Tag Archives: pay for performance

Pay for Performance in Perioperative Pain Management

Costs RocketWe have all heard the “doom and gloom” statistics about rising health care spending, and maybe even some of them have begun to sink in since the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act.

For many reasons, the federal government is working to curb health care expenditures, but many of the processes currently attributed to “Obamacare” have been in the works for a long time.  As an example, the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 introduced the Inpatient Prospective Payment System; this system encouraged participating hospitals to voluntarily report performance data to avoid payment reductions.  The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 went further by mandating the development of what we now know as pay-for-performance or value-based purchasing (used interchangeably).

In 2012, the Institute of Medicine published “Best Care at Lower Cost:  the Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America.”  In this report, recommendation 9 refers to performance transparency:  making data related to “quality, prices and cost, and outcomes of care” available to consumers.

VBPWhat does this mean?  Value-based purchasing in health care is supposed to reward better value, patient outcomes, and innovations – instead of just volume of services (read more).  It is funded by participating institutions based on withholding a set percentage (1.25% currently) of their estimated annual Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) payments from Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).  The percentage is increasing every year and will be 2% by 2017.

VBP2For FY2014, the elements of value-based purchasing have been updated to include the Clinical Process of Care Domain, Patient Experience of Care Domain, and a new Outcomes Domain.  The amount that each of these domains contributes to the eventual DRG payment return at the end of the year is 45%, 30%, and 25%, respectively.  Scores in each domain are calculated based on an institution’s improvement compared to its own historical performance and a comparison against national benchmarks (read more).

The Patient Experience Domain is assessed using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey.  HCAHPS consists of 32 questions, publicly reports its results 4 times a year on http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, and contains 7 questions that directly or indirectly relate to pain.  For details, please see my previous post “Why We Need Acute Pain Medicine Specialists.”

How do we as anesthesiologists address the need for acute pain medicine physicians and have a positive impact on the patient experience?  We can take the lead in developing multimodal perioperative pain management protocols (1).  For total joint arthroplasty, many of these protocols emphasize opioid-sparing regional anesthesia techniques such as peripheral nerve blocks (PNB) and perineural catheters.  These techniques decrease patients’ reliance on opioids for postoperative pain management and are also associated with fewer opioid-related side effects, better sleep, and higher satisfaction (2).  In addition, greater selectivity in the PNB technique included in a multimodal protocol may even lead to greater functional achievements for total knee arthroplasty (TKA) patients which generates additional value (3).  For more information about TKA perioperative pain management and improving rehabilitation outcomes, please see my previous post “Regional Anesthesia & Rehabilitation Outcomes after Knee Replacement.”

Anesthesiologists can also add value through cost savings for the hospital.  More effective pain management can prevent inadvertent admissions or readmissions due to pain.  In addition, an effective multimodal analgesic protocol can directly or indirectly prevent hospital-acquired conditions (HACs).  HACs are considered by CMS to be “never events” and supposedly preventable (4); hospitals reporting HACs as secondary diagnoses are not entitled to CMS payments for related care.  Examples of HACs include:  urinary and vascular catheter-related infections, surgical site infections, DVT/PE, pressure ulcers, and inpatient falls leading to injury.

Fall riskThere remains substantial controversy related to the potential association between regional anesthesia and inpatient falls (5, 6).  We do know that falls, when they occur, are associated with worse outcomes for patients and higher resource utilization (7) and that falls may occur in lower extremity joint replacement patients with or without PNB (8).  For these reasons, these patients should always be treated as high fall risk, and anesthesiologists can take the lead in developing fall prevention education and fall reduction programs to keep them safe.

In summary, pay for performance in perioperative pain management is already here.  The HCAHPS survey assesses the Patient Experience Domain and can be heavily influenced by the effectiveness of pain management.  There are clear opportunities for anesthesiologists to take an active role in adding value and minimizing risks for surgical patients in the perioperative period.

References:

  1. Hebl JR, Kopp SL, Ali MH, Horlocker TT, Dilger JA, Lennon RL, Williams BA, Hanssen AD, Pagnano MW. A comprehensive anesthesia protocol that emphasizes peripheral nerve blockade for total knee and total hip arthroplasty. J Bone Joint Surg Am 2005;87 Suppl 2:63-70.
  2. Ilfeld BM. Continuous peripheral nerve blocks: a review of the published evidence. Anesth Analg 2011;113:904-25.
  3. Mudumbai SC, Kim TE, Howard SK, Workman JJ, Giori N, Woolson S, Ganaway T, King R, Mariano ER. Continuous Adductor Canal Blocks Are Superior to Continuous Femoral Nerve Blocks in Promoting Early Ambulation After TKA. Clinical orthopaedics and related research 2014;472:1377-83.
  4. Hospital-acquired condition (HAC) in acute inpatient payment system (IPPS) hospitals. http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Payment/HospitalAcqCond/Downloads/HACFactsheet.pdf
  5. Ilfeld BM, Duke KB, Donohue MC. The association between lower extremity continuous peripheral nerve blocks and patient falls after knee and hip arthroplasty. Anesth Analg 2010;111:1552-4.
  6. Memtsoudis SG, Danninger T, Rasul R, Poeran J, Gerner P, Stundner O, Mariano ER, Mazumdar M. Inpatient falls after total knee arthroplasty: the role of anesthesia type and peripheral nerve blocks. Anesthesiology 2014;120:551-63.
  7. Memtsoudis SG, Dy CJ, Ma Y, Chiu YL, Della Valle AG, Mazumdar M. In-hospital patient falls after total joint arthroplasty: incidence, demographics, and risk factors in the United States. The Journal of arthroplasty 2012;27:823-8 e1.
  8. Johnson RL, Kopp SL, Hebl JR, Erwin PJ, Mantilla CB. Falls and major orthopaedic surgery with peripheral nerve blockade: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Anaesth 2013;110:518-28.

 

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Why We Need Acute Pain Medicine Specialists

Not all pain is the same.

PainChronic pain can be palliated, but “acute” pain (new onset, often with an identifiable cause) must be stamped out. This requires a systems-based approach led by physicians dedicated to understanding acute pain pathophysiology and investigating new ways to treat it. The solution is definitely not giving more and more opioids.

As our understanding of pain mechanisms has evolved, select physicians have developed a special focus on pain in the acute injury/illness and perioperative settings that has led to the rapid advancement of systemic and site-specific interventions to effectively manage this type of pain. Acute pain medicine involves the routine use of multiple modalities concurrently (i.e., multimodal analgesia) in the in-hospital setting to reduce the intensity of acute pain and minimize the development of debilitating persistent pain, a problem that can result from even common surgical procedures or trauma. Unfortunately, the need for specialists in acute pain medicine is increasing.

In December of 2013, I submitted a 161 page letter to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requesting that regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine be considered for fellowship accreditation with the help of my fellowship director colleagues. The Board of Directors of the ACGME informed me this past fall (2014) that they have approved our fellowship to be the next accredited subspecialty within anesthesiology.

Wait – don’t we already have a fellowship program in pain medicine? Yes we do, and this one year post-residency program does include the “Acute Pain Inpatient Experience.” However, this requirement may be satisfied by documented involvement with a minimum of only 50 new patients and is not the primary emphasis of fellowship training in the specialty. Pain medicine is a board-certified subspecialty of anesthesiology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and psychiatry and neurology; graduates from any of these residency programs can apply to the one year program. In a recent survey study of practicing pain physicians in the United States with added qualification in pain management according to the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), the great majority (83.7%) of respondents defined their practices as following “chronic pain patients longitudinally” (1).

There is clearly room and a need for a subspecialty training program in acute pain medicine that can focus on improving the in-hospital pain experience. Such a program should advance, in a positive and value-added fashion, the present continuum of training in pain medicine.

HCAHPS Pain QuestionsThe Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey is administered to a random sample of patients who have received inpatient care and receive government insurance through Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The survey consists of 32 questions and is intended to assess the “patient experience of care” domain in the value-based purchasing program. A hospital’s survey scores are publicly disclosed and make up 30% of the formula used to determine how much of its diagnosis-related group payment withholding will be paid by CMS at the end of each year. Of the 32 questions, 7 directly or indirectly relate to in-hospital pain management.

Why should acute pain medicine be a subspecialty of anesthesiology? Anesthesiology is a hospital-based medical specialty, and anesthesiologists are physicians who focus on the prevention and treatment of pain for their patients who undergo surgery, suffer trauma, or present for childbirth on a daily basis. For more details on the role of the anesthesiologist, please see “Physicians specializing in the patient experience.” Further, history supports the evolution of acute pain medicine through anesthesiology. The concept of an anesthesiology-led acute pain management service was described first in 1988 (2), but arguably the techniques employed in modern acute pain medicine and regional anesthesiology date back to Gaston Labat’s publication of Regional Anesthesia: its Technic and Clinical Application in 1922, with advancement and refinement of this subspecialty in the 1960s and 1970s (3-7).

By the time they complete the core residency in anesthesiology today, not all trainees have gained sufficient clinical experience to provide optimal care for the complete spectrum of issues experienced by patients suffering from acutely painful conditions, including the ability to reliably provide advanced interventional techniques proven to be effective in managing pain in the acute setting (8-12). We need physician leaders who can run acute pain medicine teams and design systems to provide individualized, comprehensive, and timely pain management for both medical and surgical patients in the hospital, expeditiously managing requests for assistance when pain intensity levels exceed those set forth in quality standards, or to prevent pain intensity from reaching such levels. The mission statement for the Acute Pain Medicine Special Interest Group within the American Academy of Pain Medicine provides additional justification.

In a survey of fellowship graduates and academic chairs published in 2005, 61 of 132 of academic chairs responded (46%), noting that future staffing models for their department will likely include an average of 2 additional faculty trained in regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine (13).

Currently, there are over 60 institutions in the United States and Canada that list themselves as having non-accredited fellowship training programs focused on regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine on the ASRA website. Since 2002, the group of regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine fellowship directors has been meeting twice yearly at the ASRA Spring Annual Meeting and ASA Annual Meeting which takes place in the fall. Despite not being an ACGME-accredited fellowship, this group, recognizing the lack of formalized training guidelines, voluntarily began to develop such guidelines as the foundation for subspecialty fellowship training in existing and future programs. These guidelines were originally published in Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine in 2005 (14), then were subsequently reviewed, revised, and published as the 2nd edition in 2011 (15), and have been recently updated again (16).

As with other subspecialties, acute pain medicine has emerged due to the need for trained specialists—in this case, those who understand the complicated, multi-faceted disease processes of acute pain, and its potential continuity with chronic pain, and can apply appropriate medical and interventional treatment in a timely fashion. The fellowship-trained regional anesthesiologist and acute pain medicine specialist must be capable of collaborating with other healthcare providers in anesthesiology, surgery, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, and more to establish multidisciplinary programs that add value and improve patient care in the hospital setting and beyond.

REFERENCES

  1. Breuer B, Pappagallo M, Tai JY, Portenoy RK: U.S. board-certified pain physician practices: uniformity and census data of their locations. J Pain 2007; 8: 244-50
  2. Ready LB, Oden R, Chadwick HS, Benedetti C, Rooke GA, Caplan R, Wild LM: Development of an anesthesiology-based postoperative pain management service. Anesthesiology 1988; 68: 100-6
  3. Winnie AP, Ramamurthy S, Durrani Z: The inguinal paravascular technic of lumbar plexus anesthesia: the “3-in-1 block”. Anesth Analg 1973; 52: 989-96
  4. Winnie AP, Collins VJ: The Subclavian Perivascular Technique of Brachial Plexus Anesthesia. Anesthesiology 1964; 25: 353-63
  5. Raj PP, Montgomery SJ, Nettles D, Jenkins MT: Infraclavicular brachial plexus block–a new approach. Anesth Analg 1973; 52: 897-904
  6. Raj PP, Parks RI, Watson TD, Jenkins MT: A new single-position supine approach to sciatic-femoral nerve block. Anesth Analg 1975; 54: 489-93
  7. Raj PP, Rosenblatt R, Miller J, Katz RL, Carden E: Dynamics of local-anesthetic compounds in regional anesthesia. Anesth Analg 1977; 56: 110-7
  8. Buvanendran A, Kroin JS: Multimodal analgesia for controlling acute postoperative pain. Curr Opin Anaesthesiol 2009; 22: 588-93
  9. Hebl JR, Dilger JA, Byer DE, Kopp SL, Stevens SR, Pagnano MW, Hanssen AD, Horlocker TT: A pre-emptive multimodal pathway featuring peripheral nerve block improves perioperative outcomes after major orthopedic surgery. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2008; 33: 510-7
  10. Jin F, Chung F: Multimodal analgesia for postoperative pain control. J Clin Anesth 2001; 13: 524-39
  11. Kehlet H, Dahl JB: The value of “multimodal” or “balanced analgesia” in postoperative pain treatment. Anesth Analg 1993; 77: 1048-56
  12. Young A, Buvanendran A: Recent advances in multimodal analgesia. Anesthesiol Clin 2012; 30: 91-100
  13. Neal JM, Kopacz DJ, Liguori GA, Beckman JD, Hargett MJ: The training and careers of regional anesthesia fellows–1983-2002. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2005; 30: 226-32
  14. Hargett MJ, Beckman JD, Liguori GA, Neal JM: Guidelines for regional anesthesia fellowship training. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2005; 30: 218-25
  15. Guidelines for fellowship training in Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine: Second Edition, 2010. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2011; 36: 282-8
  16. Guidelines for fellowship training in Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine: Third Edition, 2014. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2015; 40: 213-7

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