Friday, October 5, 2018
On Football, Palliative Care, and Quality Measurement
Transition into the Fall months means one thing for a boy like me from the Midwest – it’s football season. Snare drum cadences, referee whistles, and the crunch of linemen helmets were the soundtrack to many memorable evenings growing up. In football, winning requires strategy and execution, while embracing the humility that even the most exquisite gameplan, well steeped in planning and expertise, can fall flat. Though the two worlds seem unrelated, I often think of football analogies when approaching palliative care quality improvement.
Football offenses across college and professional leagues are increasingly calling the Run-Pass-Option (or RPO for short). In the RPO, a quarterback has three choices after the snap – hand the ball off to a running back, pass the ball to a wide receiver, or start running the ball himself. The overall goal is to keep defenses guessing, while matriculating the ball down the field efficiently. Based on the situation, the quarterback chooses where the ball will go. For example, if time is short and there are no timeouts, the quarterback may choose to throw a long pass to a wide receiver streaking down the sideline to both gain yards and stop the clock. If the defense is playing back, then the quarterback may run the ball himself for a big gain. Notice that all three options (throw, running back run, quarterback run) are always available, can meet the goal of moving the ball down the field, but are decided upon based on the needs of the team and the alignment of the defense.
Which bring us to healthcare quality improvement and measurement. There have been increasing discussions in all of healthcare, including within palliative care, about the spirit of quality measurement. A recent Health Affairs article highlighted the burden of quality measurement at the organization level, concluding that clinicians and staff spend 15 hours per week addressing requirements for external quality reporting. Further, the study estimated $15.4 billion spent annually by four specialties (general internists, family medicine, cardiology, orthopedics) on such activities. The authors concluded that quality measurement activities should be prioritized, so that increasing demands are not just piled on to the plates of clinicians without a strong rationale. This spirit of reducing complexity also runs in the ethos of palliative medicine, as we frequently help patients and families avoid polypharmacy complications while simplifying medication lists. But we have found complexities in quality measurement in specialty palliative care, with lists of quality measures applicable to our field numbering over 300. There’s a sense that change is needed.
Oftentimes, critiques are made about the types of quality measures that exist. In healthcare quality measurement, there are three widely-accepted categories for quality measures. This three-part framework was introduced and proliferated by Avedis Donabedian, oft-considered the father of the modern healthcare quality improvement movement. Dr. Donabedian proposed that quality measures would either evaluate structure, process, or outcomes of care (to contrast from Run-Pass-Option – RPO – I will call this SPO for short). In SPO, quality measures are categorized by their intent. For example, if a measure aims to evaluate the infrastructure, resources, or policies in place, then it is a Structural measure. If a measure aims to assess whether something was done, then it is a Process measure. Health outcome measures are the third category, and most typically thought of as “a change in a patient’s health state.” Related to health outcome measures are those thought of as outcomes, but not affecting a patient’s health. The Donabedian SPO framework does not specifically account for these, but I often think of them as “system outcomes.” Examples are patient experience or satisfaction, costs and financial toxicity, and access.
To make this clear, let’s take the example of advance care planning, the primary “procedure” of palliative care professionals. A Structural measure related to advance care planning may involve personnel (“All members of the palliative care team receive annual CE in local and state laws, legal precedence, and policies regarding advance directives, physician orders for scope of treatment, and surrogate decision-making”). This measure is Structural because it evaluates a characteristic inherent to the team or the service. A Process measure may look like, “75% of patients seen by the palliative care team have a documented advance directive by the third visit.” Such a measure looks at whether something was done. A true Outcome measure would look like, “Percent of patients with moderate to severe pain with reductions in pain scores by at least 50% within 24 hours of the first consult.” This is measuring the change in a patient’s health state.
A brief word on patient-reported outcomes (PRO). Patient-reported outcomes are “report of the statue of a patient’s health condition that comes directly from the patient.” Readers may wonder where PROs fit in the measurement framework. Importantly, PROs themselves are quite simply the method to collect data, but are not quality measures themselves. Just like electronic health record data can inform a Process measures, data from the patients’ own voice can inform any of the SPO measures. Oftentimes, when people say “PRO” what they are really referring to is “PRO-PM” (patient reported outcome performance measure). A PRO-PM is performance measure that is based on patient-reported outcome data aggregated for measurement purposes (e.g., percentage of patients receiving specialty palliative care whose depression score, as self-reported by the PHQ-9, is improved within the first eight weeks).
So let’s bring football and quality measurement back together. When a best practice is defined and supported by the evidence, the natural progression to ensure the best practice is followed is to develop a quality measure. In football, a quarterback in an RPO has three options. Similarly, to ensure a best practice is followed with quality measurement, we can develop a Structure, Process, or Outcome measure. And choosing the type of measure to develop and use requires understanding whether you want others to “have something” (Structure), “do something” (Process), or “change something” (Outcome). It’s tempting to think that all quality measures should be Outcome measures, since improving patient outcomes is what we all ultimately set out to do. But there are two reasons to should proceed with caution.
First, Outcome measures require a clear sense of how differences in outcomes (between two organizations, or between “ideal” and “actual”) will be treated. For example, if a small, rural, safety net hospital with one part-time palliative care clinicians who makes rounds every third day cannot improve the proposed measure “Percent of patients with moderate to severe pain with reductions in pain scores by at least 50% within 24 hours of the first consult,” how do we reconcile the “actual” versus an “ideal”? Such a measure – exactly applied - would doom this program for failure. So how does one “adjust” for the limitations of access to the team (every third day versus daily)? Or what if there were patient or disease factors that made meeting this measure more difficult? The concept of acknowledging that not all things are equal is called “risk adjustment.” What we want to know is if a difference between actual and ideal is expected, due to factors beyond the team’s control, how is that difference handled?
The second complicating factor with Outcome measures is accountability. If I said that the palliative care consult team’s reimbursement would be cut by 10% if a patient’s post-hospitalization satisfaction score was below the 50th percentile, what would be the reaction? Many in palliative care would argue that a patient satisfaction score is reflective of an accumulation of experiences and interactions throughout the hospitalization, of which the palliative care team was part of only a minority. So how do we attribute good or bad outcomes to individual clinicians or individual teams, when we work in complicated networks of providers, clinicians, health staff, environmental staff, and administrative professionals?
Both risk adjustment and accountability challenges should give pause in rushing towards Outcome measures. But it does not mean the challenges cannot be overcome, nor that Outcome measures are not needed in palliative care. Certainly, to remain in-step with the rest of healthcare, we will need to think about the definitions and measurement methodologies for our own Outcome measures. But we should not in that process ignore important gaps in Structure and Process measures that should also be addressed. So, to come back to my football analogy, sometimes as an offense you “take what the defense gives you,” which means to move the ball down the field balancing the chances of meeting your goal (scoring points) with the challenges ahead (putting the ball where the defense is not).
We will be discussing this and more topics related to quality in palliative care at the 4th Annual Quality Matters in Palliative Care Conference streaming online on October 11th. This conference is co-sponsored by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM), Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), Palliative Care Quality Network (PCQN), and Global Palliative Care Quality Alliance (GPCQA). Registration and CE are complimentary and registration is encouraged for those who can’t attend that afternoon but want to watch the recording later. For more information and to register, visit http://www.gpcqa.org/qmc
I hope to see you there!
Arif Kamal MD, MBA, MHS (@arifkamalmd) is a youth soccer coach for his six-year old and professional beach bum. In his spare time he studies quality and workforce issues in palliative care.
