No one wants a hospital-acquired infection—a wound infection, a central line infection, or any other kind.  But today, the level of concern in American hospitals about infection rates has reached a new peak—better termed paranoia than legitimate concern.

The fear of infection is leading to the arbitrary institution of brand new rules. These aren’t based on scientific research involving controlled studies.  As far as I can tell, these new rules are made up by people who are under pressure to create the appearance that action is being taken.

Here’s an example.  An edict just came down in one big-city hospital that all scrub tops must be tucked into scrub pants. The “Association of periOperative Registered Nurses” (AORN) apparently thinks that this is more hygienic because stray skin cells may be less likely to escape, though no data prove that surgical infection rates will decrease as a result.  Surgeons, anesthesiologists, and OR nurses are confused, amused, and annoyed in varying degrees.  Some are paying attention to the new rule, and many others are ignoring it.  One OR supervisor stopped an experienced nurse and told to tuck in her scrub top while she was running to get supplies for an emergency aortic repair, raising (in my mind at least) a question of misplaced priorities.

The Joint Commission, of course, loves nothing more than to make up new rules, based sometimes on real data and other times on data about as substantial as fairy dust.

A year or two ago, another new rule surfaced, mandating that physicians’ personal items such as briefcases must be placed in containers or plastic trash bags if they are brought into the operating room.  Apparently someone thinks trash bags are cleaner.

Now one anesthesiology department chairman has taken this concept a step further, decreeing that no personal items at all are to be brought into the operating room–except for cell phones and iPods.  That’s right, iPods, not iPads.  This policy (of course) probably won’t be applied uniformly to high-ranking surgeons or to people like the pacemaker technicians who routinely bring entire suitcases of equipment into the OR with them.

What’s particularly irrational about this rule is that cell phones likely are more contaminated with bacteria than briefcases or purses, even if they’re wiped off frequently.  And I have to ask how an iPhone 6+ meets eligibility criteria while the barely-larger iPad mini doesn’t.  Again, please show me the data demonstrating that this will reduce infection rates, unless someone is making it a habit to toss briefcases and iPads onto the sterile surgical field.

Show me the money

I wish I could say that the driving force behind hospitals’ fear of infection is simply the wish for patients to get well. Unfortunately, it’s probably driven as much by financial motives as benevolent ones.  Today, Medicare won’t pay for care related to surgical site infections, and it fines hospitals whenever too many patients need to be readmitted within 30 days of discharge.  In 2014, a record 2610 hospitals–including 223 in California–were penalized, and will receive lower Medicare payments for all patients over the next year, not just those who were readmitted.

What does this mean at the grassroots level?

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Dr. Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiologist, believes with good reason that many physicians have become “like everybody else:  insecure, discontented and anxious about the future.”  In a recent, widely-circulated column in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Doctors Are Sick of Their Profession,” he explains how medicine has become simply a job, not a calling, for many physicians; how their pay has declined, how the majority now say they wouldn’t advise their children to enter the medical profession, and how this malaise can’t be good for patients.

Dr. Jauhar gets it right in many ways, but the solutions he recommends miss their mark completely.

I was 100% in accord with Dr. Jauhar when he argued that “there are many measures of success in medicine:  income, of course, but also creating attachments with patients, making a difference in their lives and providing good care while responsibly managing limited resources.”

The next paragraph, though, I read with astonishment.  Does Dr. Jauhar really believe that publicizing surgeons’ mortality rates or physicians’ readmission rates can be “incentive schemes” that will reduce physician burnout?  Does he seriously think that “giving rewards for patient satisfaction” will put the joy back into practicing medicine?

If so, I’m afraid he doesn’t understand the problem that he set out to solve.

The truth behind “quality” metrics

There is no question that some physicians are inherently more talented, more dedicated, and more skilled than others.  In every hospital, if you speak to staff members privately, they’ll tell you which surgeon to see for a slipped disk, a kidney transplant, or breast cancer.  They’ll tell you which of the anesthesiologists they trust most, and which cardiologist they would recommend to someone with chest pain.  But none of these recommendations are based on simplistic metrics like readmission rates or even mortality rates.  They are based on observations over time of the physicians’ ability, integrity, and conscientiousness–all of which are tough to quantify.

Let’s take, for example, a common operation such as laparoscopic cholecystectomy:  removal of the gallbladder using cameras and instruments inserted through small incisions in the abdomen.  This is a procedure which most general surgeons perform often, with few complications.

When complications occur, there are almost always factors involved other than surgical error.  Patients with diabetes are more likely to develop wound infections, for instance.  Surgery on patients who have had prior abdominal operations may take longer and could cause bleeding or damage to other internal organs because of scar tissue.  Morbid obesity and advanced age are risk factors too.

The surgeon whose mortality rates are higher, or whose patients are more likely to be readmitted to the hospital, may be dealing with a much different patient population from the surgeon with the lowest rates.  An inner-city hospital may admit more patients as emergency cases, in more advanced stages of disease.

It’s difficult for statistics to reflect accurately the dramatic differences among patients that affect surgical outcome.  A noncompliant patient who doesn’t fill prescriptions and follow instructions is more likely to have problems, independent of the experience and skill of the surgeon.  Trying to distinguish among surgeons with “outcomes data” will only result in more surgeons refusing to operate on high-risk patients.

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Here’s a doctor’s health tip for patients that I’ll bet you haven’t heard before.

If you’re a patient who walks into a hospital for an elective procedure of any kind–surgery, or a diagnostic test–and you find out that Joint Commission reviewers are on site, reschedule your procedure and leave. Come back another day, after the reviewers have left.

Why? Because every single person who works there will be paying a lot of attention to Joint Commission reviewers with their clipboards, and scant attention to you.

The Joint Commission has the power to decide whether the hospital deserves reaccreditation. Administrators, doctors, nurses, technicians, clerks, and janitors will be obsessed with the fear that the reviewers will see them doing something that the Joint Commission doesn’t consider a “best practice”, and that they’ll catch hell from their superiors.

For you as a patient, any idea that your clinical care and your medical records are private becomes a delusion when the Joint Commission is on site. Their reviewers are given complete access to all your medical records, and they may even come into the operating room while you’re having surgery without informing you ahead of time or asking your permission.

Perhaps physicians and nurses have an ethical duty to inform patients when the Joint Commission is on site conducting a review. Right now, that doesn’t happen. Does the patient have a right to know?

Unintended consequences

How did any private, nonprofit organization gain this kind of power? Why do American healthcare facilities pay the Joint Commission millions each year for the privilege of a voluntary accreditation review? It’s a classic tale of good intentions, designed to improve healthcare quality, that turned into a quagmire of unintended consequences and heavy-handed regulation.

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Nobody stands up to argue against quality and value in healthcare. You might as well argue against motherhood, or puppies. Yet many physicians are inherently skeptical of definitions of “quality” that are imposed from above, whether by outside evaluators like The Joint Commission, or (worse) by the government.

There’s good reason for skepticism. Some of the “evidence” behind “evidence-based medicine” has turned out to be flawed, tainted by financial conflict of interest, or outright fraudulent. Any experienced physician knows that there are fads in healthcare just as there are in fashion, and today’s evidence-based medicine may be tomorrow’s malpractice. Let’s take a closer look at what’s really going on in the world of quality metrics, and why it matters if payments to you and your hospital are increasingly linked to how you score.

Surgical Site Infections

The financial toll of surgical site infections (SSIs) is huge, estimated in the U.S. at more than $10 billion a year.⁽¹⁾  A recent retrospective review from the Veterans Affairs Surgical Quality Improvement Program showed that the majority of SSIs are diagnosed only after hospital discharge, and that 57% will require hospital readmission within 30 days.⁽²⁾  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stopped paying for care related to SSIs in 2008 by designating them as “never events”, or non-reimbursable serious hospital-acquired conditions. Now SSIs are part of a long list of hospital-acquired conditions that can result in reduced CMS payments to hospitals, and will bring further reduction in payments over the next several years with the implementation of “value-based purchasing”. More than 1400 hospitals will see their Medicare payments cut by as much as 1.25% this year–a margin that could spell financial disaster for hospitals already struggling.⁽³⁾

You may already be among the more than 50% of anesthesiologists who have been reporting performance metrics to the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), which is administered by CMS. When the system started in 2007, CMS offered a bonus payment of 1.5% for successful participation, but that soon shrank to 0.5% and will be discontinued after 2014. Starting in 2015, CMS will impose a 1.5% payment reduction for physicians who do not participate in PQRS, and will push the pay cut to 2% in 2016.

If you participate in PQRS reporting, you know that two of the measures that anesthesiologists report are directly aimed at SSI prevention: perioperative temperature management, and antibiotic timing. PQRS measure #193 specifies that the patient must receive “active warming” or have a temperature above 36^C recorded within 30 minutes before or 15 minutes after anesthesia end time. Measure #30 specifies that prophylactic parenteral antibiotics must be administered within one hour before skin incision. Compliance with these two measures isn’t hard to achieve, though no one seems to question the cost to the American healthcare system of all those forced-air warming blankets and machines, or ask why giving antibiotics 61 minutes instead of 59 minutes before skin incision is an automatic “fail”.

But have CMS threats and PQRS compliance done any good? A just-published editorial in Anesthesiology concluded: “Despite early efficacy literature establishing the value of specific antibiotic timing and active warming, repeated large database analyses have not observed robust effectiveness across hundreds of hospitals.”⁽⁴⁾   Simply put, as many of us have noticed in our own hospitals, SSI rates have remained about the same.

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“The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die.”–C. S. Lewis

The problem of pain, from the viewpoint of British novelist and theologian C. S. Lewis, is how to reconcile the reality of suffering with belief in a just and benevolent God.

The American physician’s problem with pain is less cosmic and more concrete. For physicians today in nearly every specialty, the problem of pain is how to treat it responsibly, stay on the good side of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and still score high marks in patient satisfaction surveys.

If a physician recommends conservative treatment measures for pain–such as ibuprofen and physical therapy–the patient may be unhappy with the treatment plan. If the physician prescribes controlled drugs too readily, he or she may come under fire for irresponsible prescription practices that addict patients to powerful pain medications such as Vicodin and OxyContin.

Consider this recent article in The New Republic: “Drug Dealers Aren’t to Blame for the Heroin Boom. Doctors Are.” The writer, Graeme Wood, faults his dentist for prescribing hydrocodone to relieve pain after his wisdom tooth extraction. As further evidence of her misdeeds, he says, first she “knocked me out with propofol–the same drug that killed Michael Jackson.” Wood uses his experience–which sounds as though it went smoothly, controlled his pain, and fixed his problem–to bolster his argument that doctors indiscriminately hand out pain medications and are entirely to blame for patient addiction.

But what happens to doctors who try not to prescribe narcotics for every complaint of pain, or antibiotics for every viral upper respiratory infection? They’re likely to run afoul of patient satisfaction surveys. Many hospitals and clinics now send a satisfaction questionnaire to every patient who sees a doctor, visits an emergency room, or is admitted to a hospital. The results are often referred to as Press Ganey scores, named for the company that is the leading purveyor of patient satisfaction surveys. Today these scores wield alarming power over physician incentive pay, promotion, and contract renewal.

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