Roji Intel Blog

Theresa Hush 0
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Future of Health CareMedical Decision-MakingPopulation HealthValue-Based Health CareWomen and Health Care
March 28, 2019

Women with Autoimmune Diseases Fight Uphill Battle on Every Health Care Front

Our articles on women’s health care issues have focused on areas that must change in order to provide better quality and outcomes, to lower costs, to advance treatment, and to treat women respectfully and equitably as patients and providers. We have demonstrated how women have been sidelined from getting the right health care because of two key systemic obstacles that must be addressed: Cultural bias that prevents accurate clinical assessment of symptoms and diagnosis, adoption or use of protocols relative to women’s biology, and effective health care therapies, and Inadequate basic science and clinical research that will illuminate sex-differentiated biology…
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Theresa Hush 0
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Future of Health CareResearchWomen and Health Care
March 20, 2019

At the Heart of Gender Disparities in Health Care is Women’s Pain

Pain is a key symptom of injury or disease, and managing acute pain is usually one of the first services provided to patients. But if the patient in pain is a woman, the provider may require more convincing. Providers doubt that women’s pain is real and underestimate the level of pain for women. Substantial evidence shows that providers report higher levels of pain for men than for women. Gender stereotypes are so strong that in a recent pediatric study, participants evaluating a child’s pain reported higher levels when told that the child was a boy and lower if told it…
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Theresa Hush 0
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ACOsFuture of Health CarePopulation HealthValue-Based Health CareWomen and Health Care
March 13, 2019

Women’s Health Research Needs an Infusion: How Health Systems and ACOs Should Help Correct Gender Disparities

Women receive health care that is below par, and the consequences are unnecessary morbidity and death. It is fact, not fiction—borne out by significant data that reveal disparities across many major conditions—that inattention to women’s unique symptoms, risk factors, disease biology and treatment effects are causing harm to women. Despite the reality, a poor body of research exists to point women’s health in the right direction. Value-Based Health Care (VBHC) assumes that we can measure providers’ delivery of health care against clinical standards. What if we don’t even know how half the population exhibits disease or responds to therapies? At…
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Robert McNutt, M.D. 0
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Future of Health CareMedical Decision-MakingResearch
March 6, 2019

If Not Now, It’s Too Late: Clinical Science Is Futile If We Study the Wrong Population

In 1936, the Literary Digest, a respected national magazine, undertook a public opinion poll. Who would win the race between Republican Alfred Landon, governor of Kansas, and Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt? Mock ballots were mailed to 10 million Americans. About 2.4 million responded—one of the largest survey samples ever created. Their prediction? Landon would carry the day. They were wrong—by a landslide for FDR. That’s because respondents were biased toward Landon and did not accurately represent the distribution of presidential preferences across all voters. Notably, George Gallop accurately predicted FDR’s victory using a smaller representative sample of about 50,000…
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Theresa Hush 0
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Consumers & PatientsFuture of Health CareValue-Based Health CareWomen and Health Care
February 27, 2019

How Gender Discrimination Against Women Physicians Handicaps Value and Patient Care

We need to get women’s health care right. This is not a parochial issue, important only to women, and disconnected from Value-Based Health Care. Gender disparity in health care is real, with significant ramifications for outcomes—for the patients, certainly, as well as for providers’ ability to succeed under risk. Just as quality measurement is necessary to improving quality, achieving the triple aim of quality, cost and patient experience must include both measurement and elimination of gender and gender-race impediments. ACOs and providers accept that they must help patients overcome social attributes of health if those patients are to improve. Yet…
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Robert McNutt, M.D. 0
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Consumers & PatientsFuture of Health CareMedical Decision-MakingResearch
February 13, 2019

If Not Now, It’s Too Late: Clinical Science Needs Fixing

In 1967, the year I graduated from high school, my family’s television required “rabbit ear” antennae with perched aluminum foil. Our farming family had little time to watch TV, but when we did, the ritual included a side trip to reset the antennae’s angle to ensure good reception. Today, I watch a clear picture on myriad devices, no antennae needed. In the 1980s, my trips to a library to find medical literature were few. A single trip to the library would take hours and net only a small number of papers. Now, I obtain articles on any topic in a…
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Robert McNutt, M.D. 0
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Consumers & PatientsMedical Decision-MakingResearch
August 8, 2018

Why Randomized Clinical Trials Are Essential to Informed Medical Decisions

I am not a card-carrying philosopher, although I did study philosophy as my undergraduate major. What I enjoyed most was epistemology, the theory of knowledge. We debated, hotly, from the standpoints of social interaction and humanism, “What is knowledge? What constitutes knowing?” But such philosophical debates are not relevant in medical care. Medicine is not a philosophical province. By that I mean that when we are ill, we are philosophically the same; debating differences is a waste of time. We have equal value; have the same rights to the same efforts and same actions to get us better. The essential…
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Robert McNutt, M.D. 0
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Consumers & PatientsMedical Decision-MakingResearch
June 20, 2018

Deciphering Outcomes: Thirty Percent More of Nothing Is Still Nothing

Trying to pass a Bill through a legislature demands a hardy disposition. I have been involved in three attempts on different issues—one bill passed, one is still in limbo, and a third, the most salient for me, failed. In the latter case, I was the sole proposer of the Bill. My idea captured the imagination of a state representative who said she would sponsor it, but, first, she wanted to get some other views. Eleven lobbyist conversations later, my Bill was dead. Something about the legislator being worried that my Bill would be taking on the First Amendment, which allows…
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Theresa Hush 0
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Consumers & PatientsFuture of Health CareMedical Decision-MakingValue-Based Health Care
May 30, 2018

Why Patients Should Ask Questions—and Physicians Should Listen

For health care providers and payers, Value-Based Health Care (VBHC) is a hot topic, with most all payers pressing a shift toward financial risk contracts and ACOs based on quality and cost performance. But if you ask consumers about the trend, chances are you’ll get a blank stare. Why? They’re not really part of the conversation. That’s a major problem, because consumer involvement is essential for VBHC success. When outcomes fall short, providers may complain about poor “patient compliance” with physician orders, and ACOs may bemoan lack of “patient engagement.” But they are minimizing patients’ preferences and concerns, or perhaps…
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Robert McNutt, M.D. 0
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Future of Health CareMedical Decision-MakingResearch
May 16, 2018

“Just the Facts, Ma’am”

Communication, according to Webster’s: “exchange of information” You and I talk all the time. We are constantly “communicating.” Communication is a huge idea that encompasses and displays our views of the world. But communication is more than just the sum of the words used to communicate; the words are contextual. Raymond Carver wrote with simple, universally understood words, but I could not communicate like him even if I used the same words and labored intensively. Communication, in a sense, is a five-syllable word that is nearly elevated to a sixth sense, like taste, sight, touch, smell and sound. But here’s the rub. I don’t…
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