Ageism and risk of technological Darwinism

Glòria Galvez

Image by Flickr

According to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE), in 2020 about half of the people over 75 years of age-connected to the internet daily. The pandemic and the need to feel integrated into society have forced them to enter the digital world, although their opinions, aptitudes or preferences have not been taken into account in the design of the tools used.

Digital health: about the inequality of the elderly

Marco Inzitari
 

"The prioritization of care for COVID-19 changed the doctor-patient relationship reducing scheduled face-to-face visits for the detection and monitoring of chronic diseases, of almost 41%. To return to pre-pandemic levels of diagnosis and management of chronic diseases, primary health care services would have to reorganize themselves and carry out specific actions for the groups at greatest risk. I quote verbatim an interesting recent article by the group of Dr. Antoni Sisó, current president of the Catalan Society of Family and Community Medicine (CAMFiC) and an outstanding researcher.

Why is the integration of services not encouraged?

Jordi Varela
Editor

 

@varelalaf

Health and social services are fragmented between various institutions, levels of care and a lot of specialities and each one of the fractions of the system provides a service that makes sense in itself, such as a three-hour weekly service of a family worker for lending a hand at the home of an elderly person who lives alone, or angioplasty intervention for a woman who has just suffered a myocardial infarction and, according to this system, funders pay differently for each activity.

Caring for complex patients in the community requires a radical change

Jordi Varela

Editor

The pandemic has highlighted the need to protect, even more, if possible, people suffering from clinical complexities and some of them, in addition, family, economic or social difficulties. For this reason, some primary care centres have set up nursing teams to more proactively care for the most vulnerable patients. These groups of nurses have taken the initiative and now organize their tasks, most of them at home, in an autonomous way, according to a fine balance between coordination and effectiveness. The historical medical-nurse binomial of primary care, then, is beginning to show cracks that give way to advanced organizational models with more nursing skills.

The delirium epidemic in frail hospitalized patients

Marco Inzitari
 

 

Cardiff Delirium Study

Delirium, formerly known as acute confusion syndrome, affects around 20% of patients older than 70 years admitted to hospitals, such as reflected a recent study from Australia, a country of 24.6 million inhabitants with a population less aged than ours. This syndrome significantly increases the stays of hospitalized patients, for example, due to femur fracture (7.4 days on average), or aortic valve replacement (4.2 days), with avoidable extra costs.

Integrated care, the pragmatic roadmap of Ontario

Marco Inzitari

I had an exceptional opportunity to be a visiting professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Evaluation and Management at the University of the Toronto School of Public Health, Canada. Before going on vacation, I would like to share some main lessons learned about integratedcare in Ontario, which is the most populous region in the country.

Upon arrival, I was invited to share the Catalan experience on integrated care in a very well-structured symposium, Essential Ingredients of Integrated Care (# IHPMEIC19, for those who want to rescue tweets), organized by prof. Walter Woodchips. The symposium ranged from "macro" aspects of public policy to teamwork; through interprofessional relationships, active patient participation, and cross-cutting facilitating aspects such as technology and recruitment tools. Besides these interesting contents, the symposium made it easier for me to land in reality and gave me a global vision of "who is who".

Medicine based on customs

@varelalaf

The universe of my childhood was full of incontestable rules; most of them had to do with the precepts of religion, although the matter affected all aspects of daily life. I remember that you could not bathe in the sea or in the pool if you had eaten or drank within a minimum period of two hours, a period that the strictest families extended to three. When you were a teenager and you protested, the parents told you all kinds of calamities that could happen to you if you failed to comply with the rule, according to a lot of legends that were passed down from generation to generation.

Surgery and the elderly

@varelalaf

More and more elderly people are being seen in the operating room, especially for large joint replacement interventions, for colorectal cancer resections or for vascular pathologies, to cite the most frequent casuistry. Many of these actions are aggressive and generate risks of postoperative complications, which often require catheters, serum, transfusions, intubations, etc. Therefore, a lot of clinical circumstances are generated that induce immobilization, a situation that adds a new chain of risks, especially thromboembolism, bedsores, infections, disorientation, delusions, malnutrition and dehydration.

The hospital at home, one of the challenges of the upcoming integrated care systems

Marco Inzitari

The content of this week's article has been developed, over the past few years, with my colleague and friend Miquel Àngel Mas (@DrMqAgMas), a geriatrician, former PhD student in our research group and currently a member of the expert nucleus in chronicity of the Gerència Territorial Metropolitana Nord de l'Institut Català de la Salut. We’ll discuss the subject from two points of view in the hope of generating interest and debate among the blog followers.

Our health and social system experiences periods of rethinking, mainly due to the changing requirements in the need of attention of older adults. This fact suggests that the approach to problems solving from the big acute hospitals, as structures that works separately from the community, loses centrality. The logic that follows is the evolution towards increasingly integrated systems, adapted to the different territories, with primary care and attention to the community in the middle. As Professor Dennis L. Kodner said in his classic - Integrated care: meaning, logic, applications, and implications - without a discussion at different levels, all aspects of the provision of attention suffer: patients lose (and get lost), the services are not provided correctly (or arrive late), the quality and the satisfaction of the patients goes down and the potential for sustainability of the system diminishes.

The post-hospitalization syndrome

Harlan Krumholz (Yale) is a cardiologist who focuses his research on the impact of health services on health outcomes (Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation - CORE), and on "Post-Hospital Syndrome. An Acquired, Transient Condition of Generalized Risk" focused its attention on readmissions, a problem that affects 20% of people who are discharged in the US. In this context, Krumholz's most prominent finding in the article was that of Jenks and colleagues (with 12 million Medicare discharge records), which enabled them to conclude that patients who had been admitted with decompensations of the most common chronic pathologies: heart failure, pneumonia, COPD or gastrointestinal disorders, if they were readmitted before 30 days, they did so in two-thirds of the time, for reasons other than the diagnosis of the previous admission.

On the subject of continuity of care in hospitals

Last week we debated how the longitudinal continuity of primary care affects the comings and goings of chronic patients to emergency services. Along this line, I would like to explore the difficulties that hospitals have in guaranteeing ongoing health care services especially at night and at weekends, and how this problem weighs on services when taking care of the most vulnerable groups.

Imagine that a frail person enters a hospital due to acute decom-pensation, according to the known evidence, a global geriatric eva-luation and an individualized therapeutic plan should be deve-loped in agreement with the primary care team, if the desired outcome is to have a reasonable chance of returning home as soon as possible and in the best possible condition. The problem originates in that the hospitals, not even the best of them, are able to give a continuous response to patients as described, since the usual medical equipment usually offers a continuous coverage of only 27% (From a 5 day week of 8 to 5). What happens in the remaining 73% of time (evenings, nights and weekends)? As our imaginary patient, although you would enjoy medical coverage on duty, the service you will receive is very likely far from guaranteeing the continuity necessary for the fulfilment of your personalized plan.

Dysphagia and "minimal mass interventions": ethics, management and value

Marco Inzitari

In recent times there is an increased risk that the relevant becomes unseen. I understand that readers are mainly from the world of health but did you know that in Barcelona, ​​at the end of September 2017, the European and world congress on swallowing disorders was organized? And that the current president of the European Society of Swallowing Disorders is very close to us because he’s Dr. Pere Clavé, gastroenterologist and academic director, teaching and innovation at the Hospital de Mataró?

I was fortunate to be invited to talk about Dysphagia in older people in this meeting, with the opportunity to review the advances in this area. I don’t aim to venture into any clinical treatise on Dysphagia, but I think it’s useful to disseminate some aspects that are in line with the "value practices" advocated by this blog.

Break the "ill-fated trio": falls-immobility-delirium, an outstanding issue in the quality of hospitals

Marco Inzitari

The pressure on the safety of patients and medical errors to which we are all subject, together with the fear of professionals for possible complaints resulting from adverse events within the hospital (Hospital Acquired Conditions - HAC, for Americans), are changing the hospital culture, prioritizing the prevention of falls, in many cases, on top of mobility, functionality and, finally, the well-being of patients.

This is what happened in the US from 2007-2008, when the Centre for Medicaid and Medicare Services decided to penalize the billing of episodes of patients affected by different HAC, including falls with injury, to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which penalizes hospitals with worse results in this sense. In our context, in recent years some care areas have also been rewarded or penalized, at the contract level, according to an indicator of intra-hospital falls.

Self-management: Buurtzorg Identity

Frederic Laloux in "Reinventing organizations" describes the teal-evolutionary companies as those based on the personal growth of their employees and chooses Buurtzorg Netherland as an organization to which we should be paying attention to if we are among those who believe that the time to do things differently has arrived.

What is Buurtzorg Netherland?

Buurtzorg Netherland is a non-profit company, which was founded in 2007 in the Netherlands, when a group of community nurses rethought their work and came to believe that, instead of only going to homes and exercising the functions of their profession, they should advance to becoming the patients’ referee and take charge of attending to their global needs.

Capacity, environment and diversity: changing the vision of aging

Marco Inzitari

Judging by appearances, one might think that health professionals build their fortune on the misfortune of others. Traditionally, in fact, we deal with risk, diseases and their negative impact, more or less catastrophically. And, in the face of an aging population, we focus on multi morbidity, chronic disease, geriatric syndromes, disability and the end of life.

The recent report of the World Health Organization (WHO), entitled "World Report on Aging and Health" (September 2015), is committed to a change of focus. The report, which is positioned as a reference of health policies on aging, is long and complex, and addresses many dimensions of aging, from prevention to manifestations and consequences, to the need for long-term care (not in the mere sense of resource, if not of necessity continued in time, no matter how it’s provided).

Measuring the value of anti-cancer drugs

Cristina Roure

Anti-cancer drugs, especially palliative drugs, are toxic, costly and sometimes of little benefit, as a result their value to the patient and society are often questionable. It’s also true that significant improvements in the survival rates are threatened by the difficulty in accessing them, due to their unsustainable cost.

Precision medicine in the elderly care

Marco Inzitari

One of the challenges launched by President Barack Obama ($215 million for 2016) is the "Precision Medicine Initiative" a concept that goes against the treatment focused on the "average-patient". According to this initiative, as a first step, cancer treatments should be oriented to the specific genetics of the patient. For this reason, we often refer to the future of oncology as a "precision medicine". As another example, to continue with oncology, the Watson Intelligent System (IBM) will provide support to oncologists for informed and well fitted decision-making, analyzing patients' medical records and looking for possible evidence-based options.

An extensive model for complex chronic patients

The emergent phenomenon of multi-chronicity and geriatric fragility is analyzed from all points of view: demographic, epidemiological, the use of resources and the economic impact, to mention only the most outstanding. Now familiar with the tendency, we’re facing the challenge of finding out how to provide appropriate services to patients who, due to the precariousness of their health, or their social circumstances, or both, suffer instability and become frequent and directionless visitors.

This group of complex patients, although not too large, is stressing the rigidities of health systems in three ways: a) the saturation of hospital emergency services consuming ambulances and observation beds is unable to give effective responses to the needs of these people, b) lack of coordination of transfers between levels, especially between the hospital and primary care, and c) poly-medication due to prescription fragmentation.

What do chronic patients want?

Fragmentation of services is a disgrace for complex chronic patients, for people with combined health and social needs, for fragile people and, in short, for the elderly population. Hence, most governments are engaged in service integration initiatives, but progress is slow and the results are disappointing because systems are too fragmented: in budgets, in access rights, in circuits, in professional cultures, in institutions, in public and private providers, etc. However, the British have proposed a merger of services by 2020, and since they recognize that, as things stand, offering people-centred care will be a bulky process, in the summer of 2013 they launched a project, “People helping people", a project that is ambitious in vision but modest in methodology and budget.

What is "People helping people"?

The program is working on 25 pilot areas that volunteered to test (as previously done in Torbay) different ways of coordinating and integrating services in order to promote patient-centred care, for which they rely on a single operative objective of elaborating, on the part of all the actors, of individualized plans that adapt to each person’s particular needs and way of life. In terms of methodology, the project has adopted the "triple aim" (Institute for Healthcare Improvement), which develops the following principles: a) improve patient experience, b) improve the health and well-being of the population, and c) reduce the waste and, therefore, the cost per capita.

Parachute trial: on the subject of knee arthroplasties

The concept "parachute trial" has been adopted to visualize that when a treatment is really effective perhaps one should not invest money in demonstrating what everyone knows, just as no one would think to make an essay on the effectiveness of the parachute. The New England Journal of Medicine has published a clinical trial (Skou 2015) that evaluates the clinical effectiveness of knee arthroplasty, and the journalist of the magazine asks: Did it have to be done? Arthroscopic knee replacements are one of the most significant advances in modern medicine. Everyone knows that many older people who could not leave the house, invalidated by pain, now not only go out every day to the market square but they often go cruising. Seen like this, is this not a "parachute trial"? A waste?