The Doctor is On Line

The Commonwealth Fund just released a study reporting on primary care office visits in the COVID-19 era and it’s disturbing. In-person office visits fell by 60 percent in March and remained down to nearly the same extent in April. While telemedicine substituted for some of these visits, it did not come anywhere near to compensating for the decline. 

Clearly the precipitous fall is disastrous for primary care medicine, which has seen one practice after another furlough physicians or close altogether, but it also bodes ill for patients. While some of those vanishing visits were probably unnecessary or could easily be postponed, there is reasonably good evidence for the efficacy of robust primary care medicine in improving health and increasing longevity. What can we do about this problem—apart from eradicating COVID-19?

            

The popular answer is to increase the use of telemedicine. Telemedicine—principally video calls by patients to physicians that allow both parties to remain home—have had considerable successes: Jefferson Health has made extensive use of the technology to screen for COVID-19, to enhance prevention and, to some extent, to treat common conditions. The use of telemedicine has been rising dramatically, with some analysts reporting a 50 percent increase since March and others predicting a billion remote visits by the end of 2020. Moreover, the regulatory changes introduced by Medicare to facilitate billing for telemedicine visits have had a major beneficial impact. 

But before we get carried away, we should consider who is not currently using the technology and what adaptations will be necessary to maximize its efficacy. I worry that older people in general and the oldest old in particular are not availing themselves of telemedicine, despite having the greatest need. Older patients who are poor, have little education, or are non-English speakers are at the greatest disadvantage of all. But to assume that the only barrier to effective utilization is lack of access strikes me as naïve: surely new skills and a new approach will be necessary, both on the part of physicians and of patients.

First, the barriers to access. My mother is 94. She is intelligent, she has a master’s degree in social work, and she owns a computer and a tablet, both of which she uses to read her email. But video calling is just beyond her. I’ve tried FaceTime and Zoom. I sat with her (in the days when I was able to do so) and coached her. I’ve attempted to walk her through the process while we are on the phone together. No luck. And she is not unique. Her friends have not been able to master this skill either. Generations on Line, an organization which for decades has been trying to improve digital literacy in the elderly, identifies three obstacles: lack of access (not an issue with my mother or most of her friends), lack of skill, and intimidation. She is convinced she cannot learn to use this technology. “I’m not made for this century,” she tells me and she is not alone in her conviction.

Now consider all the older people who do not have a computer or a tablet. Internet use has been steadily rising in those over age 65 and is now about 73 percent—but among those age 80 or older, it’s only 44 percent. And use falls further with lower income and lower levels of education. 

Then think about those who are hearing impaired—you might imagine that the computer's capacity for amplification would be a benefit of the technology, but for many people with hearing loss, the main problem is discrimination, the ability to distinguish different sounds, and that does not disappear with amplification. Next, throw in non-English speakers. Good systems are available for dial-in interpreters, which works well in the office setting, when the patient and the physician are in physical proximity, but is more challenging when a three-way video call is required. Until these barriers are overcome, telemedicine will be limited to telephone calls in those who are neediest and most vulnerable. 

Even if we could wave a magic wand and all older people would have a computer, smartphone, or tablet and broadband access and the ability to use the device to communicate with their physician, we would still need to address the issue of reaching the doctor in a timely fashion. If telemedicine is supposed to replace urgent care as well as evaluation of new, slightly less acute problems along with chronic disease management, then we will need a systematic way to triage visits. 

If all older people could communicate with the physician via the internet promptly and effectively, there would remain the question of the substance of that interaction. Medical students are taught that a good clinical history results in (presumably correct) diagnosis 80 percent of the time. But a more sophisticated analysis suggests that how likely the history is to prove adequate depends on the prior probability of the condition—that is, if a patient is extremely likely to have pneumonia, then a physical examination or chest x-ray has relatively little to add to the history, but if the chance of pneumonia is small, then these other modalities can add significantly. For telemedicine to be effective, we will need to compensate for the lack of a physical exam and lab tests.

Video adds an important dimension to the visit—physicians can learn a great deal, for example, from observing if the patient is struggling to breathe or has blue-tinged lips. But even in dermatology, physicians rely on touch as well as vision to evaluate a rash. To maximize the effectiveness of telemedicine, patients will need to be able to provide their physicians with critical data. They will have to have a thermometer at home to report their temperature. They should have an electronic home sphygmomanometer to measure blood pressure and, ideally, a pulse oximeter to measure the amount of oxygen in their blood. They should know how to check their pulse (though typically home blood pressure cuffs will do this) and respiratory rate. Obtaining the necessary equipment and learning to use it should be feasible, but it will take time and effort.

Lastly, physicians will need to tailor their approach to a visit to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of the technological medium on which it is based. A video visit is not identical to an office visit, which in turn is not the same as hospital care. Just as physicians discovered that they could not simply extrapolate from inpatient medicine to the outpatient setting but rather had to learn different strategies for caring for ambulatory patients, similarly they will need to adapt to the brave new world of telemedicine. 

Over the long run, the adaptation will be worthwhile. Better home care can lead to fewer hospitalizations. Fewer hospitalizations means better outcomes for frail older patients: they were at risk of adverse consequences of hospitalization (falls, confusion, decline in self-care ability) long before they were at risk of COVID-19. But we have a long way to go.

Never Say Old

As a brief follow up to her important 2011 book, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age, the writer Susan Jacoby published an editorial in the NY Times this past week. 

Provocatively entitled,  “We’re Getting Old, but We’re Not Doing Anything About It,” she points out that the presence of 5 septuagenarian presidential candidates (Biden, Sanders, Warren, Bloomberg, and Trump) falsely encourages the population to think that 75 really is the new 50 and that aging doesn’t bring with it the risk of frailty, dementia, and disability. Jacoby, in her usual incisive way, argues this view is mistaken—and dangerous.

In fact, while many people do remain vigorous well into their seventies, and a smaller but not inconsequential percentage continue to be robust well into their eighties (and an even smaller percentage into their nineties), the risk of developing one or more medical conditions that get in the way of independence and well-being rises steadily with age. The much vaunted “compression of morbidity,” the dream that we will all remain totally intact until precipitously, preferably during sleep, we die, hasn’t quite materialized. Jacoby cites a study reporting that one in seven people who are 65 years old today can expect to experience 5 or more years of disability before they die. Dementia rates are falling—but since the size and proportion of older people is increasing, the absolute number of people with dementia is projected to rise steadily. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, there are 5.6 million people over 65 with dementia today, there will be 7.8 million in 2025—and 13.8 million in 2050. Frailty remains a major problem: a 2015 population study in the US found that while only 10.7 percent of people age 65-69 were frail, among the 75-79-year-olds the rate was 20.1 percent, and for those aged 85-89, it was 37.9 percent.

So, what are the implications of this reality? Jacoby offers three: provide more support for caregivers; encourage employers to allow vigorous older adults to continue working; and address various medical ethical issues such as physician assisted suicide. This is a good beginning—and about as much as one can reasonably put into a NY Times op-ed—but there are many others.

Here are a few additions: In the arena of housing, we need far more housing that is handicapped accessible. Doorways should be wide enough for wheelchairs, buildings should be on a single level or have elevators. In the domain of urban planning, communities need to be walkable with extensive and accessible public transportation. In terms of medical care, the overriding issue is not care of the dying, but how best to care for the living. We need far more attention to function: to maintaining and fostering basic abilities such as mobility and higher-level abilities such as cooking and shopping. To achieve this end, physicians need to assess function, they need to know how to diagnose frailty, and they need to know how to promote and support function. Physicians also need to determine the old person’s goals of care and to work with patients and family caregivers to develop an approach to treatment that is consistent with those goals.

The new year will begin in just two days. Among our resolutions for the coming year should be a commitment to making America a better place for us as we get old—and I agree with Jacoby that we should abandon the foolish euphemism “older people” and stick with plain “old.” This should be a resolution we actually follow.

Home Sweet Home

The May issue of the health policy journal, Health Affairs, includes a short but important article by two researchers from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Its title poses the central question of their essay, “what can be done to better support older adults to age successfully in their homes and communities?” They begin with the observation that most of the literature on “supportive housing” for older people focuses on the 20 percent of people over 75 who need significant help to function day to day (many of whom are in fact over 85). They go on to point out that the remaining 80 percent face challenges as well—mobility limitations, impaired night vision—that while not nearly as restrictive as the problems of their counterparts with frailty or dementia, are nonetheless important issues that are seldom addressed from a public policy perspective. And with the over 75-year-olds numbering 14 million today and expected to double by 2038, 80 percent represents a great many people whose housing needs are projected to be inadequate.

In fact, while the vast majority of older people say, when surveyed, that they want to stay in whatever home they live in now, that may prove difficult at best. Consider the major threat to successful independent living, impaired mobility. Only 3.5 percent of homes today offer single floor living with no steps to the entrance. Many do not have hallways that are wide enough to comfortably accommodate assistive devices. Retrofitting a two-story home with a curving staircase—and, let’s say, no first-floor bathroom or bedroom—may be prohibitively expensive or impossible altogether. Then there’s transportation from the older person’s home to stores, libraries, doctor’s offices, or movie theaters which, in many rural or suburban locations, is nonexistent.

What Christopher Herbert and Jennifer Molinsky advocate in their article is a variety of public policy steps to help. They mention tax credits for renovations and programs that provide coordination of care, perhaps modeled on PACE (program of all-inclusive care for the elderly), though that is currently based in adult day health centers and is more suitable for the frail than for the slightly impaired. They allude to NORCs (naturally occurring retirement communities) without mentioning them by name as a model that facilitates on-site assistance by concentrating a large group of people in one area.

But in the end, the authors are forced to make an appeal for building new accessible, multifamily buildings with elevators in walkable urban centers. And it’s not just urban planners—if cities still hire such people—who need to push for this model; it’s also older people themselves. A good place to start is to educate people as they turn seventy and older that they may want to think about the long run and move before they are forced to. They should choose a housing arrangement, if they can afford to, where they can truly age in place.

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Caregivers are the Key

“Low levels of caregiver training are a missed opportunity for the health care system,” comments a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine this week. Its authors continue: “Prior work suggests that training to better prepare family caregivers may improve health and reduce service utilization for those they assist.” In an age when health policy mavens are eager to find ways to decrease the enormous health care expenditures of “high-need” patients (also called “high-need, high-cost” patients), the potential contribution of caregivers has been sadly neglected.

The new study analyzes patient/caregiver pairs using data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study and the companion National Survey of Caregivers. Examining 1861 family caregivers of older individuals who live in the community and receive help in daily activities because of their health problems, the study confirms the paucity of relevant education in this group: only 7.3 percent of the unpaid caregivers reported receiving any training whatsoever. Put differently, 92.7 percent of family caregivers manage multiple medications, provide wound care, help with mobility and, in many cases, monitor specialized medical equipment entirely on their own. Is it so surprising that the older adults they care for have high rates of hospitalization? Their “carees,” the people they care for, typically suffer from multiple chronic diseases. If they knew how to manage acute exacerbations of those conditions—a flare of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, for example, or a worsening of congestive heart failure; if they were equipped to deal with a predictable complication of those illnesses, such as a marked elevation of blood sugar in diabetes or the development of bronchitis in emphysema, then at least some of those hospitalizations might well be preventable. But the health care system does not routinely involve family caregivers in the ongoing treatment of frail, older adults. Only when their patients face a crisis such as the urgent need for dialysis or surgery or ICU care will physicians consult with caregivers. 

Shockingly, the new study found no association between the health status of the older adult and the degree of training of his or her caregiver. The degree of impairment, the extent of caregiver involvement, or the amount of caregiver burden, had no discernible effect on the level of support provided by the health care system. 

Also noteworthy are the age and sex of the caregivers: among the 1230 caregivers who themselves were older, two-thirds were women and their mean age was 81.8. I suspect the age distribution of caregivers shows two peaks: one composed of the adult children of the frail elders, the other made up of their spouses. 

We have to do better. We are investing energy in redesigning the health care system so as to provide better care for individuals with complex needs, focusing on the professionals who function within the system and the finances that underlie it.  Surely we could devote a little effort to the unpaid caregivers who are central to its effectiveness. A small step in this direction will be the publication of my book for caregivers, “The Caregiver’s Encyclopedia: A Compassionate Guide to Caring for Older Adults.” Look for it in late fall!

Who Cares?

As an ever-growing percentage of Americans live to extreme old age, with a correspondingly large proportion surviving long enough to become frail, family caregivers play an increasingly pivotal role in their care. Previous studies have documented how widespread caregiving is, how intense, and how medically oriented. But these studies typically are snapshots, looking at a single point in time. A new study, “Family Caregivers of Older Adults, 1999-2015,” uses several national surveys to examine changes in caregiving over time.

The take home message of this comparison is that the job of caregiving has become more challenging as the care recipients have become sicker and more disabled. In 1999, 18 percent of care recipients needed help in three or four areas. By 2015, this had risen to 26 percent. Caregiving has become more intense and of longer duration, with 45 percent of caregivers providing help for over four years in 1999, compared to 64 percent in 2015. 

What this means is that for caregivers to do a good job, they need to be more medically sophisticated today. In the groundbreaking 2012 study, “Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care,” 46 percent of family caregivers were found to provide one or more types of fairly sophisticated medical care. This percentage has undoubtedly grown over time, just as all the other indicators of complexity have grown. But there is no reason to believe that today’s caregivers are any better equipped than their predecessors to manage chronic disease.

The consequences of this shift are profoundly under-appreciated. Increased demands on caregivers result in emotional, cognitive, and financial stress. At least as important, and almost never addressed, are the consequences to the care recipients. Unless their family caregivers develop greater medical knowledge and unless they learn to navigate the maze that is our current health care system, they will pay the price in the form of more trips to the emergency room, more hospital admissions, more tests, and more procedures. 

If today’s frail older people wish to avoid burdensome and often unnecessary and even ineffective medical treatment, and if our society wants to avoid the financial cost of such treatment, then it behooves us to provide better support for caregivers. Caregivers are the key. In the next few months, I will take a small step in that direction with the publication of my book for caregivers, tentatively titled “Taking Care.” This book, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press, will provide caregivers with the knowledge they need as their relatives make their way to the office, the hospital, the skilled nursing facility. It will teach them enough medicine to help them manage the acute symptoms and chronic diseases they are likely to encounter. Above all, it will help them think through decisions based on their family member’s underlying health state and preferences for care. Stay tuned!

Frailty Matters

Last week’s British Medical Journal draws attention to the growing literature confirming that the intensive care unit (ICU) is a perilous environment for frail older people. A position piece written by an intensivist, a geriatrician, a professor of critical care, and a “patient and public representative,” argues there is a mismatch between the supply and demand for intensive care and that increased public awareness of what admission to the ICU does—and does not—mean for patients and their families is the key to addressing the problem.

Leaving aside whether the proposed solution, public education, has the slightest chance of working, I decided to have a look at the research papers on which the position piece was based. The first article, from Scotland and published in Critical Care Medicine, deals with “Health-Related Quality of Life After ICU.” The results, in a nutshell, are that what determined how well people did after discharge from the ICU in terms of both mental and physical functioning was affected far more by how well they functioned before they got sick than how sick they were when hospitalized.

The second article, based on patients in 311 ICUs in 21 European countries published in Intensive Care Medicine, found that among people over age 80, the greater the degree of frailty, the higher the 30-day mortality. In patients who, prior to admission, were not frail the 30-day survival was 76 percent; in the “pre-frail” group it was 71 percent, but in the frail group, it was 59 percent.

The importance of these studies is not so much the numbers they report—although I thought that a 30-day survival rate of 59 percent in frail octogenarians was not bad—as their emphasis on physical functioning. We in the U.S. continue to pay little attention to frailty. The Europeans, evidently, do pay attention to frailty. In part, the reason for the difference is that Europeans actually assess frailty while Americans, to a large extent, do not. We are still fighting over how best to measure and record it. The final takeaway from these articles is that the specific scale the Europeans use is so easy to use that the researchers did not have to teach physicians, patients, or families how to use it: it’s self-explanatory.

Forget about American exceptionalism. Let’s adopt the tool in use in the much of the rest of the developed world.

Of Mice and Men

For middle-aged mice, these are the best of times. Scientists now understand genetic factors that lead to the development of disease, disability, and death—in mice. Most importantly, researchers have found ways to improve the “healthspan,” the period of disease- and disability-free life before death—in mice. The question is whether the approaches they are developing will be applicable to people, and the ethical implications if they are.

The basic ideas are spelled out in a trio of “viewpoint” articles published in JAMA last week. S. Jay Olshansky, writing from an epidemiologic perspective, observes that over the past century, dramatic gains in life expectancy have been accomplished by reducing in mortality of children and young adults. But once these gains have been made, the only remaining way to lengthen life expectancy is by extending the lives of people at the other end of the age spectrum. Medical science has therefore concentrated on tackling the diseases of old age, one by one. Unfortunately, as Barzilai et al comment in their essay, “efforts focused on preventing individual diseases will have limited net effect on population health because one disease will be exchanged for another.” We’re already seeing this phenomenon: as fewer people die of heart disease, they develop and die of Alzheimer’s instead. Far better would be to tackle the aging process itself. Targeting the underlying driver of all the chronic diseases at once could, in principle, prevent or at least delay those disorders.

So, what do we know about turning off biological aging? We know there’s a gene in mice with the euphonious name rps6kb1 and if it’s “knocked out” (molecular genetics speak for “inactivated”), female mice live longer, healthier lives. We know there’s another gene called Sirt6 (short for Sirtuin 6), which is present in multiple mammalian species including humans, and if it is “overexpressed” (genetics speak for “turned on”) in male mice, they live longer. We also know that all creatures including people have “senescent cells,” cells that, old cells that start releasing all kinds of chemicals. When an individual has more than some threshold number of such cells, it develops chronic diseases, frailty, and is at high risk of dying. When the senescent cells of a mouse are destroyed, the mouse lives longer and without a long period of deterioration before death.

And what progress has been made in identifying drugs that achieve these goals in mice? And what about in people? Reportedly, the Interventions Testing Program, funded by the National Institute on Aging, has examined 26 “candidate drugs” for their effects on mice. They have identified 6, including the anti-inflammatory drug, aspirin, the anti-diabetes drug, acarbose, the immunosuppressive drug, rapamycin, and the estrogen, 17a-estradiol, as effective in some mice. Intervening in mice of an age equivalent to 70 human years has “extended life by more than 20 years and increase[d] health span even more substantially.” Other studies have found that the drug dasatinib (related to the anti-cancer drug, Tarceva) has a powerful effect in destroying senescent cells. In mice that are the equivalent of 80 human years, treatment with dasatinib combined with quercetin (a plant chemical found in green tea, red wine, apples, and other foods) increases survival 36 percent without increasing disability before death.

We don’t know whether any of these chemicals work in humans. And we have no idea at all whether they will produce side effects, though we do know that earlier attempts to interfere with cell lifespan were associated with the development of cancer. This is not entirely surprising, as the essence of cancer is uncontrolled cell proliferation. So even the very upbeat article by Tchkonia and Kirkland, the third of the triad, ends on a cautionary note: “…Patients should be advised not to self-medicate with senolytic agents or other drugs that target fundamental aging processes in the expectation that conditions alleviated in mice will be alleviated in people.”

If, years from now, human studies indicate the drugs or others like them are effective, we will have to deal with the ethical implications of extending the “healthspan.” What will they cost? Will everyone have access to such medications? Will we create greater inequality within society? Between countries? Banning such research on the grounds that a ballooning of the elderly population is unsustainable is almost certainly going to be impossible—the lure of more disease-free life will be irresistible. But we can begin to think about the consequences of our brave new world.

An Aspirin a Day...

The headlines this week—aside from the hurricane, the typhoon, and the charge of sexual misconduct in the Supreme Court nominee—are all about aspirin. For older people, unless you live in the Carolinas or Hong Kong, this is definitely the story. A new study (reported as 3 separate studies but really just one study with three different endpoints) threatens to unseat aspirin from its coveted spot as the little-pill-that-could.

A single aspirin a day, many people believed, could stave off heart disease, stroke, cancer, and perhaps dementia. If taken as a “baby aspirin,” a dose of 81 mg a day instead of the 325 mg in a regular aspirin tablet, and with a special “enteric” coating to protect the lining of the stomach, it was touted as effective with virtually no side effects. The truth, unfortunately, seems to be that it is neither effective nor devoid of side effects when taken by healthy older people.

The study, published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, examines three plausible possible benefits of low dose, enteric-coated aspirin. First, they ask whether aspirin has a desirable effect on cardiovascular events such as heart failure requiring hospitalization, stroke, or heart attack. They found no difference in benefit between healthy older people in the US or Australia (where older was defined as over 70 except in blacks and Hispanics, where it was defined as over 65) who took 100 mg of aspirin and those who did not.

Next, they looked at whether aspirin has an effect on how long healthy older people live without developing a disability. Again, they found no statistically significant difference between those who took aspirin and those who didn’t.

Finally, they examined overall mortality in the aspirin-takers and the non-aspirin takers. Once again, the two groups were indistinguishable.

There was, however, one striking difference in outcomes between the 9525 people who were randomized to take aspirin and the 9589 people who were randomized to placebo: the risk of bleeding was significantly higher. And by bleeding, the investigators meant major bleeding such as a gastrointestinal bleed or an intracranial hemorrhage. 

Not only did this randomized controlled study fail to show any benefit from taking aspirin, and not only did it show an increased risk of harm, but even when the results were subjected to subgroup analysis, no group emerged as potential beneficiaries. The authors looked at the composite endpoint (dementia, death, or persistent disability) in several pre-specified subgroups. One was gender: in the past, aspirin has been touted as preventive for healthy men but not women; in this study, neither men nor women benefited. Another was frailty (though I’m not quite sure how 421 of the “healthy” elderly subjects could have met the definition of frailty): in this study, neither the frail nor the non-frail benefited. If anything, there was a trend towards worse outcomes in the frail group, though the numbers were so small that the difference was not statistically significant and might well be due to chance.

No study is perfect and this one is no exception. The median period of observation was 4.7 years, a relatively short period with respect to the time needed to develop dementia or heart disease. The analysis was done on an “intention to treat” basis, which is the way such studies are supposed to be analyzed, but in fact only 2/3 of the people assigned to take aspirin were actually taking it by the end of the study period. The benefit of aspirin might therefore have been under-estimated. The risk of bleeding, however, which was already substantial in the aspirin users, may have also been under-estimated. For some reason, the study used a 100 mg dose even though a standard baby aspirin contains only 81 mg: maybe the results would have been different with an even smaller dose. But the strengths of the study are impressive. It was randomized; follow up was almost complete; data collection seems to have been thorough and careful.

I have a confession to make: for several years, I took a baby aspirin every day. I’m under 70 and I’m female, so my physician did not recommend that I take aspirin. I took it nonetheless because I really don’t want to have a stroke and thought that just maybe taking aspirin was something I could do to help. I took it because years ago, before I went to medical school, I worked in a hematology research lab and spent my days studying platelet aggregation. It turned out that people who had taken a single aspirin tablet within two weeks of my testing their blood showed markedly decreased clumping of platelets, blood cells that are critically involved in the clotting process. About a year ago, I had several episodes of subconjunctival hemorrhage, a benign form of bleeding involving the blood vessels of the eye. I worried the bleeding might be related to aspirin, so I stopped taking it. 

Today, the evidence is compelling that for people without heart disease or dementia or stroke, an aspirin is more likely to cause harm than good. As of now, aspirin has joined the ranks of other failed panaceas such as estrogen and calcium supplements. 

Hospital at Home?

For years, I’ve been arguing that frail older patients are often better off being treated for acute medical problems at home than in the hospital. I began making this claim during my residency when I wrote about “The Ethics of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation,” claiming that it created cognitive dissonance for physicians in hospitals to go all out for some patients and to withhold selected treatments for others. Better, I suggested, to keep those individuals who didn’t want everything under the sun, and particularly those who didn’t want attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, out of the hospital altogether. 

I picked up the theme during my geriatrics fellowship in a paper entitled “Adverse Consequences of Hospitalization in the Elderly," which quantified the frequency with which older patients developed iatrogenic complications, unrelated to the medical problem for which they had been admitted and found it was 40.5 percent in those aged 70 or older, compared to 8.8 percent in those under 70. And instead of suggesting that we build higher siderails—or institute the kinds of interventions that eventually were adopted by Acute Care for the Elderly (ACE) units—we try to avoid hospitalization altogether. 

Over time, increasing evidence has accumulated that many people can be cared for at home and that this approach not only decreases the chance of adverse events (including unwanted treatment), but also results in comparable outcomes. A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine  suggests a way to pay for “hospital at home” model--by paying a single fee for acute care plus 30 days of post-acute care.

The Hospital at Home model (which, unlike the study authors, I won’t abbreviate as HaH since that makes it seem like a joke) used in this study offers hospital-style care for any of 19 common medical conditions (including pneumonia, urinary tract infection, flare of heart failure, and cellulitis) in clinically stable, interested adults who have adequate home supports. Their outcomes were compared to those of contemporaneously hospitalized adults who were eligible but either declined to participate in the study or couldn’t participate because services could not be set up for them at the particular time (night time) or day (weekends) when they showed up in the emergency department.

The results were overwhelmingly positive. Patients cared for at home, when compared to controls, were much less likely to be (re)hospitalized for any reason in the month after discharge (8.6 percent vs 15.6 percent); they were less likely to go to a skilled nursing facility after treatment of the acute episode (1.7 percent vs 10.4 percent); and they were far more likely to rate the quality of their care as excellent (68 percent vs 45 percent). While 12.2 percent of the Hospital at Home patients did end up in the hospital for treatment of the acute illness, there were no differences in mortality. There were also no differences in complications such as falls or infections, but the number of either of these adverse events was too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

On the other hand, as the authors of the accompanying commentary indicate, the study was a case control study, not a randomized trial, and the “controls” were significantly different from the cases: they were younger (a lot younger—an average of 71.5 compared to 76.0), less well educated, and better functioning (55.5 percent had at least one area of difficulty in daily activities, compared to 71.5 percent in the Hospital at Home patients). However, finding that the home care patients fared at least as well and, in many instances, better than their hospitalized counterparts, even though they were older and frailer suggests that they may have more to gain by staying out of the institution.

It's heartwarming to see evidence that treating many medical problems at home is achievable without sacrificing any important benefits and to discover there are plausible ways of paying for such care. My concern is that the “hospital at home” model, while an improvement over the hospital environment precisely because it takes place in a familiar location, may bring too much hospital technology with it. I would like to have a better understanding of just what hospital at home includes. I’m reminded of the final days of Pope John Paul II, dying of Parkinson’s disease and its complications. The Pope was cared for at home—but with a feeding tube, a ventilator, and physician care. He was, for all intents and purposes, receiving ICU care at home. So, by all means, let’s make medical care available to older people at home; let’s keep them out of the hospital if possible. But that should not mean bringing the hospital in entirety to them.

All that Glitters...

          Admissions to American Intensive Care Units (ICUs) from hospital emergency departments are on the rise—they doubled from 2003 to 2009—and admissions among patients aged 85 and older growing the most rapidly of all: they increased 25 percent every two years. What we still don’t know is whether or when the ICU helps them. This past week, French researchers published a study in which they shed some light on the question. What they found is that ICU admission in basically high functioning people over age 75 did not improve their chance of survival—and may have made it worse. The ICU probably didn’t make any difference in their level of function or health-related quality of life six months after discharge (if they were still alive)—but there is some suggestion it caused a deterioration.

         In a nutshell, what the researchers did was to come up with a standardized protocol for determining who should be admitted to the ICU, based on the particular conditions they had and how severe the conditions were. They then randomized hospitals to either use this special protocol or to rely on whatever they normally did to make decisions about ICU admission. To be eligible for the study, you had to be at least 75 years of age and at baseline, ie before you got acutely ill, you had to be independent in almost all your daily activities. When physicians used the special triage system, older patients were far more likely to be admitted to the ICU (61 percent) than when they did not (34 percent). But the death rate in the ICU, and the length of stay in the hospital were the same in the two populations. Overall hospital mortality was higher in the intervention group (30 percent) than in the controls (21 percent). Moreover, decline in independent functioning was greater at six months in the intervention group than in the controls.

         What should we make of all this? I think it’s reasonable to conclude something about what we're not doing. We’re not currently depriving many older patients of care that would be beneficial for them. Maybe all those physicians who don’t admit certain elderly individuals to the ICU aren’t discriminating against them; maybe they’re on to something. What we don’t know is whether the doctors who provide “routine care,” those who use criteria other than the officially sanctioned ones for determining who gets in to the ICU, are still over-utilizing the ICU. What we don’t know, although it’s a bit implausible, is whether there are older patients who are excluded both by the seat-of-the-pants criteria and the rigorously-determined criteria, who would nonetheless benefit from a trip to the ICU.

         Behind all the methodological considerations and the statistical conclusions, we have two inescapable realities: first, there are many older people who are so sick and so close to the end of life that no technology, no medication, no amount of monitoring or nursing care will keep them alive—and that’s true even for the population addressed in this study, which excluded anyone who was frail. Second, the ICU is a medical intervention, much like a drug or a procedure, and it comes with side effects. For older individuals, those side effects may outweigh any potential benefits of the intervention. So when the physician recommends the ICU for you or your older relative, think twice before agreeing.