bone marrow) while the top executives who presided over the mess received generous compensation, sometimes in strikingly irregular ways, and while at least one whistle-blower alleged he lost his job for complaining about safety issues.  Some of the stories went back another 10 years, to 1995.  One particularly striking story involved the UCI infertility program.  Three physicians were accused of stealing ova from some women to implant in others.  One physician was convicted, and two fled the country (see post here).

One of those physicians just turned up.  As reported by ABC News at the end of 2010:

U.S. authorities are working to extradite one of the doctors accused of being behind of the biggest fertility scandals in history. Mexican authorities arrested Dr. Ricardo Asch last month.

Back in the 1990s, Asch and another fertility doctor, Jose Balmaceda, were charged with stealing embryos and eggs belonging to dozens of women who sought treatment at the University of California-Irvine Center for Reproductive Health and implanting them into other women.

They are also accused of not reporting more than $1 million in earnings, and fleeing the country to avoid prosecution.

Marla McCutcheon is one of the women who says she was victimized by Asch. She was one of his patients until she decided to switch physicians because she said she found him 'uncaring.'

McCutcheon, from Irvine, Calif., says she found out years later that after she'd left Asch's care that there were leftover eggs she didn't know about. To this day, she doesn't know what happened to those eggs.

'I would have done anything for those eggs at that time. It's still hard for me to grasp that there might be something to my eggs. Someone may have been able to get pregnant from them,' McCutcheon said.

At the time of the scandal, ABC News saw documents showing that more than 60 other women who were patients at the fertility center had eggs taken from them without their consent. Asch, however, said he knew nothing about it. During the time the incidents occurred, it was not illegal to transfer human tissue without consent.

The case had major repercussions for how fertility clinics operate:

The scandal allegedly involving Asch, Balmaceda and another doctor, Sergio Stone, rocked the field of reproductive medicine, and doctors say they still feel its effects.

'Reproductive medicine is very new. It's come a long way and we've made tremendous progress, but because of scientific advances, it's very high-profile,' said Dr. Jani Jensen, a Mayo Clinic reproductive endocrinologist in Rochester, Minn. 'Whenever there are publicized incidents like this that involve ethical issues, it's sometimes difficult to engender the public's trust.'

Dr. Howard Zacur, director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center in Baltimore, Md., said patients still want reassurance their eggs and embryos will be protected from these types of incidents.

It is now against the law in California to take eggs from a woman without her consent.

Note that the disconnect between problematic quality of care at UCI and the generous compensation afforded its top leaders continued through 2010, as this post discussed.

Aside from its colorfulness, there are other reasons to recall the story of the stolen ova and the subsequent troubles at UCI.  First, the list of problems over 15 years discussed in our series of posts suggests an institution whose leadership culture is seriously disturbed.  I cannot view the institution from a distance and figure out what the fundamental problems are with its leadership and governance, but there must be some.  (Note that per a 2006 post, an internal report did fault lack of accountability, leadership by people with no medical background, absence of clear reporting lines, and the overlooking of whistleblowers, but these are just descriptions of bad management and governance, not explanations of them.  Furthermore, it is not clear whether there have been any fundamental changes in leadership or governance since then.  If there readers know there is more to this, please let me know in the comments section below.)

Second, this case illustrates how the anechoic effect has decreased recognition that the problems at UCI may be part of more systemic problems.  Despite the number of problems that occurred, their vividness, and their coverage in local media, the troubles at UCI have not gotten national media attention, nor as far as I can tell, have they ever been discussed in the medical, health care, health services research, or health policy literature.  (I have tried multiple Google scholar searches using the institution's name, and keywords including "scandal," and the names of some of the physicians most prominently named in our series of posts, and have found nothing relevant.)  The 15 year history has produced almost no echoes, and hence now has become as striking a black hole in the annals of bad health care leadership and governance as was the case of the fall of the Allegheny Health Education and Research Foundation (AHERF). 

Certain issues that we discuss on Health Care Renewal have become less anechoic, in particular, conflicts of interest caused by academic physicians financial ties to the drug, biotechnology and device industries.  However, the larger issues of mismanagement by lavishly compensated, and hence perversely incentivized executives remains relatively anechoic.  I am not sure how big a scandal it will take to remove the taboo from discussing it. 

Health Insurers Sanctioned, Fined

It has not been a good few weeks for big US health insurance companies.  First was a report (e.g., per the Wall Street Journal) that three companies had been suspended from selling Medicare Advantage plans:

The U.S. government's Medicare program has ordered three health insurers--Universal American Corp. (UAM), Health Net Inc. (HNT) and Arcadian Health--to stop marketing to and enrolling new members in their Medicare Advantage health and prescription-drug plans, saying the companies violated regulations.

In particular,

Universal American was told to stop marketing to and enrolling people in its Medicare Advantage plans effective Dec. 5. The action doesn't affect current members or the enrolling of beneficiaries in the company's stand-alone Medicare prescription-drug plans.

Health Net had to suspend the marketing of and enrollment in its Medicare Advantage plans and stand-alone Medicare prescription-drug plans as of Friday, as the government said the company's conduct poses a 'serious threat' to enrollees. The sanction doesn't affect the status of current enrollees, however.

In a letter Friday to Theodore Carpenter, head of Universal American's Medicare Advantage business, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services alleged the company has a 'longstanding pattern of prohibited marketing practices targeted to highly vulnerable populations in violation' of federal law and guidelines as well as contractual terms with CMS.

Universal American is a 'chronic poor performer' with respect to the regulations, according to CMS, which said the company's agents engaged in aggressive sales tactics and abusive behavior, and misled or confused beneficiaries or misrepresented the plan.

The agency's letter to Health Net government-programs executive Scott Kelly said the company's conduct 'poses a serious threat to the health and safety of its enrollees,' as a result of the company's 'intractable failure to provide its enrollees with prescription drug benefits in conformance" with laws, guidelines and contract terms.' CMS cited a 'history of non-compliance.'

Then, the state of California fined and ordered restitution from multiple companies, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:

State regulators Monday fined seven of California's largest health insurers nearly $5 million for systematically failing to pay doctors and hospitals fairly and on time.

The California Department of Managed Health Care issued the fines following an 18-month audit in which investigators looked at a small but statistically significant sample of claims. The investigation found the plans were paying on average about 80 percent of the claims correctly, far below the legal threshold of 95 percent.

'Our clear and consistent message is that California's hospitals and physicians must be paid fairly and on time,' said Cindy Ehnes, director of the Department of Managed Health Care, which is charged with regulating the states' health maintenance organizations, or HMOs.

In addition to the fines, the companies must pay the doctors and hospitals restitution that is expected to run into the "tens of millions of dollars," Ehnes said. The plans will also be required to come up with a plan to correct the problem and submit to future audits.

Failing to pay providers properly makes it tougher for them to survive in the struggling economy, Ehnes said. 'If providers are not paid, patient care and access suffer,' she said.

Regulators fined Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California $900,000 each. United/PacifiCare was fined $800,000 and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Health Net were both hit with fines of $750,000.


The fines for Cigna and Aetna were $450,000 and $300,000, respectively, for a total of $4.85 million.

Please note that some of these companies have become "frequent flyers" on the Health Care Renewal blog.  Anthem Blue Cross in California is a subsidiary of WellPoint. WellPoint, in particular, just appears again and again on Health Care renewal.  A list of all posts about that company is here, and see this post for a list of past ethical and management missteps.  Health Net appeared in both stories above, and appeared on Health Care Renewal here.  Posts on Aetna are here.

Having been writing for this blog now for several years, I am struck by how often the conduct of particular health care organizations has been discredited, without any discernible effect on the organization's leadership or course.  It is particularly striking how the attention paid and pay given to the leaders of some health care organizations contrasts with the public record of their organization's bad behavior.

In particular, contrast the long catalog of misbehavior by WellPoint, noted above, with the enormous earnings of the company's CEO (more than $13 million in 2009), and her status as a prominent speaker on health care policy (see post here). 

In the laissez faire, anything goes, wild, wild west economy of today, spearheaded by the financial service companies that lead us to the global economic collapse, it seems that ethical leadership counts for nothing.  This is bad when it applies to the leadership of financial services, whose bad leadership can cost us all a lot of money.  It is worse when it applies to health care, whose bad leadership can cost us our health and our lives.

As I have said ad infinitum, to really reform health care, we will need to get accountable, ethical, transparent leadership of health care organizations.

St. Vincent's Goes Bankrupt, Executives Earn Millions

St. Vincent's Hospital in the Greenwich Village section of New York City was a landmark institution which filed for bankruptcy in April, 2010, and then closed its doors. 

Background

A New York Times article written earlier this year described an institution "threatened with extinction" because it stuck to its mission of "compassionate care" in a health care environment that values "fancy equipment and celebrity doctors."  Thus, "officials blamed a high rate of poor and uninsured patients as well as cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and the hospital's inability to negotiate favorable contracts with health insurance companies...." 

Painting Another Picture

However, a story this week in the grittier New York Post painted a different picture:

St. Vincent's Hospital was looted by execs and consultants in the two years before it closed, then grossly exaggerated its debt, according to blockbuster papers set to be filed tomorrow in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The filing, a petition that seeks to force the state Health Department to turn over documents on the closing, says the defunct medical center blew through millions in 'highly questionable' expenses, including $278,000 for a golf outing, while paying its top 10 executives a combined $10 million a year.

It also shelled out $17 million for 'management consultants,' $3.8 million on 'professional fund-raising' and a staggering $104 million on unspecified costs it listed simply as 'other' on its federal tax returns, the petition says.

But even with all that money going out, St. Vincent's wasn't nearly as cash strapped as it claimed, say the court papers, prepared by a law firm working for doctors and nurses formerly employed there and the hospital's West Village neighbors.

Its crushing debt of about $1 billion, which the hospital blamed for having to close its doors in April, was bloated by hundreds of millions of dollars in loans dumped on St. Vincent's from other medical entities run by the Archdiocese of New York, starting in 2001, after the other institutions merged with the hospital, the papers say.

'The debt of the hospital was specifically exaggerated by numerous factors, including the transfer of debt from other Catholic medical centers and mismanagement by the board of directors,' the documents say. 'These transfers . . . remain undisclosed to the public.'

Historical Parallels
These accusations parallel themes that appeared towards the end of the February, 2010, NY Times piece. First, regarding the transfer of debt:

To remain competitive, in 2000 St. Vincent’s merged with several other Catholic hospitals to form St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers.

Along with the flagship hospital in the Village, it ran seven other hospitals: Bayley Seton and St. Vincent’s on Staten Island; Mary Immaculate, St. John’s and St. Joseph’s in Queens; St. Mary’s in Brooklyn; and St. Vincent’s Westchester, in Harrison, N.Y. It was also affiliated with St. Vincent’s Midtown, formerly St. Clare’s, in Midtown Manhattan.

The merger was conceived as a way to streamline management and give the hospitals pricing leverage, but it was troubled from the beginning. After closings and sales, the network was left with just one New York City hospital, the flagship; a psychiatric and substance abuse treatment hospital in Westchester; and several nursing homes and other outpatient facilities. Some of St. Vincent’s debt was inherited from the closed hospitals.

Second, regarding mismanagement:

In 2004, St. Vincent’s turned over management to Speltz & Weis, the first in a series of turnaround consultants. It paid the firms millions of dollars a year to run the hospital and hired their officials as hospital executives. The system filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early July 2005, when it appeared, according to court papers filed by hospital creditors, that it would be unable to make its payroll.

In a lawsuit filed in 2007, some of the hospital’s creditors painted a picture of a hospital system trapped between unscrupulous consultants and a passive or gullible board. The lawsuit accused David E. Speltz and Timothy C. Weis, the hospital system’s former chief executive and chief financial officer, of delaying the bankruptcy organization while they and their consulting firm collected millions of dollars in fees.

The lawsuit accused them of hiring high-priced contractors and padding their fees, instead of using hospital employees to do work. And it says they leveraged their positions with the hospital to negotiate the sale of their consulting company to Huron Consulting Group, in Chicago, also a defendant in the case.

The outcome of that earlier lawsuit was unclear.  It does suggest that St. Vincent's may have been chronically bled by greedy managers and consultants.

Contrasting Financial Health and Executive Compensation

Of course, as one of our unofficial legal consultants noted, anyone can file a lawsuit. However, perusal of the latest 990 form filed with the Internal Revenue Service by St Vincent Catholic Medical Centers for calendar year 2008 did reveal a disquieting contrast.

That form stated that the the hospital lost over $65 million in 2008, and over $34 million in 2007. However, in 2008, here were the compensation of its highest paid managers

- Brian Fitzsimmons, Executive Director, $2,135,401
- Bernadette Kingman-Bez, Senvior Vice President, CCO (?), $1,520,841
- Paul Rosenfeld, Executive Director, CC, $1,196,458
- Henry Amoroso, CEO, $1,081,592

In addition, seven current and former executives at the Senior Vice President of Vice President level earned over $500,000 that year, and another 13 earned over $250,000.

Summary

So clearly, while the hospital was hemorrhaging money, and a little more than a year away from bankruptcy, this not-for-profit hospital whose mission emphasized serving the poor served a large corps of  executives very large amounts of money.  So we see again the pattern of top managers rewarding themselves disproportionately (here, grossly so) given the mission and financial status of their organizations.  The picture is of pay entirely independent of performance, and leaders who are ultimately only in it for the money.

How many more examples like this do we need until there is resolve that real health care reform will make top health care leaders accountable for their performance, and provide them incentives that are fair and rational, rather than perverse?

Post-Script

Of course, if we regard the fall of institutions whose mission was to do good as inevitable in our Darwinian world, an explanation that earlier coverage of this story suggested, all we can do is to throw our hands up.  However, the inevitability argument is often made by those who are benefiting from the current way of doing things.  A more skeptical view of this case, and related health policy issues, may suggest a different approach. 

$4 Billion Military EMR "AHLTA" to be Put Out of Its Misery? Also, Does the VA Have $150 Million to Burn on IT That Was Never Used?

I have heard from numerous reliable sources that the military's $4 billion+ EMR known as "Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application" (AHLTA) is to be declared a failure, and replaced.

I'd written about AHLTA's considerable problems at the post "If The Military Can't Get Electronic Health Records Right, Why Would We Think Conflicted EHR Companies And IT-Backwater Hospitals Can?" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/06/if-military-cant-get-electronic-health.html .

From that post:

[AHLTA has been described as] difficult for physicians to use. Intolerable. Slow. Unreliable. Frequently crashes. Near mutiny. Morale. Affecting patient care, decreasing patient load. Can it get worse?

Yes ... When the Army's Surgeon General observes that clinicians "spend as much or more time working around the system as they do with the system", and that the superusers are not enthusiastic about the system, and a Congressional hearing is held entitled "where do we go from here?" (it's clear to this author that they have no clue), one should start to very critically question basic assumptions about health IT.

One wonders if anyone responsible for AHLTA ever read my now decade-old site on health IT dysfunction, now at this link at Drexel University, or its many hyperlinks to additional resources.

Meanwhile, the VA is having its own problems as noted on the HISTalk blog:

[HISTalk News 6/30/10] Back in March, I dug out a juicy nugget from an internal VA report: it was scrapping a $150 million patient scheduling system without ever bringing it live. The GAO weighs in with its official report (warning: PDF), pegging the cost at $127 million and saying “VA has not implemented any of the planned system’s capabilities and is essentially starting over.” The contractor that developed the system with “a large number of defects” walks away with $65 million. GAO finds much to criticize about the VA’s involvement: lack of competitive bidding, sloppy specs, unreliable status reports, and lack of action by project oversight groups when the project started tanking.

The linked PDF report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), entitled "INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - Management Improvements Are Essential to VA’s Second Effort to Replace Its Outpatient Scheduling System", reveals errors that cause me to question whether the project leadership ever passed their introductory undergraduate IT courses (assuming they had any).

From that report:

VA’s efforts to successfully complete the Scheduling Replacement Project were hindered by weaknesses in several key project management disciplines and a lack of effective oversight that, if not addressed, could undermine the department’s second effort to replace its scheduling system:

• VA did not adequately plan its acquisition of the scheduling application and did not obtain the benefits of competition.
• VA did not ensure requirements were complete and sufficiently detailed to guide development of the scheduling system.
• VA performed system tests concurrently, increasing the risk that the system would not perform as intended, and did not always follow its own guidance, leading to software passing through the testing process with unaddressed critical defects.
• VA’s project progress and status reports were not reliable, and included data that provided inconsistent views of project performance.
• VA did not effectively identify, mitigate, and communicate project risks due to, among other things, staff members’ reluctance to raise issues to the department’s leadership.
• VA’s various oversight boards had responsibility for overseeing the Scheduling Replacement Project; however, they did not take corrective actions despite the department becoming aware of significant issues.
  

The impact of the scheduling project on the HealtheVet initiative cannot yet be determined because VA has not developed a comprehensive plan for HealtheVet that, among other things, documents the dependencies among the projects that comprise the initiative.

My question is:

By what miracle of God will the military's AHLTA's and the VA's scheduling system "replacements" be any better than what now exists? Through reliance on commercial EMR vendors and management consultant "experts", perhaps?

If so, I wish the military and VA the best of luck. They will need it.

The problems with computing in complex settings such as medicine are pervasive, far beyond the military. It is increasingly clear that the leadership of the healthcare IT ecosystem (and probably even the broader IT ecosystem) consists of recycled incompetents, never held accountable for project failures, even massive ones, instead moving on to wreak mayhem elsewhere. This has certainly been my own experience in both the hospital and pharma sectors.

Competent experts who actually try to do meaningful work (a.k.a. "rock the boat" or "non-team players" in the parlance of the incompetent and/or the power seekers) have become hopelessly marginalized - or unemployed. See the post "Edwin Lee on the Tiger We Are Now Riding" by Roy Poses. Our economy and even society is falling apart as a result of these leadership problems; Lee's post "Lightweight oil executives produce worthless disaster plans" as linked above is pathognomonic of these failures. Writes Lee:

... This week the executives of the other major oil companies (besides BP) presented their oil spill contingency plans to Congress. Several things were immediately evident: the plans were all grossly inadequate and carelessly done, they were all developed by the same outside consulting firm and they were essentially carbon copies of BP’s nearly useless plans. In other words, they were empty “cover your ass” documents rather than serious contingency plans. Some people may find this surprising. From my experience, it’s what we can and should expect from the vast majority of large, public institutions because of a universal and deeply flawed process for selecting their leaders.

... Those who are chosen to lead fit a mold: mediocre, short term thinkers with similar work experiences, outlooks, temperaments and personal incentives. Disaster response, creative thinking and fundamental changes are outside their limited range of interests or competencies.

Here is the major problem in a nutshell: no real accountability where it matters.

What follows from this is a first principle:

Recycled incompetents will never produce good information systems.

Major health IT commercial vendor CEO's have been reported as making statements that health IT usability -- one of AHLTA's major deficiencies - "will be part of certification over her dead body" (as described in my post at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/05/did-epic-ceo-judy-faulkner-of-epic.html).

Why don't we recycle physicians with track records of killing patients? Better yet, make them Chairs of clinical departments?

The answer is obvious, but the IT culture seems immune to such considerations.

The UK's National Programme for IT in the NHS (NPfIT) is AHLTA on a national scale:

The UK Public Accounts Committee report on disastrous problems in their £12.7 billion national EMR program is here.

Gateway reviews of the UK National Programme for IT from the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) are here (released under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act), and a summary of 16 key points is here.

My prediction is this:

I do not believe health IT has advanced enough beyond the experimental stage for clinically efficacious, safe, cost effective mass dissemination.

Further, I do not believe that the human capital necessary to make such dissemination happen in a clinically efficacious, safe, cost effective manner exists in the IT industry.

Talent management in that industry -- based on cheap, just-in-time, "programming language/platform du jour", "smart people cannot or should not learn but should be declared obsolete", and Bart Simpson-style attitudes about ability and expertise -- does not allow the needed human capital to exist. A remarkable and revealing example comes from an article about health IT leadership a number of years ago in the journal “Healthcare Informatics”:

I don't think a degree gets you anything," says healthcare recruiter Lion Goodman, president of the Goodman Group in San Rafael, California about CIO's and other healthcare MIS staffers. Healthcare MIS recruiter Betsy Hersher of Hersher Associates, Northbrook, Illinois, agreed, stating "There's nothing like the school of hard knocks." In seeking out CIO talent, recruiter Lion Goodman "doesn't think clinical experience yields [hospital] IT people who have broad enough perspective. Physicians in particular make poor choices for CIOs. They don't think of the business issues at hand because they're consumed with patient care issues," according to Goodman.

The "management improvements" sought by the VA may simply not be possible, until the IT field undergoes something comparable to the "Flexner report" that the medical professions and their educational programs underwent a century ago.

And perhaps until health IT leadership personnel begin to lose their homes and fortunes in court to harmed patient plaintiffs, to the point where the leadership start begging competent, marginalized professionals who actually know what they're doing to save their sorry asses.

-- SS

7/6 addendum:

For more on the topic of dinosaur-era attitudes about Medical Informatics that lead to such debacles, see my July 5, 2010 post "Jurassic Attitudes about Medical Informatics: in the U.S. Navy?"

WellPoint: Don't Know Much About Computer Programming; Aetna: Don't Know Much About Mathematics

Big US based health care insurance companies have not been covering themselves in glory in the last week.

Aetna's Math Errors

First, there was the case of Aetna's mathematical prowess, e.g., as reported by the Los Angeles Times:

A second insurance company in California has killed plans for double-digit rate hikes for individual policyholders because of errors in its filing that would have inflated premiums, state regulators said Thursday.

Connecticut-based Aetna Inc. had sought an average 19% increase in rates for its 65,000 individual customers, but pulled back after multiple math errors in its paperwork were found by its own staff and by an independent consultant working for the state.

Aetna's decision follows a similar move by Anthem Blue Cross, which canceled a rate increase of as much as 39% for many of its 800,000 California policyholders in April after the state consultant found calculation errors in its filing with the California Insurance Department.

Of course, Aetna tried to minimize the story:

An Aetna spokeswoman said the company found 'a miscalculation not previously detected' when it conducted a third round of internal reviews.

'This was a simple human error,' said spokeswoman Anjanette Coplin, who did not elaborate.

However,

'There were multiple errors … in the way [Aetna] annualized premiums and in the compounding of the rate increase,' said state Insurance Department spokesman Darrel Ng.

Of course, somehow the errors all were in Aetna's favor:

Even with the new disclosure requirements, regulators have limited authority to block rate increases. They can do so only if insurers fail to spend at least 70% of their premiums on medical claims.

In Aetna's recent rate filing, the insurer said its plan met the 70% minimum. But once the errors were identified, medical-claim spending fell below the 70% requirement. The proposed rates were higher than they should have been, officials said.

WellPoint's Computer Errors

A few minutes ago, the Associated Press reported:

WellPoint Inc. has notified 470,000 individual insurance customers that medical records, credit card numbers and other sensitive information may have been exposed in the latest security breach of the health insurer's records.

The Indianapolis company said the problem stemmed from an online program customers can use to track the progress of their application for coverage. It was fixed in March.

Spokeswoman Cynthia Sanders said an outside vendor had upgraded the insurer's application tracker last October and told the insurer all security measures were back in place.

But a California customer discovered that she could call up confidential information of other customers by manipulating Web addresses used in the program. Customers use a Web site and password to track their applications.

Note that this security breach was potentially serious:

WellPoint's security breach doesn't crack the top 10 in terms of number of people who may have had information exposed, said Paul Stephens, the [Privacy Rights Clearinghouse]organization's director of policy and advocacy. Even so, he labeled the breach 'very serious' because it possibly involved both financial and medical information.

This is not the first time WellPoint's computers and software have violated the privacy of its applicants or customers:

Two years ago, WellPoint offered free credit monitoring after it said personal information for about 128,000 customers in several states had been exposed online. In 2006, backup computer tapes containing the personal information of 200,000 of its members were stolen from a Massachusetts vendor's office.

Summary

Of course, everyone makes mistakes.  However, one would expect that at least health insurance companies/ managed care organizations ought to be able to do the math necessary to support their rate proposals correctly, and keep their policy-holders' and applicants' personal information confidential.  These would seem to be fundamental competencies that such organizations ought to display.  Of course, one can find other examples of lack the lack of competency (and worse) displayed by both Aetna and WellPoint. 

Furthermore, anyone can make mistakes, but in the real world, those who preside over such mistake-prone enterprises often do not do too well.  However, in the bizarre world of large health care organizations, the executives who preside over the ongoing bumbling just make more and more money, under the pretense that their continuing brilliant leadership just leads to one triumph after another. 

As we noted here, WellPoint CEO Angela Braly's total compensation increased in 2009 to an outsized $13.1 million, with the executives just underneath her paid proportionately well.  Per its 2010 proxy statement, WellPoint's

Total Rewards compensation program is designed to attract, engage, motivate and retain a talented team of executive officers and to appropriately reward those executive officers for their contributions to our business and our members. We seek to accomplish this goal in a way that is closely aligned with the long-term interests of our shareholders and the expectations of our members and health care providers.

I suspect that WellPoint's members' expectations did not include the three computer security breaches noted above.

Similarly, according to its 2010 proxy statement, Aetna CEO Ronald A Williams' total compensation in 2009 was a mere $18,058,162. Other top executives made proportionate amounts, from more than $1 million to more than $12 million. The rationale underlying executive compensation includes:

We seek to implement a pay-for-performance philosophy by tying a significant portion of our executives’ compensation to their achievement of financial and other goals that are linked to the Company’s business strategy and each executive’s contributions towards the achievement of those goals.

To me, avoiding mathematical errors in calculating policy premiums ought to be part of the company's goals linked to its business strategy.

An old rock song that starts with "don't know much about history," may have a certain charm.  Health insurance companies that cannot accurately calculate premiums or protect the confidentiality of policy-holders' computerized data has none. 

As long as "imperial CEOs" can continue to get extremely rich while presiding over incompetence and stupidity, if not worse (see here), we can expect the foolishness to continue.  Meanwhile, the foolishness drives up costs and drives down quality of health care for the poor suffering patients, let alone the physicians and other health care professionals who must deal with it.

To really reform health care, we need to provide incentives for competent, honest leadership, and make that leadership accountable for its shortcomings.

Abbott's TriCor Fails To Beat A Sugar Pill in Diabetics - And In Pharma's Current Death Spiral, Forget About a Drug That Will

In numerous national publications today, we are once again reminded that lowering the risk of diabetics for vascular events (MI/heart attack, CVA/stroke etc.) and death is far more complex than lowering measures such as cholesterol and blood pressure.

Note these articles:

Abbott's TriCor Fails To Beat A Sugar Pill
March 14, 2010 - 9:58 am
Matthew Herper
Forbes.com

ATLANTA -- A popular triglyceride-lowering drug that has been taken by millions of Americans failed to prevent heart disease in a big federal study being presented today.

The drug, TriCor from Abbott Laboratories, has been used for over a quarter of a century to lower levels of fatty particles in the blood called triglycerides. The presumption has been that doing so would prevent heart attacks or heart-related deaths. TriCor has annual sales of more than $1 billion.

But the new study being presented at the American College of Cardiology meeting casts doubt on this. In the study, funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, 5,500 patients with diabetes got either TriCor or a placebo. After five years, there was no difference in the rate of heart attacks, strokes and deaths in the patients who got Tricor versus those who took a sugar pill.

and

Search for Better Diabetes Therapy Falls Short
Mar. 14, 2010, 9:39 P.M. ET
Ron Winslow
Wall Street Journal

Current Treatments, While Effective, Failed to Also Help Prevent Heart Attacks and Stroke

ATLANTA—New strategies to prevent and treat diabetes and heart disease failed to improve care in two major studies, frustrating researchers' efforts to find more-effective approaches to the world's burgeoning diabetes epidemic.

The studies are among the first large trials to test whether treatments recommended for diabetes patients also reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Diabetics are between two and four times as likely to die of cardiovascular causes as nondiabetics. The lack of data on whether strategies to treat diabetes actually lower heart risk is of growing concern to physicians, researchers and regulators.

One new study, called Accord, found that treating blood pressure to lower levels than recommended in current practice doesn't further reduce risk of death, heart attack and stroke among people with diabetes. The same study also found that the drug Tricor, marketed by Abbott Laboratories, failed to prevent such events even though it lowered levels of blood fats called triglycerides that are associated with high diabetes risk.

In the other report, dubbed Navigator, a diabetes drug called Starlix failed to prevent people at high risk of diabetes from progressing to the disease. The blood-pressure medicine Diovan did modestly reduce risk of developing diabetes in the same study, but neither drug significantly cut the risk of heart-related deaths, heart attacks and strokes. Both pills in this study are sold by Novartis SA of Switzerland.

There is a meta-issue I wish to bring up:

It's clear there are many phenomena going on in diabetes and other metabolic disorders that we simply do not understand.

It's also very likely that there are new drugs, yet undiscovered, that could be developed and that would improve mortality and morbidity.

It's too bad the pharmaceutical industry is now largely run by dyscompetents, incompetents, and other management charlatans, not to mention those responsible for questionable or outright criminal behaviors (such as here, here).

This privileged class has apparently so demoralized pharma rank and file including the very soul of drug discovery (chemists) - based for example on "layoff thread" comments on a very popular blog for medicinal, synthetic and other chemists such as here - that these new drugs are increasingly unlikely to be developed at all.

The industry in its current anti-intellectual, "lay them off and watch the stock price rise", short-term narrow-minded idiocy-driven death spiral is basically good for nothing except money games.

Pity.

-- SS

The Argument Over Insurance Rate Hikes: A Systemic Problem with Health Care Organizations' Leadership and Governance?

There has been a tremendous amount of news coverage of a large rate increase proposed by Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint, in California.  For example, the Los Angeles Times reported last week,

Congress opened an investigation Tuesday into Anthem Blue Cross' impending rate increases in California as President Obama cited the premium hikes -- some as high as 39% -- in his bid to pass national healthcare legislation.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations announced they were examining the increases, which are set to take effect March 1. The subcommittee has scheduled a Feb. 24 hearing in Washington, while an Assembly committee in Sacramento has set a hearing for Feb 23.

'Reports of premium increases up to 39% are deeply troubling,' Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), who chairs the energy committee, said in a statement. 'At a time when millions of Americans are struggling to keep their health insurance, we need to know what possible justification there could be for increases of this magnitude.'

Anthem of Woodland Hills is the state's largest for-profit insurer and a unit of Indianapolis health insurance giant WellPoint Inc.

At issue are increases in monthly premiums for many of Anthem's estimated 800,000 customers with individual health insurance policies who are not part of group coverage.

Anthem began informing individual policyholders last month that prices would go up March 1 and could be adjusted 'more frequently' than typical yearly increases.

The company would not say how high the rates could go or how many customers would be affected. Brokers and policyholders said many of the anticipated increases were 30% to 39%, the largest they could recall. The brokers said other insurers also were raising rates by double digits.

Anthem maintains that its increases are necessary to meet growing healthcare costs, even as it voices sympathy for policyholders whose premiums are rising.

In addition, per again a Los Angeles Times article this week,

Executives from California health insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross, under fire for scheduled rate hikes of up to 39%, insisted Tuesday that their premiums were fair and legal, and they told lawmakers they expected that the increases would go forward.

Appearing before the state Assembly's health committee, the officials said that they believed rate increases for individual health insurance policies, delayed until May 1 while being reviewed by the Department of Insurance, would survive scrutiny by regulators

In Sacramento, Anthem's president, Leslie Margolin, told the committee that much of the public frustration over the rate hikes was misdirected and should be aimed at the nation's healthcare system.

'This debate and this inquiry cannot and should not be just about the insurance industry or the delivery system or regulators or legislators or customers or brokers,' Margolin said.

'We have wasted precious time and precious resources doing battle with each other,' she added. 'We must come together collaboratively and strategically to address the distressing symptoms of our troubled system -- rising premiums, for example -- and to address the fundamental underlying causes of our collective failure.'

As we have discussed time after time on Health Care Renewal, there are multiple fundamental problems with health care in the US (and around the world.) The Anthem President above did not apparently specify what she thought these problems are. We have discussed in particular problems that arise out of abuse and concentration of power in health, particularly problems with the leadership and governance of health care organizations. We have suggested that such problems are major causes of the ever rising costs of, declining access to, and stagnant quality of health care in the US.

These problems do not seem to particularly afflict WellPoint more than most other organizations, and certainly do afflict the other organizations with which WellPoint has to deal.  On the other hand, WellPoint has certainly had its own share of issues. These have been sufficient to raise questions about the organization's leadership's transparency, ethics, and management abilities. While WellPoint perhaps should not be singled out for these sorts of problems, the extent they may have contributed to the costs it imposes, and its ability to manage its relationships with other organizations should be a source of skepticism about the idealized pronouncements of its leaders.

For a recent example, the Los Angeles Times also just reported,

California's largest for-profit health insurer violated state law more than 700 times over a three-year period by failing to pay medical claims on time and misrepresenting policy provisions to customers, the state's insurance commissioner said Monday.

Anthem Blue Cross of Woodland Hills could face fines of up to $7 million stemming from the alleged violations from 2006 to 2009. Commissioner Steve Poizner said the insurer repeatedly failed to respond to state regulators in a 'reasonable time' as they investigated complaints over the last year.

'We believe there is evidence to suggest there are serious issues with how Anthem Blue Cross pays claims,' Poizner said at a Sacramento news conference. 'Most disturbing to us is that they don't even respond' to the Department of Insurance 'in a timely way.'

Furthermore, WellPoint...

• settled a RICO (racketeer influenced corrupt organization) law-suit in California over its alleged systematic attempts to withhold payments from physicians (see post here).
• subsidiary New York Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield misplaced a computer disc containing confidential information on 75,000 policy-holders (see story here).
• California Anthem Blue Cross subsidiary cancelled individual insurance policies after their owners made large claims (a practices sometimes called rescission).  The company was ordered to pay a million dollar fine in early 2007 for this (see post here).  A state agency charged that some of these cancellations by another WellPoint subsidiary were improper (see post here).  WellPoint was alleged to have pushed physicians to look for patients' medical problems that would allow rescission (see post here).  It turned out that California never collected the 2007 fine noted above, allegedly because the state agency feared that WellPoint had become too powerful to take on (see post here). But in 2008, WellPoint agreed to pay more fines for its rescission practices (see post here).  In 2009, WellPoint executives were defiant about their continued intention to make rescission in hearings before the US congress (see post here).
• California Blue Cross subsidiary allegedly attempted to get physicians to sign contracts whose confidentiality provisions would have prevented them from consulting lawyers about the contract (see post here).
• formerly acclaimed CFO was fired for unclear reasons, and then allegations from numerous women of what now might be called Tiger Woods-like activities surfaced (see post here).
• announced that its investment portfolio was hardly immune from the losses prevalent in late 2008 (see post here).
• was sanctioned by the US government in early 2009 for erroneously denying coverage to senior patients who subscribed to its Medicare drug plans (see post here).
• settled charges that it had used a questionable data-base (builty by Ingenix, a subsidiary of ostensible WellPoint competitor UnitedHealth) to determine fees paid to physicians for out-of-network care (see post here). 

So, WellPoint's subsidiary Anthem President Margolin was right in that her company, or insurance and managed care companies should not be blamed for all of our health care woes.  But I submit that her company should no less have to address concerns about the transparency, honesty, and skill of its management, and how problems in these areas have driven up costs, decreased access, threatened quality, and demoralized health care professsionals  than do leaders of other health care organizations.  At the moment, such concerns are at best peripheral to the ongoing debate on health care reform in the US.  I suggest they ought to be central.

ADDENDUM (24 February, 2010) - see also comments on the Covert Rationing Blog, and on the Managed Care Matters blog.

More California Medical Centers Plagued by Quality Problems While Their Executives Get Bonuses for "Improved Patient Care"

Earlier this week, we noted that while executives at one University of California medical center were getting large bonuses supposedly for "improved patient health," the hospital was being cited for serious health care quality deficiencies.  Now, more stories have appeared that raise questions about the rationale for the generous bonuses handed out to multiple top hospital executives at University of California hospitals. 

University of California - San Diego

First, in alphabetical order by city, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported on penalties for poor quality care announced by the California Department of Public Health:

UCSD Medical Center in San Diego was fined $50,000.... The state said the hospital staff failed to follow its surgical policies and procedures, which resulted in a patient having to have a second surgery to remove a foreign object — a guide wire that was left in the patient when a central venous catheter was inserted into the patient’s right femoral vein in the groin area in January 2009. The wire migrated into a chamber of the patient’s heart.

The procedure was done by a first-year intern and supervised by a third-year resident.

This marks the third time the state has penalized UCSD, with the first penalty issued in May 2008 and the second in May 2009.

However, a few days earlier, the Union-Tribune had reported:

Despite criticism from union leaders and rank-and-file employees, University of California regents yesterday overwhelmingly approved $3.1 million in incentive payouts to 38 medical center executives.

The payouts mean, for instance, that former UC San Diego Medical Center CEO Richard Liekweg will receive $136,174 in performance pay for the last fiscal year, added to his base of $660,500.

Regents justified the payments by noting that incentive programs are common in the health care industry, and necessary to compete for top talent.

'It’s the way this industry works,' said Regent William De La Pena, an ophthalmologist and medical director of eye clinics throughout Southern California.

At UCSD Medical Center, 10 senior managers will receive a combined $754,650 for surpassing goals set in areas ranging from improved patient safety to increased revenue. The bonuses amount to 14 to 23 percent added to executives’ salaries.

University of California - San Francisco
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a major University of California - San Francisco teaching hospital was also cited by the state Department of Public Health for quality problems:

San Francisco General was fined $25,000 for leaving a piece of surgical gauze in a patient who underwent an eight-hour operation for two types of cancer in September 2008. The foreign object was discovered about three months later and was removed without surgery during an office visit.

The Chronicle also reported a possibly major breach in the confidentiality of patient records at the UCSF Medical Center:

Medical records for about 4,400 UCSF patients are at risk after thieves stole a laptop from a medical school employee in November, UCSF officials said Wednesday.

The laptop, which was stolen on or about Nov. 30 from a plane as the employee was traveling, was found in Southern California on Jan. 8.

There is no indication that unauthorized access to the files or the laptop actually took place, UCSF officials said, but patients' names, medical record numbers, ages and clinical information were potentially exposed.

The security breach is UCSF's second in recent months. Last month, UCSF officials revealed that a faculty physician responding to an Internet 'phishing' scam potentially exposed the personal information of about 600 patients.

However, despite these obvious quality problems, the San Francisco Business Times reported

University of California regents approved $500,000 in bonuses to six top officials at the UC San Francisco Medical Center, part of a package of $3.1 million in payments to 38 hospital executives across the UC system.

In an interview last week with UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellman, she said that the executive bonuses were tied to meeting specific performance goals, such as reducing clinical infections and increasing satisfaction ratings by patients. She also pointed out that additional payments of $14.3 million to the UCSF Medical Center’s 6,600-strong workforce were approved earlier.

The UCSF officials awarded bonuses were:

* Mark Laret, chief executive officer, $181,227;
* Ken Jones, chief financial officer, interim chief operating officer, $89,162;
* Larry Lotenero, chief information officer, $66,045;
* John Harris, chief strategy and business development officer, $63,196;
* Susan Moore, finance director and interim chief financial officer, $53,261; and
* Sheila Antrum, chief nursing/patient care services officer, $49,280.

Summary

So, in summary, multiple executives at three major University of California medical centers received generous bonuses.  The rationale for these bonuses, given out at a time when the university system was under major financial constraints, was that they were incentives for exemplary performance and patient care. 

Yet almost simultaneous with announcement of the bonuses were news reports indicating serious patient care problems at the same medical centers.  The point I am NOT trying to make is that the care at any of these medical centers is bad.  The examples of quality problems were limited.  I am sure that many other major medical centers hae had such quality problems as well.  However, the cases cited above were sufficient to argue that the care at these medical centers was not outstanding, not exemplary.  Yet, the bonuses were awarded not for acceptable performance or average quality.  Their rationale was exceptional performance and quality.  Thus, the rationale for the performance bonuses seems at best naive, if not foolish. 

I would suggest, instead, that the sorts of bonuses given out at the University of California are a product of the current management culture that has been infused into nearly every health care organization in the US.  That culture holds that managers are different from you and me.  They are entitled to a special share of other people's money.  Because of their innate and self-evident brilliance, they are entitled to become rich.  This entitlement exists even when the economy, or the financial performance of the specific organization prevents other people from making any economic progress.  This entitlement exists even if those other poeple actually do the work, and ultimately provide the money that sustains the organization. 

Although the executives of not-for-profit health care organizations generally make far less than executives of for-profit health care corporations, collectively, hired managers of even not-for-profit health care organizations have become richer and richer at a time when most Americans, including many health professionals, and most primary care physicians, have seen their incomes stagnate or fall.  They are less and less restrainted by passive, if not crony boards, and more and more unaccountable.  In a kind of multi-centric coup d'etat of the hired managers, they have become our new de facto aristocracy. 

Or as we wrote in our previous post, executive compensation in health care seems best described as Prof Mintzberg described compensation for finance CEOs, "All this compensation madness is not about markets or talents or incentives, but rather about insiders hijacking established institutions for their personal benefit." As it did in finance, compensation madness is likely to keep the health care bubble inflating until it bursts, with the expected adverse consequences. Meanwhile, I say again, if health care reformers really care about improving access and controlling costs, they will have to have the courage to confront the powerful and self-interested leaders who benefit so well from their previously mission-driven organizations.  It is time to reverse the coup d'etat of the hired managers.

UCI Medical Center Fails Inspection, UCI Executives Get Bonuses

Back in the early days of Health Care Renewal, we had many occasions to write about problems with the leadership of the University of California - Irvine (UCI) medical school.  Starting in late 2005, we posted  about various management problems at the institution, involving its liver transplant service, cardiology division, and bone marrow transplant service, (see posts here and here) which lead the new chancellor of the campus to "acknowledge a failure of leadership and accountability" (see post here.) Slightly more recently, we noted the almost 20 year history of questionable financial relationships that involved one of UCI's "biggest stars" in clinical researach and several pharmaceutical companies (see post here).  Then, in 2007, we wrote about some strange contracting practices involving UCI and a local orthopedic practice (see post here).

So it was deja vu all over again when last week the Los Angeles Times reported about the latest batch of problems at UC Irvine Medical Center:

Federal investigators found scores of problems at UC Irvine Medical Center during a fall inspection that again put the troubled hospital's Medicare funding at risk, according to report released Thursday.

In an 85-page report on their surprise October inspection, regulators said they observed poor oversight and mistakes by UCI doctors, nurses and pharmacists, leading to inadequate care that in some cases harmed patients.

Among the findings:

* An 82-year-old man was mistakenly given a narcotic patch by a medical resident, without approval of doctors or pharmacists. The patch led to an overdose that required emergency intervention and may have contributed to his death a week later.

* A patient in the neuropsychiatric unit fell twice in three days and despite yelling 'Help me, doctor, help me,' suffered a head injury and had to be taken to intensive care.

* An on-call resident did not respond to repeated emergency pages from nurses in the neurological intensive care unit, where a patient with an irregular heartbeat languished for more than an hour.

* Pharmacists failed to monitor and store drugs correctly, allowing nurses to carry narcotics in their pockets and inject patients without proper oversight.

The report comes a year after investigators from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services documented repeated examples of poor oversight at the hospital and threatened to cut Medicare funding.

In July, Medicare officials issued a finding of immediate jeopardy after investigators discovered that five UCI patients had received overdoses because nurses using pain medication pumps were not properly trained. UCI officials immediately began training nurses to use the pumps, the finding was lifted within 24 hours and the hospital submitted a plan of correction.

However, the 2010 continuation of the sad tale of UCI adds an interesting contrast.

UCI nurses said Thursday that many of the latest problems stem from understaffing and other cost-cutting, even as the facility turned a $54.2-million profit last year and the chief executive earned an $83,250 bonus.

'This is a problem of money. To provide extra training, extra staffing, is money,' said Beth Kean, California Nursing Assn. director for UC nurses, including 1,000 at UCI.

Terry A. Belmont, who took over as the hospital's chief executive last year, disputed that the facility was understaffed.

The new wrinkle in the UCI saga seems to be that now the leadership of UCI has been raking in bonuses while the mismanagement of the organization apparently continues.

Indeed, also last week several California newspapers reported on a series of bonuses granted to the top executives of the University of California system.  For example, per the Los Angeles Times,

The University of California regents Thursday approved the controversial payment of $3.1 million in performance bonuses to 38 senior executives at UC's five medical centers.

The regents emphasized that the payments were linked to improved patient health and stronger hospital finances and said they were important tools to attract and retain talent. They said the bonuses were part of a 16-year-old plan funded by hospital revenue, not state funds or student fees. An additional $33.7 million is distributed among 22,000 lower-ranking medical employees.

However, union activists denounced the executive bonuses as unconscionable as other parts of the university were coping with pay cuts and layoffs.

'This is appalling to do this when they are telling the lowest-paid workers to stay in poverty,' said Lakesha Harrison, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, which represents about 20,000 UC workers, including hospital technicians and campus custodians.

Some of the union's members get bonuses of about $300 a year, Harrison said. In contrast, the payments to the 38 senior managers range from about $30,100 to nearly $219,000.

The incentives were awarded after the UC medical center system met such targets as reducing catheter-related infections and saving money through group purchases of supplies, officials said.

Among the payments approved Thursday by the regents in San Francisco were $218,728 to UCLA Medical Center Chief Executive David Feinberg, on top of his $739,695 base salary; $181,227 to UC San Francisco medical center Chief Executive Mark Laret, on top of $739,700 in pay; and $87,000, in addition to his $580,000 salary, for John Stobo, the UC system's senior vice president for health sciences.

Corroborating the assertion that the bonus plan is not new is a document that lists executive compensation at the University of California in 2008. (2009 data does not yet seem to be available on the web.) This document noted the following bonuses paid to University of California - Irvine medical leaders in 2008:
- Susan J Rayburn, Executive Director of Clinical Enterprise - Base Salary= $212,700, Bonus=$28,401
- Lisa M Reiser, Chief Patient Care Services Officer - $243,000, $26,507
- Eugene Spiritus, Chief Medical Officer - $310,000, $38,373
- Patricia D Thatcher, Executive Director - HR and Customer Service, Medical Center - $197,547, $17,542
- Cynthia A Winner, Chief Ambulatory Care Officer - $238,200, $24,371
- Maureen L Zehntner, Associate Vice Chancellor/ Chief Executive Officer, Medical Center - $555,000, $74,432

Note that Dr Spiritus, the Chief Medical Officer, did not mention that he was a 2008 bonus recipient when he defended bonuses given to UCI leaders in the LA Times article,

'Everybody's fallible. We just have to make sure we have the right processes in place' to catch errors, said Dr. Eugene Spiritus, UCI Medical Center's chief medical officer.

Spiritus also defended the compensation for hospital managers, saying they need to stay competitive in order to attract and keep talented managers, especially given the cost of living in California.

F Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "the very rich are different from you and me."  These days, it is executives and managers who are very different from you and me. 

Physicians are beginning to dread the notion of "pay for performance," which may mean tiny increases in fees paid to physicians who uncritically follow wooden-headed guidelines based on over-simplified notions of disease, poor measurement schemes, and manipulated and suppressed clinical data. 

However, for health care organization executives, "pay for performance" seems to mean lavish bonuses only tenuously related to any rational notion of performance.  In the example above, it seems that multiple UCI executives earned bonuses for their management of clinical affairs at the medical center in 2008, and at least the medical center CEO earned a bonus in 2009 for "improved patient health" while outside review of the medical center's performance in 2009 revealed "scores of problems" sufficient to threaten withdrawal of Medicare funding.  One wonders about the basis for all the millions in bonuses that have been paid to University of California executives over the years?

In fact, the executive "pay for performance" programs that started in the for-profit corporate world, and now are prevalent in not-for-profit health care organizations, seem to reflect the culture of executive entitlement now so prevalent in the US (and maybe most developed countries.)  First, executives claim credit for any improvements in their organizations, while the workers in the trenches who actually accomplished the improvements get chump change.  Second, when things go wrong, the workers face salary cuts and lay-offs, while the executives' total compensation never seems to go down. 

As we mentioned before, executive compensation in health care seems best described as Prof Mintzberg described compensation for finance CEOs, "All this compensation madness is not about markets or talents or incentives, but rather about insiders hijacking established institutions for their personal benefit." As it did in finance, compensation madness is likely to keep the health care bubble inflating until it bursts, with the expected adverse consequences. Meanwhile, I say again, if health care reformers really care about improving access and controlling costs, they will have to have the courage to confront the powerful and self-interested leaders who benefit so well from their previously mission-driven organizations.

Electronic Medical Records and Going For Broke: Jackson Health System's Financial Future Appears Grim

I have written on numerous occasions that health IT in its present form, often poorly designed and implemented under current IT leadership structures, is often a waste of precious healthcare resources. The resources might be better spent on essentials such as patient care for the poor or improved human staffing, until this experimental technology is perfected.

As at my site on health IT difficulties and mismanagement I observed:

Healthcare information technology (HIT) holds great promise towards improving healthcare quality, safety and costs. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, however, this potential has been largely unrealized. A significant factor impeding HIT achievement has been mismanagement of the technology. Mismanagement of HIT is largely due to false assumptions and naïveté concerning the challenges presented by this still-experimental technology, and underestimations of the expertise essential to achieve the potential benefits of HIT. This results in mission-hostile HIT design, and HIT leaders and stakeholders operating outside (often far outside) the boundaries of their professional competencies. Until these issues are acknowledged and corrected, HIT efforts will waste precious healthcare resources, will not achieve claimed benefits for many years to come, and may actually cause harm. Numerous reports in the 2009 articles link corroborate this view, including those from the U.S. Joint Commission and National Research Council.

The following may bring my observations to life.

This from 2007:

RedOrbit.com/News
Jackson Memorial Hospital Uses State-of-the-Art Technology to Drive Improved Patient Outcomes for South Florida Families

Posted on: Thursday, 6 September 2007, 09:11 EDT

Jackson Memorial Hospital (JMH), part of Jackson Memorial Health System, South Florida's leading/largest healthcare provider, recently implemented 11 Cerner Millennium® solutions.

[Including EMR, nursing, pharmacy, radiology, HIM, Eligibility Management, Master Person Index, Registration Management, Scheduling Management, Emergency Department, etc. - ed.]

This marks the hospital's first step in a multi-stage healthcare information technology implementation. With Cerner Millennium® solutions, JMH clinicians now have access to real-time resources to better manage patient care with improved access to cross-department information, evidence-based clinical decision support and streamlined hospitals operations.

"Cerner is pleased to partner with Jackson Memorial Hospital, an institution continually ranked as one of the best hospitals in America," said Trace Devanny, Cerner -- president. "JMH's decision to implement a solution-oriented information technology system reinforces its vision to improve healthcare communitywide. Cerner worked together with JMH to implement multiple Cerner Millennium solutions specifically designed for various roles, venues and conditions that will ultimately improve the patient experience."

These implementations, a mere "first step" towards "streamlining operations," and their maintenance, modification, remediation, and staffing were undoubtedly multimillion-dollar expenses and are likely still ongoing. (See other examples of mass hospital IT expenditures here and here.)

Now, fast forward to 2010. This is stunning:

Jackson Health System's financial future appears grim
Miami Herald
BY JOHN DORSCHNER
Posted on Wednesday, 01.13.10

Looking forward and back, Jackson Health System's grim financial picture just keeps getting worse.

Members of the Public Health Trust, the system's governing board, are being told:

• Patient volume has dropped by 6.5 percent recently, meaning that with all the cost cutting and new revenue plans, Jackson is facing an $88 million loss this fiscal year, and this estimate is likely to get worse.

• The government system may have lost much more money last year than the $56 million it reported in unaudited statements. That loss could conceivably go as high as $150 million.

• Cash on hand to pay bills -- the measure of how the three-hospital system is doing at this moment -- continues to be awful. ``Perhaps a cash hemorrhage,'' PHT member Marcos Lapciuc called it.

The bad news came at PHT committee hearings late Tuesday afternoon. ``Very drastic measures need to happen'' to stem the growing losses, said Chief Executive Eneida Roldan. She said the losses were likely to increase, because considerable funding for poor patients comes from Tallahassee, and the Legislature is expected to cut back on healthcare funding programs as it deals with its own budget crisis.

``We're making very drastic decisions that no hospital wants to do,'' Roldan told the board, including ending contracts for 175 unfunded patients to receive dialysis at out-patient centers.

Ending contracts for unfunded patients to receive dialysis after spending tens of millions of dollars on IT to "streamline operations?" Could this be an example of "Blood for Computers?"

Board members were upset in particular about how the institution, with 12,000 employees and $1.9 billion in revenue, could be so uncertain about its financial performance last year.

The central issue appears to be the proper amount of accounts receivable -- money that the system expects to collect from insurers -- as contrasted with bad debts that are unlikely to be collected. As of Nov. 30, Jackson was listing its accounts receivable at $431.8 million.

``It just doesn't tie in,'' said board member Martin Zilber. ``We talk about $400 million or $500 million like it's buying lunch.''

Ernst & Young, Jackson's auditors, are expected to present the official audited returns within the next month. ``We know there's going to be a sizable adjustment,'' Chief Financial Officer Frank Barrett told the board. But he's uncertain how much.

Uncertain how much money will be "adjusted" in accounts receivable? Apparently all this computerization has not realized a ROI on basic financial management.

Could problems with the IT (e.g., mismanaged design, mission hostile user experience, bugs, etc.) and/or mismanagement of its implementation actually be responsible for the chaos, I ask?

... Perplexed board members heard several explanations. One is that the system has switched computer systems, and the old financial software may have been calculating bills as accounts receivable from years ago, when those items should be listed as uncollectable bad debts.

If that was the case (and I note the "may have", implying the organization is not even certain of this explanation), why was this discrepancy not noted before or during the transition? Who, exactly, was managing this project? This would be a stunning example of IT mismanagement making what happened at Yale some years ago look like a cakewalk, and on par with the mismanagement at another Miami hospital, Mt. Sinai, as I posted here.

... On Monday, the board was shown a presentation on bill collecting with a complex grid of flow charts and time lines. Still, some board members expressed concern about why Jackson's financial people didn't have a better handle on key measures of the system's condition.

A question arises regarding whether the massive IT implementations are causing data irregularities, confusion, or are not functioning properly in other ways affecting financial management.

``I don't totally understand the reasons,'' said [board member] Ernsto de la Fé.

... The fiscal 2009-2010 budget had calculated a loss of $6.5 million. Of that, $107 million was the baseline loss, reduced by $59.8 million in new revenue building ventures and $41.5 million in cost-cutting.

"Cost cutting" usually is synonymous with "layoffs." How many millions were spent on computing instead of jobs, I wonder?

Additional information on these financial difficulties are available at the Miami Herald:

• Jackson Health System faces more financial losses

Jackson Health System faces more financial losses

Looking forward and back, Jackson Health System's grim financial picture just keeps getting worse.

Members of the Public Health Trust, the system's governing board, are being told:

Patient volume has dropped by 6.5 percent recently, meaning that with all the cost cutting and new revenue plans, Jackson is facing an $88 million loss this fiscal year. This estimate is likely to get worse.

•Donna Shalala tries to mend fences with Jackson Health

Donna Shalala tries to mend fences with Jackson Health

While Jackson Health System's governing body struggled Tuesday to find more ways to cut costs and increase revenue, University of Miami President Donna Shalala made a rare appearance before the Public Health Trust to ``personally apologize for statements by members of the university leadership team last week.''

She was referring to UM Board of Trustees Chairman Phillip George's comments to Jackson leaders that he was disturbed about the quality of doctors that Jackson had been hiring in recent years. ``I wouldn't send my family to many of them,'' George said.

Shalala noted that the Jackson doctors, all fully credentialed, were often approved by UM department heads to practice at Jackson. ``If they are good enough for Jackson patients, let me tell you, they are good enough for me and my family.''

•Jackson Health System may close clinics, nursing homes

Jackson Health System may close clinics, nursing homes

Needing to present a balanced budget for Miami-Dade Commission's approval Thursday, the Jackson Health System is proposing to close two primary care centers, both of its nursing homes, outsource inmate healthcare and reduce support to other entities that care for the poor and uninsured.

``We are in an extremely unique position,'' Chief Executive Eneida Roldan said Wednesday. The public health system is having to cut services to meet an estimated budget deficit of $133 million for its next fiscal year at a time when the commission must also deal with filling a shortfall of more than $400 million in other county programs.

Some doctor services at Jackson Memorial may also be curtailed, Roldan said. ``Because Jackson has been forced to reduce its funding for the annual operating agreement with the University of Miami,'' she wrote in a message to employees, ``the university is also planning to reduce its services offered at our facilities.''

•Jackson Health System's cash pot falls to dangerous levels

Jackson Health System's cash pot falls to dangerous levels

Even after plans to reduce staff and close units, Jackson Health System is getting dangerously close to its bare minimum for cash-on-hand -- a key indication of financial health.

As of Oct. 31, Miami-Dade's public hospital system had 20.8 days of cash to pay its bills, including payroll and keeping the lights on. Its governing body, the Public Health Trust, has set 20 days as the lowest Jackson should go.

``When it gets below 20 days, that's when I declare an emergency,'' said Frank Barrett, chief financial officer. He said he is already talking to county administrators about getting an advance to fund payroll if the system runs out of cash.

•Jackson Health's finances continue to deteriorate

While IT is not a definite cause or contributor to these problems, I sense familiar patterns. Perhaps forensics related to hospital computing, the decisions to spend so many millions on the technology, and the actual impact of the implementations might shed additional light on the reasons for this apparent financial debacle.

Perhaps the hospital system would have better spent that money on buttressing its financial stability, and hiring smart people to have kept better track of its finances.

An analysis of these issues might likely provide a cautionary tale for hospital executives planning on massive new HIT expenditures to "streamline operations."

Addendum:

This is a good time to once again call attention to this paper by a perspicacious author from Down Under:

Pessimism, Computer Failure, and Information Systems Development in the Public Sector. (Public Administration Review 67;5:917-929, Sept/Oct. 2007, Shaun Goldfinch, University of Otago, New Zealand). Cautionary article on IT that should be read by every healthcare executive documenting the widespread nature of IT difficulties and failure, the lack of attention to the issues responsible, and recommending much more critical attitudes towards IT. link to pdf

Feb. 11, 2010 Addendum:

CFO at Miami health system resigns

MIAMI – Frank Barrett, chief financial officer and executive vice president at Miami's Jackson Health System, has resigned after five years in the position. The health system's board of directors criticized Barrett strongly last week after he reported miscalculated financial losses. Barrett had revealed to the board that Jackson Health lost $203.8 million in fiscal 2009, although he had originally reported a $46.8 million loss. The projected loss for fiscal 2010 rose $87 million to $229 million.

-- SS