I received this response to a recent post. It is so good that I wanted to share it – so with Dr. Thomas Nielson’s permission I have. He makes the important point that the rush to LABEL the patient with the diagnosis has major unintended negative consequences. He says it so well that I encourage your reading and comments.
Thank you for this post. This is a problem that occurs from time to time, and I believe that the current system in place for admissions is a large part of the problem.
We are asked to diagnose people in the emergency department because we need an “admission diagnosis” so that we can make sure that we meet “admission criteria”. The people in hospital administration who require this have never taken care of patients themselves, and they have no idea what they are talking about.
There is a disconnect between administrative types and doctors, and I do not know how this can be solved in our current system.
Example: Patient presents with AMS and is found to have a massive acid base disorder in the ED. What is the diagnosis? I have no idea! I need to admit the patient to the hospital and run a bunch of tests before I can tell you what the underlying problem is. Is it ethylene glycol poisoning? Is it their renal failure? I don’t know.
The current system puts the cart before the horse in requiring an admission diagnosis. What happens is some random diagnosis is given to the patient so that we can get them into the hospital. Unfortunately, because the system demands that we treat the patient with “quality” care, this diagnosis puts a process in place. Now the patient is run through a bunch of tests relating to the admission diagnosis which may or may not be the actual problem going on with the patient. And at the end the patient is sent home, dazed and confused, without a clear understanding of WTF just happened to them.
Think I am kidding? How about this example: Patient present with shortness of breath and the radiologist in the ER says pulmonary vascular congestion. The BNP is 300. Now the patient is admitted with “congestive heart failure”. Do we know it is CHF? NO! But now, because CHF is a diagnosis which beancounters believe they can treat by protocol alone, the patient is set upon a course in which all of the “quality” measures must be met to make sure that we get paid. The patient does not know what is going on, but all of a sudden they are being put on a low salt diet, being given an ACE inhibitor, and so on. They will (hopefully) get an echocardiogram and then….what happens if the echo is normal? SYSTEM FAILURE
To get back to your post, it is often the system that is running away with the patient when we have a sense that the diagnosis is wrong. And studies have repeatedly shown that pinning a diagnosis to a patient early in the process, which is required by the system, leads to significant bias in the doctor’s treatment process and judgment.
What we need in this country is for the doctors to reclaim their rightful place in the system. All of the quality metrics BS needs to go right out the door.
How do we do this? I am afraid that we are going to have to revert to doctor-run hospitals, with all cash. Let patients deal with their own insurance companies.
