Health Affairs
April 2016
Study Of Physician And Patient Communication Identifies Missed Opportunities To Help Reduce Patients' Out-Of-Pocket Spending
By Peter A. Ubel, Cecilia J. Zhang, Ashley Hesson, J. Kelly Davis, Christine Kirby, Jamison Barnett and Wynn G. Hunter
Abstract
Some experts contend that requiring patients to pay out of pocket for a portion of their care will bring consumer discipline to health care markets. But are physicians prepared to help patients factor out-of-pocket expenses into medical decisions? In this qualitative study of audio-recorded clinical encounters, we identified physician behaviors that stand in the way of helping patients navigate out-of-pocket spending. Some behaviors reflected a failure to fully engage with patients' financial concerns, from never acknowledging such concerns to dismissing them too quickly. Other behaviors reflected a failure to resolve uncertainty about out-of-pocket expenses or reliance on temporary solutions without making long-term plans to reduce spending. Many of these failures resulted from systemic barriers to health care spending conversations, such as a lack of price transparency. For consumer health care markets to work as intended, physicians need to be prepared to help patients navigate out-of-pocket expenses when financial concerns arise during clinical encounters.
From the Introduction
In recent years an increasing number of Americans have chosen health insurance plans with high out-of-pocket expenses, in the form of deductibles, copayments, or coinsurance rates. According to economic theory, such plans should make consumers more sensitive to the price of health care services. Indeed, copayments have been shown to reduce health care use. However, high out-of-pocket spending can also create financial burdens for patients. In 2014 one in three Americans reported having difficulty paying health care bills. Many patients did not adhere to prescribed health care interventions because of difficulty paying for them. In addition, some patients reported that the financial burden of paying for medical care caused them to miss mortgage payments or led them to personal bankruptcy.
On the one hand, patients with high out-of-pocket spending have an opportunity to behave as informed consumers in the health care Marketplace. On the other hand, their status as consumers exposes them to potential financial burden. Ideally, patients will recognize this trade-off between the medical benefits and the financial costs of receiving health care services, incurring out-of-pocket expenses only when the benefits of receiving the services outweigh the costs.
In this article we present a qualitative content analysis of health care spending discussions from outpatient clinic visits for patients wi th breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, or depression who saw specialists who treat these conditions. We present a series of physician behaviors that interfered with patients' efforts to either lower their out-of-pocket expenses or understand the pros and cons of less costly health care alternatives.
From the Study Results
Our qualitative content analysis revealed two broad categories of physician behaviors that led to missed opportunities to reduce out-of-pocket expenses. The first set of behaviors involved the physician's failure to address the patient's financial concerns, in which the physician did not make an explicit effort to either acknowledge or deal with the seriousness of the patient's concerns. The second category involved instances where physicians did make explicit efforts to deal with patients' financial concerns but failed to resolve such concerns satisfactorily.
From the Discussion
Many health care policies are ultimately played out "at the bedside," by influencing the way doctors and patients make medical decisions. In the case of policies promoting health care consumerism, many patients are faced with important decisions about whether the benefits of health care interventions justify their financial cost. In this qualitative, observational study of outpatient interactions, we identified a range of physician behaviors that stand in the way of helping patients make informed decisions about ways to potentially lower their out-of-pocket spending. Some behaviors reflect physicians' failures to fully engage with patients' financial concerns, from never acknowledging such concerns, to dismissing them too quickly, to getting sidetracked discussing frustration with a system that creates such high out-of-pocket spending. Other behaviors reflect physicians' efforts to engage patients about their financial concerns but efforts that potentially fall short, because physicians fail to resolve uncertainty about out-of-pocket expenses or turn to temporary solutions without making long-term plans to reduce patients' spending.
We recognize that physician-patient communication is a two-way street and that some of the failures described here resulted in part from patients having difficulty clearly and explicitly expressing their financial concerns. Patients have difficulty partly because health care consumerism is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States for most people, meaning that patients have not had substantial experience that would help them become savvier about the health care marketplace. Nevertheless, it is still incumbent on physicians to do their best to overcome patients' difficulties communicating about their expenses.
We acknowledge that many of the potential failures we have identified here, if they truly do reflect physician failure, also reflect more general failure of the US health care system. Physicians in the United States have difficulty factoring financial concerns into health care decisions in part because out-of-pocket spending is often difficult to determine and health care prices are often opaque. Consequently, physicians under time constraints cannot be expected to fully resolve patients' financial concerns in the space of any single outpatient appointment.
From the Conclusion
Ideally, when people face high out-of-pocket spending for health care services, they will act like savvy consumers, exploring the pros and cons of their alternatives with full knowledge of the financial consequences of those alternatives. This confidence is undermined whenever clinical interactions lead patients to miss opportunities to explore less costly alternatives or to identify means by which they can receive their current interventions at lower prices.
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Comment by Don McCanne
Although the theme of this article seems to be that physicians should improve their skills in communicating with patients about their out-of-pocket spending for health care in order to enable spending reductions that are the goal of the ever-increasingly prevalent consumer-directed health care plans. But there is a much more important message buried in this study. Physicians do not have the time nor the tools and are basically incapable of assisting patients with their burdensome cost sharing.
Patients are mostly on their own to try to negotiate past the financial barriers to care, or, failing to do so, accept the fact that they may have to forgo the recommended health care simply because they cannot afford to pay for it. Training physicians in personal financial management so that they can counsel patients on how they can manage their deductibles and other expenses, and then expecting physicians to dedicate a significant portion of the patient interaction time to that counseling are just not practical uses of the very limited time the physician has with the patient - time that should be fully dedicated to managing the patient's medical problems.
Also buried in the full article is this comment: "From this sample of 3,000 transcripts, we excluded visits that were conducted by primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, or nurses because these clinicians are often not the ones that prescribed the expensive interventions relevant to the diseases in question."
Wow! Primary care was excluded because that is not where the expensive interventions occur? So primary care really does provide greater value? Yet most primary care (except sometimes certain preventive services) falls below today's higher deductibles, and thus the patient is quite sensitive to primary care costs because it usually lacks first dollar coverage.
It is not the lack of training of health care professionals in patient-consumer financial counseling that is the problem. It is the transfer of financial responsibility to the patient that is causing the difficulties. Many other nations that spend much less on health care than we do are able to provide first dollar coverage. We can as well. We can control costs in a much more patient-friendly manner through an improved Medicare that covers everyone.
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