A disturbing story published last week in the New York Times raised anew questions about how profit sometimes is the primary consideration in performing medical procedures. Following a major hospital chain’s paper trail, The Times told a story of widespread overuse of cardiology resources with serious implications for patient safety.
In 2010, Stephen Johnson, the chief ethics officer of HCA, the largest for-profit hospital chain in the U.S, received a letter from a former nurse at a Florida hospital claiming that a doctor there was performing heart procedures on patients who didn’t need them. A two-month internal investigation confirmed the charge in a confidential memo by Johnson. The doctor was slapped on the wrist, but the nurse lost his job. That decision, Johnson said in the memo, was because he blew the whistle on the cardiologist.
“But the nurse’s complaint,” The Times reported, “was far from the only evidence that unnecessary — even dangerous — procedures were taking place at some HCA hospitals, driving up costs and increasing profits.”
According to The Times, Medicare reimburses hospitals about $10,000 for a cardiac stent—a tiny tube that holds an artery open. But recently, doctors have been less eager to implant stents, preferring drugs to treat blockages.
Another invasive test, cardiac catheterization, which Medicare reimburses at about $3,000, is used to diagnose blocked arteries. A long, thin, flexible tube (the catheter) is inserted into a blood vessel in the arm, groin, or neck and threaded to the heart, where it is used to inject dye into the heart's blood vessels to take x-ray pictures.
Even if necessary, these procedures pose a range of risks from infection, nerve damage, pain to death. Cardiologists generally don’t operate on coronary arteries unless they show at least 70 percent blockage. (See our story about unnecessary surgery here.)
Although The Times’ story focused only on HCA, a story published last week by ProPublica, an independent investigative organization, said that the practice of inflating the need for cardiac procedures is widespread.
ProPublica referred to a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that only half of 144,000 nonemergency heart catheterizations were appropriate.
"It's presented in the media as if it's an aberrancy, when actually it's the rule," Dr. David Brown, an interventional cardiologist and professor of medicine at SUNY-Stony Brook School of Medicine told ProPublica. "The medical system is addicted to the revenues that it generates."
Last year, Medicare spent nearly $1 billion on the procedures that boost revenues for doctors and hospitals but cost taxpayers, raise insurance premiums and put patients at risk—about 3 in 100 patients experience serious complication.
Since 2002, HCA itself had uncovered evidence that some cardiologists at several of its Florida hospitals were unable to prove the need for many of the procedures they were performing. To justify them, according to internal HCA documents, doctors wrote inflated medical reports to make it seem as though they were necessary.
Approximately half of one HCA hospital’s cardiac catheterizations—about 1,200—were deemed to have been performed on patients without significant heart disease, according to a 2010 confidential review.
At one hospital, a 44-year-old man who came to the emergency room complaining of chest pain suffered a punctured blood vessel and a near-fatal irregular heartbeat after a doctor performed a procedure that an outside expert later suggested might have been unnecessary. The patient had to be revived.
In another incident at the same hospital, a woman with no significant heart disease went into cardiac arrest after a vessel was cut when a cardiologist inserted a stent. She was hospitalized for several days.
Last month, the U.S. attorney’s office requested information on reviews assessing the medical necessity of interventional cardiology services provided at 10 of HCA’s hospitals. The Justice Department, according to the Associated Press, also will review billing and medical records at 95 HCA hospitals.
HCA declined to provide evidence that it had alerted Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance companies of its findings, or that it reimbursed them for any procedures the company determined had been unnecessary, never mind that such action is required by law.
HCA told The Times that it took the steps necessary to improve patient care, and that “significant actions were taken to investigate areas of concern, to bring in independent reviewers, and to take action where necessary.”
But HCA declined to show that it had ever notified patients, who might have been entitled to compensation from the hospital for any harm. And some of the doctors accused in the reviews of performing unnecessary procedures still practice at HCA hospitals.
How “significant” can its actions have been?
The Times reviewed hospital communications and concluded that rather than asking whether patients had been harmed or whether regulators needed to be contacted, hospital officials asked for information on how the physicians’ activities affected the hospitals’ bottom line.
Maybe that’s because HCA is less concerned about doing no harm than in recouping expenses for its chronic bad behavior. In 2000, HCA settled one in a series of huge Medicare fraud cases with the Justice Department that tallied $1.7 billion in fines and repayments, mostly concerning charges of overbilling.
Only two years after that fraud settlement, HCA started uncovering the “questions regarding the medical necessity of some of the procedures” that remain problematic.
Today, the surgeon who inserted a cardiac stent after the whistle-blowing nurse (and others) had seen no blockages in the images of the patient’s artery continues to practice at the same HCA hospital. This, despite the fact that an outside heart specialist found problems with 13 of the 17 cases the surgeon performed, including unwarranted cardiac catheterizations and patients who were needlessly subjected to multiple procedures.
To learn more about options for treating coronary problems, visit the website of the Informed Medical Decisions Foundation.
