Medical error

February makes us shiver

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Matula Thoughts 

February 5, 2021

2311 words

 

One.

One. 

February made me shiver…  Of all the songs and phrases that accompany most months, this timely phrase from Don McLean’s 1971 song American Pie echoes especially strongly in the minds of many of us who lived through that era of American political unrest and the Vietnam War. I was a surgery intern in Los Angeles back then when the song was making its rounds and even though I didn’t fully understand all of its imagery, the lyrics and music struck a responsive chord. In fact, I wasn’t clear if it was a musical poem rich in metaphor or a pleasing musical jabberwocky of nonsense.

At eight minutes and 36 seconds, it was a long song but the words were authentic for my generation. McLean was only 26 years old at the time, but nostalgia dominated the first paragraph, celebrating the music of “A long, long time ago” before the cold snap mentioned in the second paragraph, “But February made me shiver,” referring to the plane crash that killed legendary singer Buddy Holly on February 3, 1959. McLean’s phrases and tune come back to me every year at this time. [Above: Don McLean singer. Below: Donald Maclean surgeon, UM Bentley Library.]

 

Two.

Another Donald Maclean (1839-1897), a surgeon unrelated directly to the singer, played an important part in the story of Michigan Medicine. Born in Canada to Scottish parents, this Maclean attended Kingston College in Ontario. He studied medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland and fell under the spell of the great surgeon and teacher, James Syme, who had earlier taught Joseph Lister (Syme’s daughter Agnes married young trainee Lister). Maclean returned to Kingston as professor of surgery but came to Ann Arbor in 1872 as fifth sequential replacement for the founder of UM surgery, Moses Gunn. Unlike the previous short-term intermediaries, Maclean had staying power in Ann Arbor, lasting until 1889 and teaching a generation of UM medical students in the Pavilion Hospital, including William Mayo (UMMS 1883). Just as his predecessors in the Ann Arbor Surgery Chair, Maclean managed his private practice in Detroit and commuted by train to Ann Ann Arbor for classes and teaching demonstrations. Accordingly, Maclean was one of the strong voices who wanted to move the clinical teaching programs and professional practices of the UM medical faculty to Detroit with its larger population and relative abundance of hospitals.

Dean Vaughan, university president James Angell, and the UM regents had a contrary vision of retaining the medical school, clinical practice, and hospital in Ann Arbor, so when the issue came to a head, Maclean and the other “exiteers” were no longer welcome on the faculty. It was at that point that UM established a “full-time” faculty position and university clinical practice for its next chair of the Surgery Department, Charles de Nancrede, who would serve from 1889 to 1917. The university also recognized the need for a more modern hospital facility, and that opened on Catherine Street in 1891, although it quickly proved inadequate for the needs of the times. After de Nancrede retired in 1917 Cyrenus Darling provided a weak interim period of leadership until 1919 when the next chair would be the celebrity urologist Hugh Cabot.  

 

Three.

A paradigm shift occurred between the eras of surgeons Donald Maclean and Hugh Cabot in Ann Arbor. It actually wasn’t such a terribly long long time ago in the grand scheme of things although, to contemporary medical students and trainees, Maclean’s era certainly must seem to be the distant past. Actually, that was the time of my great-great-grandparents. 

Horace Davenport, UM’s great physiologist and historian of the Medical School, uncovered representative surgical cases of Maclean at UH in 1881-1882, that were published in Physician Surgeon by Maclean. The range of procedures is remarkable considering that Maclean was the sole surgeon and the surgical facilities in the Medical School and Pavilion Hospital were rudimentary. Maclean’s attention to reporting of results, although also rudimentary by today’s standards, was laudatory for his times. [D. Maclean, “A tabular statement of the surgical work done in the Department of After Maclean 1881 and 1882,” Physician Surgeon, 5 (1883): 387-396.] [H. Davenport, Not Just Any Medical School, p. 20.]

The astonishing paradigm shift that followed Maclean delivered surgical (and medical) specialization to mankind and the first steps of minimally invasive surgery – most widely and effectively evidenced in the urology arena.

Hospitals that were once dormitories for the sick became complex healthcare factories with a multiplicity of diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities. Costs escalated greatly and new parties eagerly began to divide up the monetary pie of health care. Research embedded in medical schools and hospitals generated new knowledge and tools. Medical education expanded from four years of medical school to internships and residency training programs equivalent in length of time or greater than that of medical school. Teams replaced individuals as health care providers. Public health joined with individual health care as responsibilities of modern societies and myriad systems (small practices, community health centers, medical centers, and large healthcare networks) self-assembled to create the modern and postmodern meta-systems of health care in the U.S., Canada, and other nations of the world.

 

Four.

Hospitalization today is a commonplace phenomenon. In Maclean’s time hospitalization was unlikely for an individual in their lifetime. In modern times, however, most people in industrialized nations are likely to undergo hospitalization at some point in their lives for childbirth, surgery, trauma, cardiopulmonary conditions, infectious diseases, or a wide variety of other conditions.

A friend endured a difficult (non-Covid) hospitalization this winter, emerging successfully but not without much suffering, a number of failed communications, fumbled hand-offs, and errors. All that that provoked another friend to make the common observation that “the system is broken, and broken beyond repair.” Happily, our first friend (the patient) made it home, even as the concomitant covid syndemic exploded, driving UM and St. Joe’s daily inpatient Covid patients above 100 each for the first time since spring. 

I feel responsible for our organizational imperfections my friend endured, even though I’m no longer in a position of organizational responsibility. When our Faculty Group Practice (FGP) evolved in the early 2000s I believed that our new UM clinical leadership structure could provide the best hope for aligning the complexities of modern health care to the triple academic mission while taking into account the harsh economic marketplace and changing public policies. Now, as our FGP has become the UM Medical Group (UMMG) under the banner of Michigan Medicine, I still believe this is true, although we have a long way to go, as evidenced by my hospitalized friend. 

After I apologized for our systemic imperfections of fumbled “hand-offs” and glitches in processes of care to my friend and his family, I reflected on the common phrase that “the system is broken.”  The sad familiar phrase is nonspecific and unhelpful – what actual system was being referenced as broken? It’s almost like observing that the planetary environment “system” is broken, which may well be true, but doesn’t offer much help in solving the universally recognized problem. More accurately, many systems actually work very well, but mainly in serving their own particular needs rather than needs of individual patients and the public at large. 

The vast array of enterprises and systems in national health care are variably interconnected, but not united operationally to produce the purposeful and elastic system that we crave. The idea of a single centralized (governmental) system to fulfill the myriad needs of a nation’s health care is not easily imaginable when it comes down to specific functions, in fact that experiment has been tried and failed in 20th century China and Soviet Russia. It doesn’t seem reasonable to think we could build (even with Artificial Intelligence) a systemic set of rules, laws, and organizations to deploy the myriad aspects of personal and public health care, accounting for the needs of workforce education, research, innovation, public policy, crisis preparedness, safety nets, private sector, and professional organizations. 

We presently witness the astonishing multinational development of multiple effective vaccines in response to the global pandemic, decelerate in the implementation phase with clumsy national and local policies, supply chain issues, political rhetoric, false narratives, vaccine deniers, and worldwide healthcare disparities resulting from poverty and racism. A tiny virus has thrown every national and health care system into states of confusion and exacerbated the known inadequacies and disparities.

 

Five.

Making health care work. The charge that “our system is broken” is aimed most acutely at the fundamental parts of health care – the delivery of individual ambulatory and inpatient care, while supporting the public health of a population. It is a certainty that any given integrated organization, such as Michigan Medicine, can go a long way toward making health care work better and more fairly for their individual patients, workforces, and regional stakeholders. 

The operation of a large regional health care system such as Michigan Medicine is not amenable to any algorithms known to mankind.  Expectation that artificial intelligence might provide efficient and humane central management will likely be disappointed, just as other exclusive central systems failed to provide societies the full range of health care in its particular clinical, public, educational, investigative, and innovative dimensions. It’s difficult to identify any society that has pulled off this pent-fecta, although it’s not for lack of trying. For now, the best hope is management by teams that distill content expertise of specialties and stakeholders, to aligning them to the needs of the individual patient, the public health, and the larger aspirations of society. 

It was big news at UM in Ann Arbor in mid-month when David Miller was named as President of Michigan Medicine, taking over from David Spahlinger, who had done great service in the role of President of UMHS and Executive Vice Dean for Clinical Affairs, a position he held in its various names through two decades of astonishing change and growth. [In modern health care camouflage: above David Spahlinger and below David Miller and Justin Dimick.]

 

Postscripts. 

Another Donald Maclean (1913-1983) evokes the spirit of the late David Cornwall. This Maclean was a member of a Cambridge spy ring that passed British and American secrets to the Soviet Union in WWII and during the cold war. The Gaelic surname in its various spellings means alternatively ‘son of Gillean’ referring to Gillean of the Battle Axe of Ireland around 1200 or ‘servant of St. John.’ The Scottish Clan MacLean has been powerful throughout the history of Scotland and all the MacLeans, Macleans, McLeans, McCleans, McLaines, and McClains may well derive from a single mitochondrial mother “Eve.”  [Below: Donald Maclean the spy, Wikipedia.]

Maclean made headlines in 1951 when he exfiltrated to the Soviet Union, along with fellow conspirator Guy Burgess, and they would be followed in 1963 by Kim Philby. Maclean’s family accompanied him to Moscow but after an affair with Philby, Mrs. Maclean returned to the West 1979, dying in NYC in 2010. The three Maclean children each married Russians, but all subsequently also returned to the West, leaving their father behind, working as a foreign policy analyst at Moscow’s Institute of World Economy and International Affairs. He died, reportedly of cancer at age 69, and was cremated and honored in Moscow in 1983.

A Fourth Man, fellow spy Sir Anthony Blount and art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Paintings, stuck it out in England and was unmasked in 1979, but lost only his knighthood. The Cambridge Four later turned out to have been the Cambridge Five, after John Cairncross (code-named Liszt) was confirmed by KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky in a 1991 interview as the Fifth Man. Cairncross, a literary scholar from Cambridge had previously been known as an atomic secrets spy, confessing partially in 1951 and losing his civil service job. He moved to the U.S. as a lecturer at Northwestern and Case Western Reserve, where he confessed more completely in 1964 to British investigators who had opened his case after Philby’s defection. Cairncross moved to Rome in 1967 to work for the U.N. and then in 1970 to Provence, France. He died in England in 1995. 

These convoluted truths may seem stranger than fiction, but made for great stories from the late great spy novelist John le Carré, the pen name of David Cornwall (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020) in the enduring tales of George Smiley and other memorable protagonists.  

 

February each year manages to get the work of a month accomplished in fewer days than the other longer months. This, of course, is a hyperbolic thought, as if a month is a purposeful agency instead of an arbitrary block of time. Yet, this playful conjecture is an inverse run of Parkinson’s Law by which work expands to fill the time or other resources available for its completion.

Parkinson, a British naval historian and academic in Malaya, in his later career, wrote a short piece in the Economist in 1955 that he expanded into a book in 1957. He thus fulfilled his own law –  expanding words rather than more vaguely defined work – to explain the same idea of Parkinson’s Law, laid out in the brief Economist article, later in his book.

Like most rules of organizational theory, Parkinson’s Law needs to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, although Parkinson took it pretty far, mathematically modeling it out based on an analysis of the British Admiralty staff from 1914-1954. He considered how the administrative staff grew inexorably, unrelated to number of commissioned ships, wars, or other obvious factors: more personnel, but no additional work. His formula predicted that management staffing increased annually on an average of 5.75% (with a modeling range of 5.17 to 6.5%) regardless that the amount of work was static, without annual increase, but factoring in ages of appointment and retirement, and man-hours required for communication among personnel.

Parkinson’s self-styled rule, was greatly (but not entirely) satirical, much like Willie Sutton’s rule for success (go where the money is) or Robert Sutton’s organizational No Asshole Rule (don’t retain “jerks” in the organization) for successful teams.

 

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts, this February 2021.

David A. Bloom, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Ga-ga now and then

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DAB Matula Thoughts June 7, 2019

Ga-ga then and now

2172 words

[Above: Nesbit reception at 2019 AUA Annual Meeting in Chicago. Ice sculpture.]

 

One.             

Senior medical students are getting ready this month for the next big stage in their lives and careers, just as I did in June of 1971 heading west from Buffalo to Los Angeles, to start nine years of training at UCLA. I don’t recall much of the drive along the evolving interstate highway system, a vision of President Eisenhower only 20 years earlier, but the exhilaration of beginning something totally new with surgical residency under William P. Longmire certainly dominated my thoughts on the road. The intellectual and conjoined physical capabilities of surgery as a profession excited me. The first day of internship, in line to check in, I met fellow intern Doug McConnell and quickly befriended John Cook, Erick Albert, Ed Pritchett, Ron Busuttil, Arnie Brody, John Kaswick, Dave Confer and the rest of our 18 at the bottom of the UCLA training pyramid. Over the five-year process, we learned the knowledge base, skills, and professionalism of surgery through experience, teaching, study, and role models. In the blink of an eye 1971 has become 2019 and, suddenly I’m near the end of my career.

Reading Arrowsmith and the recent story of the Theranos debacle in John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, I saw those protagonists wanting to change the world. My hopes in 1971 were not so grand, I just wanted to find my own relevance and hoped to become good in my career. Most people similarly want to make their mark in one way or another, through job, family, art, or community. Some, however, actually intend to change the larger world, although their idea of “change” may be someone else’s deformation.

Last month a large cohort of our University of Michigan urology residents, faculty, nurses, PAs, and staff met in Chicago at the annual AUA national meeting to learn, teach, exchange ideas, network, enjoy reunion, and circulate word of our new chair Ganesh Palapattu. The Michigan brand was strong with hundreds of presentations from our faculty, residents, and alumni. The MUSIC and Nesbit Alumni sessions were great gathering points. [Below: UM podium events with alumni Cheryl Lee, Jens Sønksen, Barry Kogan, and Julian Wan.]

Cheryl has been back in Ann Arbor this week as visiting professor.

A group of our residents and one incipient PGY1 were ga-ga at the AUA Museum booth. [Below in front: Juan Andino, Catherine Nam; back row: Adam Cole, Scott Hawken, Rita Jen, Ella Doerge, senior faculty member, Colton Walker, Matt Lee, Kyle Johnson, Udit Singhal.]

 

Two.

Surgery, the word, derives from Greek, kheirourgos, for working by hand and the term moved through Latin, Old French, and Anglo-French to become surgien in the 13th century. The epicenter of that world was the doctor/patient duality, based on an essential transaction as old as humanity with exchange of information, discovery of needs, and provision of remedies and skills. The knowledge base and tools are far better since Hippocratic times, but the professional ideals are much the same. It seemed pretty awesome to my 21-year-old self that I might one day be able to fix things with my hands like Drs. Longmire and Rick Fonkalsrud. History mattered to our UCLA professors who insisted that trainees know the back stories of each disorder and treatment.

New interns arriving next month, called PGY1s for their postgraduate year status, may have parallel thoughts to those of mine 48 years ago as they start their journeys. Pyramidal training models no longer exist – PGY1s can reasonably expect to complete their programs. Their experiences will be replete with contemporary expectations, notably patient safety, value propositions, clinical outcome assessments, co-morbidities, social determinants of disease, personal well-being, attention to patient experience, and teamwork with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Acronyms have proliferated, tools are more powerful, and regulation grows more burdensome. Nevertheless, essential transactions remain at the center of health care with needs of patients addressed by the knowledge, skills, and kindness of healthcare providers, one patient and one provider at a time.

While taking pride in the labels doctor, physician, surgeon, nurse, and physician’s assistant we realize now that teams of providers with many types of expertise congregate around each single patient, either immediately physically as “bedside teams” (in clinics as well), sequentially, or virtually (with office staff, coders, laboratories, or electronically). Teams offer exquisitely specialized expertise and “wisdom of crowds,” although patients often find no single person in charge of their care.

 

Three.

Patient safety was a given when I was a resident. It was wrapped up in regular Morbidity and Mortality conferences without explicit use of that phrase, patient safety. Around that time a young graduate student in sociology, Charles Bosk, embedded himself in an academic surgical team for 18 months to discover how surgery was learned, practiced, and lived at an unnamed “Pacific Hospital.” The result was his book in 1979, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure. Bob Bartlett, my friend and colleague in the Surgery Department, introduced me to it a few years later. A second edition in 2003 was reviewed by Williamson. [Williamson R. J Royal Soc Med. 97(3):147-148, 2004.]

Patient safety has grown since my internship from an obvious but unarticulated expectation to a distinct field of study modeled after other industries, notably aviation. Health care has learned much from other professions such as the concepts of safety culture, standardization of procedures, checklists, and so forth, although healthcare is more multidimensional and nuanced than those other worlds. Bosk recently reflected on the health care exceptionality in a Lancet article, “Blind spots in the science of safety,” written with Kirstine Pedersen, concluding:

“There is a science of safety to reduce preventable adverse outcomes. But health care also has an irreducibly relational, experiential, and normative element that remains opaque to safety science. The contribution of a kind and reassuring word; a well delivered and appropriately timed disclosure of a bad diagnosis; or an experience-based evaluation of a small but important change in a patient’s condition – all are difficult, if not impossible to capture in a performance metric. Accomplishing safety and avoiding harm depend on discretion, effective teamwork, and local knowledge of how things work in specific clinical settings. Finally, the successful practice of a science of safety presupposes in theory what is most difficult to achieve in practice: a stable functioning team capable of wisely adapting general guidelines to specific cases.” [Bosk CL, Pedersen KZ, “Blind spots in the science of safety.” The Lancet 393:978-979, 2019.]

 

Four.

The Michigan Urology Centennial is nearly here and the process of writing our departmental history has elicited many names and stories. Bookends demarcating any era may be discretionary choices and our starting point could easily be debated. Perhaps the first “urologic” procedure of Moses Gunn initiated this specialty at Michigan in the 1850s, or the first faculty appointments with the term lecturer on genitourinary surgery, held by Cyrenus Darling (1902) or clinical professor of genitourinary surgery by Ira Dean Loree (1907) might qualify. Unquestionably, though, the arrival of Hugh Cabot in the autumn of 1919 brought modern urology with its academic components to the University of Michigan. Cabot was the first to use the 20thcentury terminology, urology, at UM and he was Michigan’s celebrity in the field. He literally brought Modern Urology to Ann Arbor, as that was the name of his two-volume state-of-the art textbook of 1918, repeated in a second edition in 1924. Cabot probably didn’t anticipate becoming Medical School dean when he left Boston two years earlier, but his advancement was hardly accidental. A number of other prominent faculty members were well-positioned to replace Dean Victor Vaughan, but Cabot played his political cards well and won the job.

Frederick George Novy (1864-1957) was the strongest competitor. Born and raised in Chicago, Novy obtained a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Michigan in 1886. His master’s thesis was “Cocaine and its derivatives” in 1887. Teaching bacteriology as an instructor, his Ph.D. thesis in 1890 was “The toxic products of the bacillus of hog cholera.” After an M.D. in 1891 he followed the footsteps of his teacher Victor Vaughan as assistant professor of hygiene and physiological chemistry. Visiting key European centers in 1894 and 1897, Novy brought state-of-the-art bacteriology to Ann Arbor, rising to full professor in 1904 and first chair of the Department of Bacteriology. His studies of trypanosomes and spirochetes, laboratory culture techniques, anaerobic organisms, and the tubercle bacillus were widely respected. Our colleague Powel Kazanjian wrote a first-rate book on Novy.

 

Five.

Paul de Kruif (1890-1971), one of Novy’s students, bears particular mention. [Above: de Kruif, courtesy Bentley Library.]  de Kruif came from Zeeland, Michigan, to Ann Arbor for a bachelor’s degree in 1912 and then a Ph.D. in 1916. He joined the U.S. Mexican Expedition (“the Pancho Villa Expedition”) against Mexican revolutionary paramilitary forces in 1916 and 1917, then saw service in France with the Sanitary Corps, investigating the gas gangrene prevalent in the trenches of WWI. de Kruif returned to Michigan as assistant professor in 1919 working in Novy’s laboratory, publishing a paper on streptococci and complement activation.

Novy helped de Kruif secure a prestigious position at the Rockefeller Institute in 1920, to study mechanisms of respiratory infection. While there de Kruif wrote an anonymous chapter on modern medicine for Harold Sterns’s Civilization in 1922. The 34 chapters were mainly written by prominent authors, including H.L. Mencken, Ring Larder, and Lewis Mumford, so how de Kruif, a young bacteriologist (and non-physician), came to be included in this compilation is a mystery. de Kruif’s 14-page chapter, however, caused the biggest stir, skewering contemporary medical practice and doctors for “a mélange of religious ritual, more or less accurate folk-lore, and commercial cunning.” de Kruif viewed medical practice as unscientific “medical Ga-Ga-ism,” but his article was sophomoric at best.

Once de Kruif was revealed as author the Rockefeller Institute fired him in September, 1922. The newly unemployed bacteriologist came in contact with a newly prominent author, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), praised for Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). Lewis was ready for his next novel and two friends, Morris Fishbein and H.L. Mencken, persuaded him to focus on medical research. Lewis, son and grandson of physicians, knew little of medical research, so Fishbein, editor of JAMA, connected Lewis to de Kruif. A bond and collaboration ensued for Arrowsmith (1925) in which a central character, Max Gottlieb, was modelled around Novy. Lewis gave de Kruif 25% of the royalties for the collaboration, but held back on sharing authorship, claiming that it might hurt sales. At the time de Kruif thought his share generous, but later became somewhat embittered as book sales soared with Lewis as sole author. [Henig RM. The life and legacy of Paul de Kruif. Alicia Patterson Foundation.]

Arrowsmith was selected for the 1926 Pulitzer Prize, but Lewis refused the $1,000 award, explaining his refusal in a letter to the Pulitzer Committee:

“… I invite other writers to consider the fact that by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.”

Four years later, however, Lewis accepted the $46,350 Nobel Prize. His Nobel lecture was “The American Fear of Literature.”

Leaving lab behind, de Kruif became a full-time science writer, one of the first in that new genre of journalism. His Microbe Hunters, published in 1926, became a classic and inspired me when I read it as an early teenager, unaware of the controversies around it. [Chernin E. “Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters and an outraged Ronald Ross.” Rev Infec Dis. 10(3):661-667, 1988.] Arrowsmith was re-published in 2001 by Classics of Medicine Library and Michigan’s Howard Markel provided the introduction. [Markel H. “Prescribing Arrowsmith.”]

 

Ga-ga notes

de Kruif’s adjective ga ga for American medicine in the 1920s intended to mean foolish, infatuated, or wildly enthusiastic. It can also denote someone no longer in possession of full mental faculties or a dotard. (Dotard recently came into play in the peculiar rhetoric of the North Korean and American leaders.) The ga ga origin may be from early 20thcentury French for a senile person based on gâteux, variant of gâteur and hospital slang for “bed-wetter.” Gateau, of course, is also French for “cake” and gateux is the plural. de Kruif himself was negatively ga-ga with his criticism of medical specialism. Lady Gaga brings the term to a new level of consciousness and a new generation.

The past week was big on three continents for those who go ga-ga over historic anniversaries. Two hundred years ago, on 31 May 1819, Walt Whitman was born on Long Island. His Leaves of Grass, among much else, had the intriguing phrase “I am large, I contain multitudes,” a prescient reminder of our cellular basis, microbiome, or the plethora of information that leads to TMI (“too much information”) or burnout. Seventy-five years ago, on 4 June 1944, Operation Overlord at Normandy, France, initiated the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Thirty years ago, on 4 June 1989, protests in a large city square between the Forbidden City and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong turned violent and are now referred to as the June Fourth Incident in the People’s Republic of China.

 

David A. Bloom

University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Matula Thoughts March 1, 2019

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DAB What’s New Mar 1, 2019

NESBIT_CalendarExample_MAR

Stories

1999 words

[Above: childbirth fever pamphlet 1855 – a fatal complication. Below: M&M complications conference at UM Urology.]

One.             

M&Ms.  Once a month our department gathers at 7 AM on a Thursday morning for Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conference, as is typical of most surgical training programs. This recurring touchpoint integrates the triple mission of medical academia so we can learn from the serious complications inherent to our work, improve the quality of that work, and discover new avenues of investigation. Typically, residents or fellows tell a story of a complication or a death, faculty members involved consider “what might have been done differently,” others share their experiences and thoughts, and sometimes a literature-based short presentation is offered. Complications are classified by the Clavien system. [Above: January 2019 M&M with Priyanka Gupta discussing the new complications entry system.] These conferences fine-tune our mutual relevance, allowing regular inspection of our complications, discussion from the perspective of quality improvement, and calibration of individual work with that of colleagues.

When I was a resident, grand rounds centered around the chair, whose every opinion mattered. Performances as residents could make or break progression through residency and chances for fellowships or good jobs. The chair critiqued everyone else and molded the department in his image (always a “his” during my training), much like an Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table, the title of essays by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1858. Those of us who made it through the process naturally carried a deep respect and even fondness for the chair, while others were not quite so enamored. Things have changed, especially in big departments, with decentralization to divisions and teams much more the order of the day, and while structure is still necessarily hierarchical (the buck must stop somewhere), a more democratic flavor rules the day at M&M conferences and grand rounds.

Although chairs are no longer the center of departmental universes, they set much of the tone and represent the team administratively to the rest of the institution. Departments improve when leadership rotates carefully, as it has in our case, and today it’s official: we welcome Ganesh Palapattu to our chair position, and Brent Hollenbeck as vice chair of the University of Michigan Department of Urology.

 

Two.

The Clavien-Dindo system, described in 2004 by Zurich surgeons Pierre Clavien and Daniel Dindo, assigns grades to surgical complications: Grade I events are small deviations from normal expected operative or postoperative courses; Grade II events are atypical medication needs, including blood transfusion and total parenteral nutrition; Grade III are complications requiring surgical, endoscopic, or radiologic intervention – with or without anesthesia; Grade IV are life-threatening complications; and Grade V is death. [PA Clavien et al. Ann Surg. 250:187-196, 2009.] Our M & M conferences focus on Clavien III or greater complications, mainly to identify learning opportunities: what could we do better, personally, or in our teams and systems? Human activities are inevitably susceptible to periodic errors and negative outcomes, but medical complications are serious disappointments and sometimes tragedies for patients and their families. Each complication is a story, often a complex one. Faculty and residents must learn from them, grieve over them, and learn to deal with the adversity. Just as importantly, surgeons must move on to take care of the next patient. The seminal book Forgive and Remember by Bosk, discussed on these pages in the past, is worth renewed attention. [Bosk CL. Forgive and Remember. Managing Medical Failure. University of Chicago Press. 1979.]

Getting “the story” right is a universal necessity, whether from personal points of view, social perspectives, or occupational demands. Journalists, teachers, politicians, engineers, lawyers, and physicians need to understand stories and ascertain truth. Surgeons need to know a patient’s story from the diagnostic perspective in order to come to operative solutions, and if complications occur, then it is imperative to understand those stories, for only then can the practice of medicine improve.

 

Three.

The idea of what is “right” – that is what can be proven true or is generally accepted as correct – is surprisingly complex, requiring a socially shared sense of “truth” and factual reliability.  A person’s ability to adhere to truth is a matter of integrity, and we expect higher levels of integrity from physicians, scientists, and engineers than many other occupations. Yet, shouldn’t we expect integrity in all responsible occupations, from chefs to politicians? When is it forgivable to tamper with the public trust for personal gain or malicious reason and what are the boundaries of the First Amendment? These tough questions are beyond solution in Matula Thoughts, but should be considered and discussed by all members of society.

It is a fact, as this line is written, that it is not raining outside my window, but that fact will change with time and environment. Some facts are difficult to ascertain and people sometimes have legitimate misconceptions of reality, uncertainty being intrinsic to humanity. Deliberate misrepresentation of reality, however, is corrosive to any social group and to society at large. Deliberate misrepresentation is expected in the products of fiction and the entertainment industry, but not in their business dealings. Misrepresentation in business, politics, religion, etc., erodes trust, essential for a healthy society. When stories become propaganda, or opinions masquerade as journalism, free speech is abused. Misrepresentation in medicine and science, worse matters, are social crimes.

These last charges are tricky, running contrary to the First Amendment and the cherished idea of free speech. Yet, “yelling fire” in a theater or its equivalent on social media is too  dangerous for society to tolerate. Democratic societies have yet to figure out where and how to draw the line between deliberate misrepresentation and free speech, and the hyper-pace of contemporary social media exacerbates the dilemma. Given that the ideas of the First Amendment are self-ordained “rights” of humanity, it is unlikely that they can be preserved if they cannot be better stewarded to serve the public, rather than serve individuals, factions, or ideologies.

Then, too, there is the matter of the “backstory,” the history, conditions, and other narratives leading up to a particular story and the circumstances that frame it. In health care the backstory includes co-morbidities, while in the field of economics such circumstances are dismissed as externalities. Although stories are simpler and easy to “understand” when stripped of complicating and confounding matters, stripped-down stories rarely convey the whole truth of a matter for accurate understanding.

 

Four.

It is hard to escape the name Oliver Wendell Holmes in American history. There were two of them, the first an iconic American physician (1809-1894) and the second, his son, an iconic supreme court justice (1841-1935). Both lives and careers centered on stories and truth.

Medical practice is a highly social profession and business. Socialization of practitioners with specialized knowledge and experience, sharing their stories, is a route to progress and today’s M&M conferences are programmed opportunities for this teamwork. Medical education, standards of practice, quality improvement, and research have been built around socialization since ancient times of Mediterranean and Asian medical practice, medieval professional guilds, and doctors in the early days of the United States.

One sparkling example was The Boston Society for Medical Improvement, doctors who wanted to share ideas and ascertain truths. Established in 1828 by John Spooner with 11 members, the Society quickly grew to 35 by 1838. Meetings were held the second and fourth Monday each month, originally in Spooner’s rented room on Washington Street.  A cabinet keeper managed a collection of specimens contributed by the members. Only “elite” practicing physicians of Boston were eligible and a younger set of physicians in 1835 formed their separate Boston Society for Medical Observation, echoing the terminology of Professor Louis in Paris, under whom Holmes studied. The two competing Boston groups ultimately merged in 1894.

The picture above, from the Countway Library Center for the History of Medicine, shows the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1853: sitting – George Bethune, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Cabot, Jonathan Mason Warren, William Coale, James Gregerson; standing – Charles Ware, Robert Hooper, Le Baron Russell, Samuel Parkman. Samuel Cabot was the grandfather of Arthur Tracy Cabot and Hugh Cabot, two of the most influential urologists in the transitional fin de siècle between the end of the late 19th century and early 20th. Hugh Cabot’s arrival in Ann Arbor in autumn 1919 defines the Michigan Urology centennial.

 

Five.

Puerperal fever & a murder. At a summer meeting in 1842 of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, JBS Jackson queried fellow members their opinions regarding the possible contagiousness of puerperal fever. Jackson was concerned by the death of a colleague after treating an infected woman, and he knew of other infections incurred by subsequent patients the decreased physician had treated before he died. Holmes, a member of the original French Society of Medical Observation during his study in Paris a decade earlier, took up Jackson’s question and presented his own independent research, “The contagiousness of puerperal fever,” back to the Society on February 13, 1843. The presentation was commemorated in a 1940 painting by Dean Cornwell, That Mothers Might Live (below).

OWH 1843

The New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery published Holmes’s talk in April and it was reprinted as a pamphlet (top, lead picture). Holmes was certain that “obstetricians, nurses, and midwives were active agents of the infection, carrying the dreaded disease from the bedside of one mother to the next.” This was among the earliest good evidence for germ theory of disease.

Holmes was dean of Harvard Medical School when he factored in the sensational murder case of wealthy Bostonian George Parkman in 1849. Parkman had studied medicine, but never practiced, so it is likely that the Parkman identified in the Boston Society for Medical Improvement was his relative. The murdered George Parkman was a wealthy Bostonian who had studied abroad, received an MD in Aberdeen, Scotland, and studied further in France, taking particular interest in mental illness. After returning home, however, he never practiced medicine, instead managed family property, so was ineligible for the Medical Improvement Society, although an admired friend of Holmes.

John Webster was also from an affluent family and had studied abroad. Later in Boston Webster became professor of chemistry and geology at the medical school, but ran into debt often and borrowed extensively, including from George Parkman. In an argument over a debt, Webster killed Parkman in his medical school office on November 23, 1849, dismembered the body, and hid it in a locked cellar basement restroom. An astute custodian, Ephraim Littlefield, concerned about the popular missing Bostonian, broke into the room and discovered the body remnants on November 30, 1849.  Holmes testified persuasively at the 12-day trial and Webster was executed by hanging on August 30, 1850. Holmes dedicated his 1850 introductory lecture to the medical school class in Parkman’s memory. [Below: OW Holmes c. 1879.]

Holmes enjoyed stories, although happier ones than that of his murdered friend. He wrote poetry and books of fiction and nonfiction. A founder of the Atlantic Magazine, he contributed to it regularly and mingled with the literary set in Boston, including J. Elliot Cabot, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Holmes popularized the term Boston Brahmin and was certainly one of them. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table is a collection of 1857-1858 essays Holmes wrote for The Atlantic, published in book form in 1858. The stories are one-sided dialogues between a genial and “anonymous author” and other residents of a New England boarding house. It is, perhaps, more than a coincidence that the fictional detective imagined 40 years later by Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, would share the Holmes surname.

 

Short story. Frédéric François Chopin born this day in 1810, six months after Holmes, lived a short life of only 39 years. Although numerous photographs exist of Holmes, only two exist of the great Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. [Below: top, Chopin c. 1847, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chopin1847_R_SW.jpg]

Photography as a technology was new and rare during the early lives of these two men, but Holmes’ luck of longevity gave him greater opportunity as a subject. [Above: Chopin c. 1849. Daguerreotype by Louis-Auguste Bisson.]

 

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts.

David A. Bloom

University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

 

 

Matula Thoughts October 7, 2016

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DAB What’s New Oct 7, 2016

 

Education, errors, & box scores

3931 words

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One.               Autumn is academic medicine’s high season.  With summer officially over the serious work is well underway for faculty promotions, graduate medical education (GME) in academic centers, and continuing medical education in professional meetings. Residency interviews are beginning. Coincidentally, this is also the definitive season for baseball as major league teams compete for its World Series. [Above: San Francisco Giants 6 – St. Louis Cardinals 2. Sept 15, 2016. Cueto pitching.]

With participants notching up their games, rookie mistakes become occasional, although errors never totally go away.  Performance measurements allow individuals to understand and improve their work, while inviting inevitable comparisons. Fielders in baseball, for example, are judged by errors: the number of times they fail to complete plays that could have been made by common effort, a term roughly equivalent to the reasonable and standard practice by which physicians are judged.

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[Derek Jeter, Yankee shortstop. 8/24/08. Photographer Keith Allison]

It may seem awkward for physicians to talk of mistakes, however these conversations are not only necessary, but also healthy when done properly. We formalize these conversations in morbidity and mortality (M&M) conferences. Fortunately, most errors are minor if not trivial and are intrinsic to all biologic behaviors, indeed species variation itself is built on error. Health care cannot be expected to be exempt from error, for who among us has not missed a blood draw or an IV placement on first puncture? Who has not made a transcription error when typing an entry into today’s electronic medical record systems. (When I trained to become a surgeon, typing skills were not a required skill set; today many surgeons spend nearly as much time typing as operating – surely an epic waste of health care resources.) On the other hand, serious complications such as postoperative bleeding, deep venous thromboses, anastomotic leaks, or missed relevant comorbidities, bear inspections that should inspire personal and systemic improvements to minimize errors for future patients. While we take errors very seriously, we can’t let them disable us, for the next patient is always in line.

The point to make is that the conversation of error in health care is essential. The practice of medicine is, indeed, a practice and things that don’t turn out as intended need to be investigated to improve quality of practice. Charles Bosk’s 1979 book, Forgive and Remember, is a classic starting point. You can get a good summary of it in Robin Williamson’s review of its 2003 edition [J. Royal Society of Medicine. 2004 Mar; 97(3): 147-148]. While surgical fields have a long history of tough treatment of trainees, surgical training today (GME) is far less recriminating when errors are the result of earnest effort. [Below: Ed McGuire lecturing as emeritus professor to residents last year.]

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Two.           An astonishing array of events emblematic of our three-way mission initiated the 2016 academic high season of urology in Ann Arbor.

Inspiring Discovery was a celebration at North Campus Research Center focusing on partnerships with donors that fuel education and research. Tom Varbedian, distinguished Michigan alumnus, friend of our department, and retired ophthalmologist was among those honored, in his instance for support of medical students. He has funded 14 students over the years and 4 “Varbedian scholars” are presently here in medical school. [Below: Tom and some of his students]

varbedian-students

The evening was rich in meaningful stories of partnerships between donors and faculty to grow the conceptual basis and technology of health care while educating the next generation. Endowments are the key strength of Michigan’s future as a great academic medical center.

Dow Division Health Services Research Symposium targeted the topic of performance. The program by Jim Dupree, Khurshid Ghani, and Chad Ellimoottil featured our own and other world-wide experts who investigate and innovate health care delivery. This third biennial meeting included around 200 attendees.

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Jerry Weisbach Lectureship last month brought Martin Gleave from Vancouver, BC to discuss his extraordinary work co-targeting the androgen receptor and adaptive survival pathways in advanced prostate cancer.

Nesbit alumni weekend featured Freddie Hamdy from Oxford University describing his unique randomized trial of active monitoring, radical prostatectomy, and radiotherapy for localized prostate cancer. Two NEJM papers from his group last month attracted international attention and Freddie’s talk to us was the first public presentation. At the cutting edge of reproductive medicine, Sherman Silber explained how the Y-chromosome is becoming redundant in the light of the incredible accomplishment of creating sperm and ova from skin fibroblasts. Many other talks filled the program. We were honored to have senior urologists Cheng-Yang Chang, Clair Cox, and Mark McQuiggan in the audience. Cheryl Lee (Chair at OSU) and Stu Wolf (Associate Dean at Austin’s Dell SOM) were honored at our alumni dinner and John Park won the John Konnak award for service to our department. A lively Nesbit tailgate party preceded the Wisconsin football game.

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[Above: Freddie Hamdy presents results of prostate cancer trial. Below: Freddie Hamdy, Marschall Runge, Sherman Silber, Jim Monte & Nesbit attendees]

nesbit-group

After the Nesbit tailgate we saw Michigan edge Wisconsin out 14-7. Next year’s Nesbit alumni reunion will align with the Air Force Academy game here in Ann Arbor.

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[Clair & Clarice Cox tailgating]

The Montie Visiting Professor was Ian Thompson, Jr.,  Director of the Cancer Therapy & Research Center of the University of Texas in San Antonio. Ian (below) spent childhood years (1956-59) in Ann Arbor when his father was on the Michigan urology faculty. A West Point graduate, Ian became Colonel in the U.S. Army and chair of urology at University of Texas San Antonio. He is President of the American Board of Urology. He spoke to us on the future of prostate cancer detection and therapy, and heard superb presentations from our residents and fellows.

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[Ian Thompson, Jim Montie]

This past month has been rich in education. Although these costly events interrupt the clinical work that supplies their main funding, they are educationally essential and important for quality improvement and team alignment. Quality of care is improved by expanding the conceptual basis of medical practice, clinical skills and professionalism of the workforce, and delivery systems. Alignment of healthcare workers is critical to their success in teams. In the face of new technology, new diseases, and a changing socio-economic-political environment these educational efforts cannot be sacrificed to clinical throughput.

Three.           The attendant at the gas station of life was a picturesque metaphor of Dr. Horace Davenport as he taught first year physiology to medical students here in Ann Arbor in the later 20th century (re-quoted by us in July What’s New and Matula Thoughts). The actuality of a physician’s role is more complex, as Dr. Davenport well knew, and the irony of his specific term attendant in the midst of an academic medical center full of attendings was probably intentional. (Another irony is that today’s gas stations, in contrast to those of Davenport’s time, are mostly self-service).

A physician is better understood from the neuroscience perspective with respect to mirror neurons. Humans are not unique in having these sophisticated forms of quorum sensors that facilitate empathy, a phenomenon seen in certain other biologic species such as crows, elephants, and of course fellow primates. Humans, however, have tools, skills, and systems that allow highly developed ways to operationalize empathy.

Physicians can no longer speak so territorially about their roles because health care is provided as significantly by nurses, physician assistants, and other advanced practice providers (APPs). The awkward term health care provider has crept into general use, and while downplaying the physician as a professional, the new terminology is necessary in the team play of modern healthcare. Regulatory and corporate forces reduce health care services to commodity encounters that match diagnostic codes to treatment codes. Many encounters can be delegated to APPs working at high ends of their scopes of practice. While vaccinations, dental cleaning, and sports physicals can readily be commoditized, whether routine “well patient” check ups or visits for uncharacterized problems can be similarly commoditized in 15 to 30-minute encounters remains to be seen. Some patients need the magic of attention and intuition from a health care professional that is not readily translated to check lists or passed down the ladder of expertise.

Effective attendants at life’s service stations hone their skills to observe and listen carefully while practicing their craft. In the process of listening and observing they need not only determine a patient’s diagnosis and an attendant treatment (ICD 10 and corresponding CPT codes), but also must discover relevant issues of the context of that person’s life in terms of livelihood, family, neighborhood, or socioeconomic condition. Context amplifies or minimizes any diagnosis and therapy. Without understanding the patient’s life story, that is the ultimate co-morbidities, an actual encounter in the office may have little value to the patient. All this is to say that effective attendants (physician, medical assistant, nurse, advanced practice provider, etc.) must seek to understand the patient as fully as possible, although such understanding is illusive and always incomplete.

Four.              Rabbit holes in time.   An article earlier this year in The Lancet by Kingshuk Pal, “Could you wait a second,” described a clinic visit with a woman in her mid-thirties. The encounter was allocated for a mere 10 minutes in his National Health Service (NHS) clinic in London, and in spite of an earlier add-on patient Pal was back on time for the last patient of the morning. He assumed the visit would be a simple encounter for a prescription, and indeed things started out that way. In fact, Pal had seen the same lady in brief encounters twice before and his colleagues had seen her other times as well to write prescriptions after going through standardized template checklists. However, Pal noted:

“But things didn’t feel quite right. I interrupted my internal monologue to go back over what she had just said … There was something about the vehemence with which she had expressed herself that jarred.”

Follow-up questions led into a “rabbit hole” that revealed an unexpected terrible social situation of an abusive marriage. Pal called in appropriate support services and eventually the lady became able to take control of her life. The missed opportunities to uncover the critical social comorbidity (spousal abuse) that was the basis of all of the previous encounters with the well-intended NHS physicians surely would be considered errors in other occupations. Pal commented on earlier missed opportunities to rescue the patient:

“… each time we had stuck to our templates. We were focused on her medical needs. We had listened to what she said, but not what she meant. What had been left unsaid was how much she needed kindness, sympathy, and patience. For me to give her a few seconds of my silence so that she could finally break hers. I know if I had been busy, it would have seemed like that would take forever. But the passage of time is a peculiar thing. As strange as in a consultation as it is in Wonderland:

Alice: ‘How long is forever?’

White Rabbit: ‘Sometimes, just one second.” [The Lancet. 387:1900-1901, 2016]

Five.               Attending at the station. John Berger’s factual description of a rural English general practitioner in the 1960s is an understated gem of medical literature. Berger and photographer Jean Mohr spent six weeks with the doctor. More than shadowing him, they embedded in his practice, living with him and his wife in St. Briavels in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. The physician, John Eskell, was named John Sassall for the book, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, although accounts of patients and the community were otherwise factual. Berger and Mohr observed Eskell/Sassall in his clinic (called the surgery) and dispensary, as well as on his house calls.

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This somber book has underlying themes of optimism in human kindness, meaning, and extraordinary curiosity that some people, such as Eskell possess. Berger explains how the morbidity and comorbidities of patients became the personal burden of Eskell.

“I said that the price which Sassall pays for the achievement of his somewhat special position is that he has to face more nakedly than many other doctors the suffering of his patients and the sense of his own inadequacy. I want now to examine his sense of inadequacy.

There are occasions when any doctor may feel helpless: faced with a tragic incurable disease; faced with obstinacy and prejudice maintaining the very condition which has created the illness or unhappiness; faced with certain housing conditions; faced with poverty.

On most occasions Sassall is better placed than the average. He cannot cure the incurable. But because of his comparative intimacy with patients, and because the relations of a patient are also likely to be his patients, he is well-placed to challenge family obstinacy and prejudice. Likewise, because of the hegemony he enjoys within his district, his views tend to carry weight with housing committees, national assistance officers, etc. He can intercede for his patients on both a personal and bureaucratic level.”

Six.                 Personalized medicine. Comorbidities unquestionably impact illness, and without understanding them in at least some depth, physicians can hardly claim to deal out meaningful advice and therapy. Today we confuse recognition of comorbidities, by our ability to list billing codes, with actual understanding of comorbidity relevance and impact. Prominent in Sassall’s example is the matter of who he is outside the clinic and dispensary. He represents something positive in the community and accordingly he is not quite free to live a life that doesn’t impact favorably on him, his environment, or his profession. He accepted that “trade-off” when he accepted his role as a physician. Berger continues his explanation.

“He is probably more aware of making mistakes in diagnosis and treatment than most doctors. This is not because he makes more mistakes, but because he counts as mistakes what many doctors would – perhaps justifiably – call unfortunate complications. However, to balance such self-criticism he has the satisfaction of his reputation which brings him ‘difficult’ cases from far outside his own area. He suffers the doubts and enjoys the reputation of a professional idealist.

Yet his sense of inadequacy does not arise from this – although it may sometimes be prompted by an exaggerated sense of failure concerning a particular case. His sense of inadequacy is larger than the professional.

Do his patients deserve the lives they lead, or do they deserve better? Are they what they could be or are they suffering continual diminution? Do they ever have the opportunity to develop the potentialities which he has observed in them at certain moments? Are there not some who secretly wish to live in a sense that is impossible given the conditions of their actual lives? And facing this impossibility do they not then secretly wish to die?”  [Berger. A Fortunate Man. 1967. Vintage International Edition 1997. p. 132-133.]

sassall

[Jean Mohr photo p. 50]

The doctor confronts existential issues in these questions. Berger makes the case that Sassall’s biggest inadequacy was an inability to counter the comorbidities that framed the immediate morbidities of his patients. Sassall was an idealist who tried to fix morbidities and co-morbidities patient by patient. His intermittent successes fueled his perseverance.

Seven.           Mistakes. Medical practice in Eskell’s day was mainly the binary proposition of doctor and patient, family “comorbidity” notwithstanding. Physicians had far fewer tools at their disposal than today’s incredible armamentarium, but it requires teams to deploy modern healthcare’s tools. No single John Eskell can deliver today’s miracles, although confoundingly the complex paradigm of multidisciplinary team medicine greatly increases the opportunities for error. The complexity of healthcare today and the multiplicity of people involved in the teams delivering it, has magnified the chance for mistakes in the intervening half century.

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently introduced a new department, JAMA Professionalism, with an inaugural article on disclosure of medical error. The case summary described a dermatologist who had just performed skin biopsies on two patients only to discover that the instruments he had just used had not been sterilized. The ensuing discussion revolved around the issues of disclosure and analysis of the error to preclude its repetition. [W. Levinson, J. Yeung, S. Ginsburg. Disclosure of medical error. JAMA 316(7):764-765, 2016]

A phrase has stuck with me from John Shook, the insightful “zen-master” of lean processes: I can’t remember exactly where or when he said it, but it goes like this: for us to fulfill our role, we have to keep on learning. screen-shot-2016-09-11-at-8-17-58-pm

[John Shook on right with Jack Billi]

Eight.             Retrograde thoughts. Everyone brings a unique identity to their work, and in health care the idiosyncrasies of each practitioner resonate with particular specificity in the nature of his or her practice. The professional motivations, world-view, aspirations, distractions, personal demons, work-ethic, curiosity, consistency, empathy, attention to detail, ability to listen and observe, as well as commitment to community are unique to each practitioner and are manifested distinctly in each practice, and with each patient. A mandate for professionalism is intended to bind all these variables together in the practice of medicine, but this is necessarily a vague aspiration although a national trend seeks to define a professional standard and perhaps reduce it to metrics and benchmarks. A national set of professionalism standards or a GME curricular competency can never replace the role models of John Sassall/Eskell and so many others.

It may be subversive to suggest, in today’s world of measurement and precision in medicine, that if you can’t measure something of importance, you still can (and must) improve it. The discovery of what matters to a patient may not be readily measureable. On the other hand, for things that are measureable a certain degree of precision does not matter. Whether you weigh 170 pounds vs. 169.573 pounds, or whether your creatinine is 1.2 or 1.18746, or if your BP is 120/80 or 117.3/78.4 the precision is irrelevant. However, if your abdominal aortic aneurysm or renal transplant are managed by medications that you are reluctant to admit you can’t afford – that fact really matters.

Nine.              A growing body of literature punctures any remaining illusions of the perfection of medical practice. Atul Gawande’s Complications and Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm are good examples of this genre of story-telling and introspection. This type of work is instructive, although limited to single examples of individuals, sometimes approaching the point of titillation or voyeurism. Anecdotes certainly have value, acting like fables that accrue in our minds and bring us to greater wisdom in future actions. Lacking any real-time peer review and team-based process improvement, however, these personal denouements and anecdotes are unlikely to achieve larger scale in medical practice quality improvement.

Autopsy of errors or failures is more purposeful in driving deliberate changes in the ways we deploy work, whether in the structure of a clinic visit or the steps in an operative procedure. This turns out to be the very holistic idea of the Toyota Process Systems that has translated in western business as lean engineering. Reconsidering that pseudo-scientific phrase, if you can’t measure it you can’t understand or fix it – this adage is useful, but should not become dogma. Of course, measurement is essential to understanding and improving things, but measurement is not central to all sophisticated human processes. Ideas are central to understanding and progress, and measurement is only a tool used along the way to test hypotheses, measure performances, or test results.

henry_chadwick_baseball

Henry Chadwick (1824-1908) initiated the practice of recording statistics based on his experience in the game of cricket. He applied these methods to baseball after discovering the game in 1856 while “cricket reporter” for the New York Times. His box score for reporting the game, adapted from the cricket box score, has blossomed into contemporary baseball statistics of batting average, runs scored, base on balls, strike outs, runs batted in, earned run average, fielding percentage, and errors, to name a few before falling into the more complex Sabermetrics. Numbers can replicate or model a game, but they cannot substitute for the performance of the game itself.

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[1876 Box score: Wikipedia]

 

 

Ten.               Boston surgeon Ernest Amory Codman (1869-1940) was an intellectual successor to Chadwick in the realm of health care, where scoring is more complex than in baseball. [Below: Codman collecting data.]

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Eskell and Codman were obsessively committed to their work, but centered on the patient in different ways. Both men were mavericks. Codman focused on measureable outcome, he called this the end result idea, and believed that individual physicians and hospital record systems should keep relevant information. Eskell attended to the patient in the moment and in the environment. Each physician was overwhelmed by his own idea. Codman became alienated from his colleagues and went bankrupt self-publishing his book on the end-result idea, A Study in Hospital Efficiency.  Eskell focused on his immediate performance delivering health care one patient at a time, attentive to their inevitable comorbidities, but he ultimately committed suicide. Whether their unfortunate ends were due to highly sensitive mirror neurons overwhelmed by the woes of the world, or obsessive personalities that closed the door to sufficient joy to offset their burdens is a mystery.

The word detachment caught my attention when I finished surgical residency at UCLA. My inspirational chief was William P. Longmire, Jr. and, just as our completing residents and fellows and the Nesbit Society, I was given a diploma when I finished training. The Longmire Society logo was a symbol with four corners that read: Detachment, Method, Thoroughness, and Humility. At the time (it was 1977) I understood three of the attributes, but found detachment somewhat odd: why include that word?

Over the years. I’ve come to understand it better. Clearly, Codman and Eskell suffered from inadequate detachment. Dr. Longmire, a great surgeon, found the right balance. He knew his patients quite well, but had the necessary detachment to make a grand incision, put his hands in the abdomen, and fix most any problem with exquisite skill and judgment. He felt the need to warn young trainees to develop similar detachment.

The world is different today. Minimally invasive surgery, OR checklists, and electronic health records serve their purposes, but distance us from patients. Indeed, with robots a surgeon never needs to physically touch a patient, surrogates and checklists can stand in the way. Don’t get me wrong, I have benefitted from the robot and I believe in systems (although not obsessively). However, when it is not the surgeon’s hand that makes the incision and it’s not the surgeon’s hands in the body, the doctor-patient relationship is changed, even if in a subtle way. This is reminiscent of the old farmer’s adage: if you have ham and eggs for breakfast, the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed. The new tools, the regulations, scorekeeping, and the economics of health care have created an environment of significant detachment for our trainees. We no longer need to warn them to develop that sense, rather we need to inspire the right extent of involvement and commitment that will lead them into rabbit holes and other avenues of inquiry as caring attendants at the gas stations of life.

Health care performance is now judged by a multitude of variables, some worthy and others less so: patient outcomes may not be evident for years, peer review at M & M conferences drives quality improvement, and performance measures du jour, such as Press Ganey data, remind us of our public responsibility. Ultimately, our game has no final box score. The practice of medicine is an individual art, evolving as knowledge and technology accrue and as self-knowledge notches up, one hopes in lockstep with experience, patient by patient, whether in the springtime or autumn of our careers. Measurements can improve elements of our performances, but will never substitute for artful performance itself.

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[Michigan 14 – Wisconsin 7,  Nesbit Weekend 2016]

 

David A. Bloom

University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor