The diagnostic process and medical errors

The past 15 years, since the publication of "To Err Is Human" report, has seen a great deal of progress in projects that promote patient safety, especially in programs such as increasing hand washing, identifying patients, surgical checklists or changes in nursing care, but on the other hand the diagnostic process continues to be a matter almost exclusive to medical work although it’s known that this is a very sensitive area for the safety of patients. This new report from the National Academy of Medicine (formerly Institute of Medicine), "Improving Diagnosis in Healthcare," is a follow up document to the aforementioned one, specifically focused on diagnostic errors.

The report defines the diagnostic error as the failure to obtain a detailed, timely explanation of a health problem. Experts have also included in the definition the physician’s inability to know how to explain the diagnosis to the patient. According to the report, diagnostic errors would have an incidence on medical consultations of 5%, accounting for 10% of deaths, 6-7% of adverse reactions in hospitals, as well as the leading cause of litigation in the health area (the figures correspond to the US).

Life quantity or more quality?

Ventricular assisting devices, VAD, or LVAD if for the left ventricle (the most common) are implantable instruments that help pump blood in situations where ventricular ejection force is severely compromised. In some cases the implantation of an LVAD facilitates the waiting for a cardiac transplant, but in others it’s adopted as a definitive solution. The price of the device is around $150,000 while the cost per QALY (cost per year of life earned) is between $200,000 and $400,000. The cost-effectiveness studies still don’t line up much, but the range of documented amounts is nowadays far above the $30,000 of Spanish per capita income. Remember that the WHO introduced the criterion of considering if a treatment is cost-effective when it doesn’t exceed three times the per capita income of a country.

Caesarean section as a consumer good

In private medicine in Brazil, the rate of caesarean section has reached 90% of births. In that country, gynaecologists and midwives, if any, have lost the job of helping women to give birth, and some obstetrical clinics only work to schedule and during office hours. Bad research has not helped either. In the year 2000, a team of researchers led by Dr. Mary Hannah revealed that the caesarean section was a safer practice in breech presentations, information that had an almost immediate impact on clinical practice. Four years later it was found that the research had been poorly done and that its conclusions were wrong, but gynaecologists had already lost the skills (not easy) to practice vaginal births for breech babies. The result is that nowadays the breech foetal position is, assumed to be equivalent to caesarean section, despite the lack of evidence that supports the indication.

Beyond the reforms (on the subject of Franco Basaglia)

What can we do when reforms are in short supply? This is a question that many of us ask ourselves when rigidities and bureaucracies show us their sordid face. Without going any further, the integration of services and community work is the only way (I think there are no dissenters in this) to adequately care for complex chronic patients, but when it comes to the truth, it turns out that the levels of care, professionals’ abilities and the fragmentation of medical specialties are a drag on the progress of the necessary reforms.

I’ve pondered on this when I read that The Guardian had just published a book by John Foot, "The man who closed the asylum" that tells the life of Franco Basaglia, a psychiatrist with an exceptional entrepreneurial force. During the war, according to the author, Basaglia was imprisoned as an antifascist and this experience was key to the fact that when he was appointed director of an asylum in the early 1960s, he realized that the psychiatry practiced in that establishment was inspired by and took the shape of prisons.

The controversy of health checks

The National Health Service announces health checks by making use of the mood of the "Full Monty" or "The Calendar Girls." Let yourself be undressed for a good cause - they say - your body deserves it. In Spain, on the other hand, this approach is more typical to the private offer. "The best way to take care of your health is to open your eyes to possible diseases and not hesitate to undergo periodic tests to prevent them," says "10 Minutos" magazine in an article on the subject. Many private centres have "Medical check-ups" and most insurers and clinics offer health check-ups, as can be seen in an announcement from the Quirón Teknon Hospital: "basic preventive check-up: previously € 820 - now € 690; advanced preventive check: was € 1,800 - now € 1,520". The Sanitas proposal that offers the possibility of choosing between "checks: classic, integral and complete" is also interesting just as the National Conference of Marketing and Sales Management of the Health Sector that says "the most demanded from the iGlobalMed platform are the health checks for managers who are going to work abroad". To end this journey through the world of health reviews, see the clip below from the University Hospital of Navarre website:

What if I decide to do nothing?

TIME magazine has surprised us with a question on its front page: "What would happen if I decided to do nothing?" Desiree Basila, a 60-year-old teacher, had just been diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and, overwhelmed by the aggressiveness of the treatment proposals offered to her, began to investigate on her own and realized that there were many unknown elements about the progression of this type of injury and also saw that there was no agreement in the scientific community on what should be the most appropriate therapy for her case. For this reason she made a bold decision and asked her oncologist to do nothing, which resulted in two checks a year and a treatment with Tamoxifen, a drug that blocks estrogens that could cause the tumour to grow.

The case of Desiree Basila is quite valuable because when she made this decision, 8 years ago, it was not yet known that the mortality of women with DCIS, regardless of the type of treatment they adopt, is 3.3%, a figure comparable to that of the general population, and it was also not known that chemotherapy has no effect on tumours in initial staging. But to better understand the pressure that Desiree had to endure, it should be added that the attitude of most oncologists, even in the case of DCIS, was, and remains, "the sooner the better and the more the better."

Primary care: segment to reform?

In a paper published in Health Affairs, Redesigning Primary Care: A strategic vision to improve value by organizing around patients' needs (see commented post) Michael Porter invited us to rethink the organizational model of primary care in accordance with the real needs of the population.

Following the Porterian advice, and just to think a little, it’s worth the excellent Memory of the Catalan Institute of Health (ICS) of 2013, with data from 288 primary health care teams spread throughout the territory, from small local clinics to metropolitan centres with several basic health areas under their care. On page 7 of the document you will see a table elaborated with the attendance of more than 4 million people (who have been visited at least once during the year). The segmentation of this population, grouped with Clinical Risk Group, shows that segments 5, 6 and 7 (different intensities of chronicity) have represented 64.5% of the people who have visited, a group that has consumed 88.8% of the pharmacy and generated 74.7% of urgent hospitalizations (among patients who have been hospitalized two or more times in a year).