Tag Archives: WSMA

Where are the primary care providers?

This is an unpublished Op-Ed intended for The Columbian at the end of May. I got bumped by WSMA President Dale Resiner, so no hard feelings. Here is WSMA version of the Columbian editorial.

Last week, the news hit that The Vancouver Clinic was going to reduce the number of Medicaid patients they care for. This kind of patient selection is nothing new. Many county elderly already know nearly every practice is closed to Medicare. In fact, some offices that do not accept Medicare simply hand you your walking papers when you become eligible. Anyone with a background in public health will cringe at that behavior, but anyone with healthcare business experience will know that you can’t blame them.

The announcement comes at a bad time for the state as Medicaid expansion can impact health only if the new sign-ups have access to doctors, especially in primary care. There are several industry wide factors that contribute to this kind of decision: low payment rates, penalties for fraud that are so over-reaching a single billing error could potentially cost a practice over $10,000 and the extra staff time required to get approvals from Medicare Advantage plans. The same is true for Medicaid except the payments are even lower.

Clark County has severe access problems for patients insured by government plans. Physician incomes in the Pacific Northwest are considerably lower than much of the nation and particularly in Vancouver that was once a rural county and historically did not justify the higher costs associated with being a suburb of Portland. In fact Clark sports one of the lowest primary care physician to population ratio that can be found in any urban county on the West Coast. According to the Graham Center, a primary care think tank in Washington DC, “a relative shortage in the physician workforce with geographic and specialty maldistribution contributes to difficulties in accessing needed services.” Clark County is a case in point.

When an area doesn’t have enough primary care but plenty of specialists, a few things will happen: 1) costs rise because seeing a specialist results in higher costs than seeing a primary care doctor, 2) primary care office fees rise because of a simple supply and demand equation, 3) where fees cannot rise because they are regulated, doctors opt out.

Opting out can take various forms: 1) a physician can decide do concierge medicine and cater to the wealthy, 2) they can become selective and refuse to take patients covered by low-paying insurers, 3) they can stop dealing with the hassle of sick patients’ ongoing needs and simply do urgent care for the easy no-headache payments or 4) they can close their doors.

All these options have been exercised by Clark County physicians in the past few years. Either way, patients lose out because they are the ones in need of lower cost access, coordination of care and the insights that can only be gained by a longitudinal long-term relationship between a patient and provider.

It’s just that this kind of work is thankless. It is high risk because of the awesome regulatory burden and exhausting because of the breathtaking scope of knowledge required. Every specialist knows more about their chosen field than the primary care physician, but every primary care doc is more competent than that one specialist at every other of the 130 specialties recognized in the US. A very few specialists become insensitive, unsupportive, preachy and intrusive. Intrusiveness is increasingly the hallmark of legislatures around the country with mandates for extra medical education on their pet subjects, like pain management, suicide prevention and AIDS, just to name a few. Some state imposed medical education requirements may be relevant and other times merely a distraction from the real work of medicine. It is ironic that this is the year of the suicide prevention mandate from Olympia, imposed on physicians, the profession with the highest suicide risk of all.

The question no longer is why you can’t find a primary care doctor, but how can any still exist. The problem with healthcare is not Obamacare, and definitely not the absence of Obamacare. What got us into this mess is under-investment in the primary care workforce. With or without Obamacare, the current path is not sustainable and will adversely affect the greater economy soon, that without draconian government efforts, it could be too late to fix. If we had an effective source of primary care, the whole system would be efficient enough to take care of everyone without some practices dropping whole groups of patients.

A Splintered House

This is the text of a speech I gave to the Clark County Medical Society’s New Physician Reception in 2013.

Thank you to our sponsors and guests, to the Board of the CCMS and especially to each of you for coming. To all the new physicians; welcome to Clark County and to the medical society. I want to take a few minutes tonight and talk to you about our medical society and its history, my personal spin on what has happened to medicine in the 72 years since CCMS got started and how the House of Medicine became splintered. I would also like to talk a little about what our future might look like under the current and coming reality. Life is changing quickly for physicians these days.

“Clark County Medical Service Corporation” was established in 1941. The articles of incorporation, written under the name “Clark County Medical Society, Inc.”, were signed by Clyde B. Hutt, MD, as President and L.E. Hockett, MD as Secretary/Treasurer and were approved and filed on December 3, 1942. The constitution and by-laws of 1942 were amended on May 6, 1947 and adopted by membership on May 4, 1948. The bylaws have stood unamended since the last review and overhaul accomplished in 1991. They have withstood the test of time.

Medicine was simpler back in 1941. The bulk of CCMS membership knew each other. The largest group in town was the Vancouver Clinic and it had four doctors: a GP, a surgeon, a pediatrician and an OBGYN. If you wanted to hang a shingle, you may have wanted to meet the local docs so they could tell patients about you and maybe put in a good word for you at local merchants and businesses or maybe the bank. The county medical society was a way to let people know what your special interests and skills were and this was the way you got most of your referrals.

No I am not going to wax sentimental about the golden age of medicine. County medical societies had a dark side: they were exclusive and closed old-boys clubs that enforced standards of behavior in a manner that would be frowned upon today. They focused too much on their own interests and not enough on the health of the people they served. Keeping an eye on the money worked well for the US medical societies, and their parent organizations all the way up to the AMA, until the first turf wars erupted. I don’t need to belabor strife within the House of Medicine.

At the turn of the last century, there was a tug of war in the House of Medicine regarding the need for specialization: Some thought that generalism was necessary to understand the whole person, others thought that specialism was the way of increasing the relevance of physicians and to provide the best possible care for individuals. This was all derived from scientific medicine and the notion prevalent in an industrial society that there was more value in specializing.  Sir William Osler, perhaps the largest historical proponent of scientific medicine was ambivalent about the notion: “[Specialization]’” he said and I am quoting here, “must then be associated with large views on the relation of the problem, and a knowledge of its status elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the slough of a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, or he may be led to make what he believes to be important discoveries, but which have long been current coin in other lands. It is sad to think that the day of the great polymathic student is at an end; that we may, perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a Humboldt—men who took the whole field of [human] knowledge for their domain and viewed it as from a pinnacle. “

One of the earliest specialty societies was the American Academy of Pediatrics, hatched about 15 miles from here at an AMA meeting in 1930. In 1933, dermatology, OB-GYN, ophthalmology and ENT were the founding members of the ABMS. 1941 marked the year that the CCMS was founded and that Anesthesia became America’s 15th recognized specialty. Today we have splintered into between 130 and 157 specialties and sub specialties depending on how you count them and nearly as many specialty societies.

I think that is the word that best represents the House of Medicine today: splintered.

But somehow I think that people with an MD or a DO degree after their name may share certain characteristics more than a similar day-to-day existence within their own narrow silos of specialty and employment.

Somehow I think that people whose primary role is to help patients navigate our current morass of regulation, government, insurance, corporations, pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of various gadgets and medical technologies from titanium hips to scribe-friendly keyboard operated EHRs… somehow these people who bear the primary responsibility for trying at least to improve the health of well-being of their patients (and by consequence our community) have more in common than their differences would suggest.

When I first got to Clark County 4 years ago, I set about charting a course to understand how I could personally influence the course of events impacting my life. I have a MPH,  so I was interested in my role as an advocate for patients and how I could impact the epidemiological measures of health. I looked at what my specialty society was doing in the local community. I found the impact was driven by individuals, many of whom were involved with the local residency. The point is that my specialty association’s largest impact was being felt at the national level and had recently hired a lobbyist at the state. At the local level it was not any association, it was the individuals. I think this is probably true for each of our specialty associations. We can do at least as well locally.

So I believe that medicine has a role in improving the health of our communities. It may follow that when we band together and work towards that purpose, we may have better chances of success. It’s a subject for another day, but medicine has a role. It must have a role if the industry is to remain relevant as a social good, otherwise, we might as well all quit and become bankers, because that’s where the real money is.

Don’t get me wrong, I proudly carry the flag of my specialty society, but the fact is that all our specialty societies are somehow vaguely inadequate to the grass roots tasks. Its not just primary care, but all aspects of medicine that are at work in this town, from the anesthesiologist and the gynecological oncologist and the cytogenetic geneticist. We have more impact as a House of Medicine united in this one common mission that we agree on than worrying about turf wars.

And the impact is felt community by community. A truism in epidemiology is that you need large numbers to detect small changes, but it tells you nothing about what happens to individuals. And communities are made up of individuals, states are made up of communities and nations are built on states. It all starts where you live and work and being concerned for the health of your neighbors and the people around you. The health of Clark County depends in a small way on each one of you. The health of Clark County needs you to speak for it and for its concerns.

One aspect that has helped the health of Clark County has been the role of CUP. CCMS has advocated and will continue to advocate on behalf of this local non-profit community-based health plan both because it works for the community’s health and because it is a significant employer. We were concerned with toxic byproducts of a recycling plant and successfully shot it down. At the state, with other medical societies, we helped overturn the rule that emergency rooms wouldn’t be paid if their services were retrospectively judged not to be emergencies. Physicians got involved to work with the DOH and saved them more money than they envisioned by their prior plan. We also fought the B&O tax which no longer applies to physicians in WA. We are now looking at the impact of a coal terminal on our coast as well as the trains have along the route, so we are supporting studies to clarify the impact and publicize our concerns. At the state we have also supported public health nurses working on STD’s and providing the related questions and answers assistance, reproductive equity in the state and pushed for medical staff reviews that are not quite so abusive of physicians.

Only here in Clark County can you speak out about our lack of availability of fresh food in a wasteland of fast food. Only in Clark County can you do something about obesity in your community. Only in Clark County can you set up community forums to counter the vaccine objectors’ propaganda that makes us so vulnerable to epidemics IN THIS COUNTY!

I hope you each continue to support the county medical society, I hope you get involved, speak up, be a light for others to follow, be obnoxious if you want, just speak!!! And tell you colleagues about the society. You need to take responsibility for your own “belonging” to a group you believe in. And if the AMA or WSMA or even CCMS does something you disagree with, remember that your voice counts. Without that voice, it’s not surprising the organizations do things that don’t meet with your approval. You won’t win every battle in a democracy, but you will win some/ You will make a difference.

Are You At The Table?

In case you’re wondering, this is my piece for the Clark County Medical Society newsletter, summer 2013.

There are just under 900,000 licensed physicians in the U.S. Current AMA membership numbers about 224,500, rising up to levels not seen since 2009 when the AMA’s endorsement of Obamacare apparently precipitated a 5% drop in membership. Local Medical Societies are often loosely affiliated with the state and national medical association and can compare themselves to the national benchmark. Clark County has a better percentage than the national average, but barely. Nearly a quarter of the county’s physicians belonging to the medical society.  
In my few months as President of the CCMS I have watched with interest as some counties struggle without any physician cohesion as others have active and dynamic medical societies that contribute much to their communities’ well being.  It would be enlightening to understand what accounts for low membership in the AMA and local county societies.
The most significant drivers of membership seems to be related to the employment status of a growing number of physicians.  In the much storied  past of American Medicine it was necessary to belong to a local medical society as a source of referrals and recognition within that local medical community. As more and more physicians find themselves employed by large multispecialty groups, the relevance of a medical society diminishes. In addition most specialists seem to believe that their interests are better represented by their societies.
Perhaps at some point in the past couple of decades, the House of Medicine lost its ability to extract growing concessions from the rest of society and thus external conflicts became intra-professional conflicts. Despite the larger world relying on progressively greater degrees of specialization, it seems unwise to perpetuate internal conflicts. We each have a role to play in the larger system, including the generalist role in primary care and care coordination.
What seems self-evident is that a fragmented medical profession is easier to control and manipulate than a united one.  There was a time when a nationwide group of educated, professional healers were felt to be the best hope for advising on the population’s health. Some social theorists have suggested that the medical profession squandered its social capital on protecting its economic welfare. I would argue that a small minority of narrow-minded and short-sighted physicians temporarily hijacked an organization whose role has always been nobler than its own economic welfare.
We all have colleagues who will not join the AMA because of positions it had taken in the past. Well, the trouble with that is that no one has a voice who is not at the table. There should be no illusions about how political organizations work and how advocacy comes about; we may lose the occasional internal battles but still fight for common goals. A medical society works for the interests of its members but it would be a mistake to take a shortsighted view of what that means. Medicine based on scientific proof still safeguards the public’s health. Thus, there is no way of continuing to safeguard the public’s health, either by prevention or treatment  without a highly trained, professional force working to create a health system that is both effective and efficient improving the health of the entire population.
Health care has a knack of exposing the weaknesses of a free market system but I have also worked in a socialized health system that shared different weaknesses, but of equal magnitude.  It seems the US medical system is evolving into some sort of hybrid system midway between different ideologies. Anxiety comes with any change and we are being presented with a major change in the environment of medical practice.
Whatever your politics and personal philosophical structure, much of this change has happened with nominal input from organized physicians groups. It is important for the House of Medicine to speak with one voice whenever it can come to a consensus. My thoughts and opinions have been well-received at the state level where they have differed from the official position of the WSMA. Clark County has been particularly active at the state level, especially when it comes to advocating for the health of the Medicaid population. We have been involved in discussions regarding CUP, physician wellness programs, Prescription Monitoring Program funding (in the future, it will no longer be from your license fees), exempting physicians from the state B&O tax, the role of physicians in the state disciplinary body MQAC, and disseminating information about the upcoming state health insurance exchange.
We need to focus on what is best for the health of our population and not just what is best for ourselves. However, we must also stand up for ourselves because without a professional workforce, the population will suffer. We must face the fact that the industry of which we are an integral part extracts $2.7 Trillion from the general economy and we are being held accountable for the value we return in exchange for our share.  

One thing is sure. This is no longer your father’s AMA! It is YOUR AMA! And its actions depend on your participation at the local level in your County Medical Society.

Family Medicine in the New Healthcare Landscape

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to our local residency graduation party to give a few words on behalf of the Clark County Medical Society. It was more of a party than anything else, but there was so much I wanted to say. It was supposed to be about the residents, they had a keynote speaker, and I had five minutes to promote the society. I also kept getting ideas right up to the time of the speech. I cannot tell you how many rules of public speaking I broke. I read most of the speech, way too fast, couldn’t keep eye contact with the audience and improvised on the fly… not really sure if the main points came through. It was probably more of an essay, probably more multi-layered than it should be for a simple five minute talk.
So here it is in blog format.


You are graduating into the single most exciting period in the past century of medicine. Sweeping changes to how healthcare is delivered is being contemplated and actually being enacted.
The last time this much change was going on at the same time was.. well, it was when I was graduating. They told me the same thing. From my  In the late 1980’s and early 90’s, a pharmaceutical revolution had reduced hospital stays and the technological revolution of minimally invasive surgery was about to threaten the need for beds across the country. HIV had been isolated and drugs were emerging that could potentially provide hope for a treatment. The practice of medicine was coming to be viewed more and more as a business and restrictions on physician advertising were being rolled back, along with the introduction of pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising that was just starting at the time. Managed care was growing, HMO’s were felt to be the inevitable wave of the future and the first wave of integrated health systems was about to begin, with physicians selling their practices to hospitals that were reaching out blindly to won as many practices as they could.
Since then, we saw the boom of primary care in the HMO era, the consumer backlash that followed, and the unwinding of integrated health systems. It was painfully apparent by then that FP’s did not always have a good business sense and many lost money taking on capitated patients with exposure to too much risk. The hospitals realized they needed to pay attention to what they were buying when they bought a practice and for more than a decade, they were very cautious in such enterprises. The pharmaceutical industry seems to have split in two: the “me-too” drug manufacturers and the biotechs. The success of specialty drugs is perhaps nowhere felt more than in oncology where survival started increasing in the most stubborn of cancers like lung and pancreas. Indeed breast cancer is now more of a chronic disease than an acute illness and this may yet occur with other conditions. In fact, think of HIV/AIDs which is a persistent, annoying and important public health problem, now also best managed as a chronic disease. Some of our internal medicine colleagues, not known for being well remunerated have entered a golden age of their own, think of rheumatologists and the spread of biologicals in lupus and RA.
So maybe I’m wrong, maybe every age is the most exciting age in the history of medicine and the pace of change is merely accelerating. That means you will have to be accustomed to constant change throughout your careers. Such a thought can be a little sobering, because we all need some constants in our life. Living with constant change sometimes feels like living in the eye of a hurricane.
On the other hand, consider the following… no matter how much the content and context of medical care changes around you and your patients, some things do not change… a physician and a patient behind a closed door discussing their health. The generalist physician, in particular, is the one who does the troubleshooting. This never changes. Family medicine defined this way, is an integral part of the health care system. Worldwide, many experiments are under way in horizontal care with nurse practitioners, physician extenders, community health workers and the like… At the center of any program is a generalist physician who encourages, fosters and actively participates in caring professional relationships with people who may or may not know what kind of healthcare they need.
A mature specialty does not ask for the respect of its colleagues; it merely acts knowing that it is contributing to the well-being of everyone it touches by the individual acts of its practitioners.
A mature specialty does not criticize its colleagues for acting according to their immediate pecuniary interests. It recognizes its inherent power to guide and direct patients to where they will get the greatest value for their money. It also recognizes that much of its credibility in the eyes of the populace rests in the network of specialists to which they have access. People see value in getting to the right specialist quickly.
Primary care will be at the center of the future healthcare system and the fact that family physicians alone see all patients along the age spectrum provides a huge market advantage. I speak as an employer now. I have asked family physicians to step aside if they were uncomfortable with caring for certain age groups to step aside. I’d rather have an internist.
So how about some free advice to be valued as such from a doc who is now old enough to be looking downfield for a Hail Mary pass:
Family Medicine will be fine as long as you focus on certain things:
  1. Focus on the health of the population. In so doing, you will always be able to see the amount of value you are contributing to the communities where you work, no matter how little you actually get paid!
  2. Focus on the fact that without generalist physicians, the goal of a safe, efficient, effective health care system cannot be achieved.
  3. Focus on the fact that you need to work well with everyone in the allied health fields: PA’s, NP’s, pharmacists, home health aides, radiology technicians, lab porters… Medicine was never supposed to be a turf war and what you do depends on the contributions of so many, it is best to remember them in everything you do.
  4. Remember that nothing makes competition irrelevant than a change in the landscape. Your competition is not against PA’s, NP’s, specialists and the like… it is with them you must work to improve the health of populations.
  5. It is OK to say no to working more for less. There are settings where you can deliver better care with less effort and mean more to people. (And maybe make more money.)
  6. Stay involved.
    Medical and specialty societies are both important. In this county the WAFP is not as strong as the WSMA, but there are other counties where the opposite is true. Get involved in both. It’s not about how they represent you, but rather that when you get involved, you start driving how it represents you. There is nothing more important to understanding how a new relationship between family medicine and the rest of medicine will work until you see how family physicians are getting involved all the way up to the AMA.
I would like to leave you with this one final thought on how important your contribution is
“Family physicians are the guardians of the House of Medicine; the last credible proponents of sensible care.”

First Post

I used to write a blog several years ago under a pen-name. I became disillusioned around that time; not with blogging as much as with my job. I stopped writing as my anger was leaking into my writing. I was supposed to be “The Physician Executive” but found myself unable to hold a job, buffeted by my own ego and surrounded by some more than disingenuous people. Nothing in my career as a physician, teacher, manager or self-described policy commenter had prepared me for the foulness of the human struggle.

Yes, I got involved in a political battle at work and found myself oddly unprepared for the interpersonal and political battles which presented themselves. The blow to my confidence was such that my next job, accepted mostly because I needed a job, went just as badly. Well, ’nuff said.

I have since gotten back on my feet.I worked my way into a private practice, where I am now a principal and am working on developing a medical home and honing our quality performance. During my Master’s, I particularly honed interests in Outcomes and Management with a view to quality management. I feel reasonably well-integrated in the community; I get along with most people, but am already aware of some people who stand in opposition to my ideas, attitudes and practices. That’s OK, nobody in the world only makes friends without being a little obtuse.

Over time, I have regained confidence in my insights and my ability to communicate them. I no longer intend to write just about health care, management and policy items, or be in search of ideas for persuasive essays. This is not a blog with its own brand identity. Writing for a local magazine, I requested republication rights. Everything I publish should eventually come under the umbrella of dinoramzi.com.

My wife and I have started two companies, one was a consulting company that took in some revenue between jobs, and is now a small holding company with investments in several healthcare (and non-healthcare) fields. SanZoe Health is in pursuit of ideas that can improve the delivery of primary care, because it is the best way to improve the health of populations (at least as far as health services are concerned). SavingHealth.com is a web site that will deliver evidence-based medicine (EBM) insights from the perspective of a practicing physician. There was a time I would perform reviews for the teaching program when I was involved in teaching at Emory. I have published an evidence-based review in a large circulation continuing education journal. Now that I am in practice, I find I still use the skills. These skills may be scarce, but they are definitely not unique but nobody is actively blogging them. So we’ll get this one up when we get the time… between patients, you know.

We also started PanZoe, which should begin accepting donations within a month or two to help deliver innovative primary care to uninsured or underinsured Americans. We will begin locally, in the Camas/Washougal area, suburbs of Portland Oregon. This is our status as of June 2013 and I do not intend to update this first entry.

At this time I am also the President of the Clark County Medical Association, an alternate delegate to the Washington State Medical Association, and an active member and delegate to the Washington Academy of Family Physicians.

Politically, I am conservative, but you might not recognize my ideas as conservative given that the current crop of right-wingers are merely radicals to my eye. Many of them would call me a liberal. At the end of the day, I am an Independent who supports No Labels and the Congressional Problem-Solvers. Being a bit of a gadfly and calling out inconsistencies on both sides, I could be regarded as uniter of the parties; both sides can always rally behind the idea of throwing me out of the room!

The simple and effective communication of complex ideas is not at easy thing to do. It is a skill that requires a great deal of practice. I have not invested enough time in doing this, but have become aware that my head is exploding with innumerable multi-step ideas. There is no way to describe the role direct-primary care combined with reinsurance and a disappearing deductible for employers to avoid the Obamacare tax and improve the health of the population without building ideas one by one. I need this venue to develop the articulation of these ideas.

The greatest paradox and struggle of my life is that an intellectual path eventually takes you to a place of uncertainty, unknowing and doubt, which inevitably leads to either a sort of intellectual nihilism or on the other hand, to a succumbing to faith. I came backwards to the faith of my ancestors, to the world of Eastern Orthodoxy, mostly as a cradle Greek Orthodox. I accepted this world because of its inherent mysticism; although there is dogma in this church, there is much we acknowledge as unknown. All revelation is short of the blinding reality of God. I find echoes of Orthodox Christianity in the non-religious methodology of mindfulness meditation and most recently in “happiness” research and the concepts of “flow” and “social altruism.” My old professors are guffawing as I write, but this too is something by which I stand.

If by way of advocating for the things I am most passionate about, I run into something offensive, please forgive me in advance. It is not my primary purpose to advocate for any single entity; not for primary care or family medicine, not for the Clark County Medical Society, the AMA, the AFP or its state affiliates, my wife’s for-profit holding company or my non-profit foundation, EBM, mindfulness meditation or the Orthodox Church. But these things are reflections of who I am and what I care about.

I hope you will enjoy the blog and follow its evolution.