Administrators

The Monthly Pulse – Administrators (Apr. 2022)

The Monthly Pulse

Industry News

The Society of Thoracic Surgeons/American Association for Thoracic Surgery Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Management of Type B Aortic Dissection

The Story

Being the most common catastrophic aortic event, aortic dissection calls for a careful approach with patient-specific interventions. As the diagnosis and management of Type B aortic dissection (TBAD) have evolved over time, The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) and the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) have released new clinical practice guidelines based on a methodical review of current data performed by expert aortic surgeons.

What You Should Know

While treatment strategies for TBAD continue to evolve, STS and AATS findings confirm practitioners should take a stepwise approach to evaluating and treating patients with TBAD, and perform ongoing clinical surveillance. For patients with uncomplicated TBAD, optimal medical therapy (OMT) is the recommended treatment. Thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) is recommended for patients with complicated hyperacute, acute, or subacute TBADs; those with connective tissue disorders or progression of disease despite OMT may receive open surgical repair instead. Patients with chronic TBAD and no prohibitive comorbidities may also be considered for open surgical repair.

Cardiology societies want to help Congress reform Medicare

The Story

Roughly 100 healthcare societies, including the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), have written a letter urging Congress to include them in their Medicare payment policy reform. The letter encouraged collaboration with the community of providers and an initiation of formal proceedings that would address systemic issues affecting physicians.

What You Should Know

The current Medicare payment system leaves many clinicians facing considerable pay reductions, which are exacerbated by factors such as inflation and increasing practice costs. Physicians are facing a freeze which would last until 2026, followed by a payment update of just 0.25%. The societies’ letter to Congress calls for a dependable payment update system that would more effectively offset rising costs, thereby continuing uninterrupted beneficiary access to care, as well as a more streamlined Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) participation experience to reduce administrative burdens.

A new tool for 3-D measurement of the aorta may identify fatal heart conditions earlier

The Story

Researchers at Michigan Medicine have discovered a new way to look at aortic aneurysm growth. The technique allows for a detailed look into three-dimensional changes of the aortic wall using high-resolution CT imaging.

What You Should Know

The current process for measuring aortic growth is error-prone and leaves uncertainties for the best measures for treatments and follow-up. It uses human “raters” to line up two images and draw lines at specific points to measure changes of as little as a fraction of a millimeter. With the new technique, clinicians could use automated programs to achieve vascular deformation mapping, resulting in a much smaller error margin, and potentially, improved clinical outcomes.

Leadership Reflections

Design Thinking
Recently, I participated in a Design Thinking course through Stanford Graduate School of Business. Design thinking is a user-centered way to conceive of and create a successful product, service, or process. It was a great opportunity to actively engage the process and consider the many ways it can be applied. Here are some key takeaways that may be helpful as you consider your team’s processes and service delivery:

Create a customer-centric team. Ask questions about customer needs with empathy, and really listen and learn from the feedback. You can use the same process when considering how to better meet employee needs.
Tackle problems without preconceived solutions. Feedback from your questions will generate out-of-the-box ideas that are likely better than your anticipated solutions.
Be willing to pivot quickly. Reimagine processes and service delivery per the feedback and then circle back to your users with solutions that better meet their needs.
Don’t forget to consider key partners. These can include patient and employee family members, other teams within the system, vendors, and so forth. Consider how to nurture these relationships in order to make your new plans a success.

Per the course, “It is becoming increasingly recognized that innovations that succeed follow a systematic, rigorous process of need identification, hypothesis generation, testing, learning, and iteration.” I encourage you to give it a try!