Robert D. Glatter, MD

Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists such as semaglutide (marketed as Ozempic and Rybelsus for type 2 diabetes and as Wegovy for obesity) slow down digestion and curb hunger by working on the brain’s dopamine reward center. They are prescribed to promote weight loss, metabolic health in type 2 diabetes, and heart health in coronary artery disease.

Semaglutide can be prescribed in two forms: the brand-name version, which is approved and confirmed as safe and effective by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the versions that can be obtained from a compounding pharmacy. Compounding pharmacies are permitted by the FDA to produce what is “ essentially a copy” of approved medications when there’s an official shortage, which is currently the case with semaglutide and other GLP-1 receptor agonists.

Patients are often drawn to compounding pharmacies for pricing-related reasons. If semaglutide is prescribed for a clear indication like diabetes and is covered by insurance, the brand-name version is commonly dispensed. However, if it’s not covered, patients need to pay out of pocket for branded versions, which carry a monthly cost of $1000 or more. Alternatively, their doctors can prescribe compounded semaglutide, which some telehealth companies advertise at costs of approximately $150-$300 per month.
 

Potential Issues With Compounded Semaglutide 

Compounding pharmacies produce drugs from raw materials containing active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Although compounders use many of the same ingredients found in brand-name medications, for drugs like semaglutide, they may opt for specific salts that are not identical to those involved in the production of the standard versions. These salts are typically reserved for research purposes and may not be suitable for general use.

In late 2023, the FDA issued a letter asking the public to exercise caution when using compounded products containing semaglutide or semaglutide salts. This was followed in January 2024 by an FDA communication citing adverse events reported with the use of compounded semaglutide and advising patients to avoid these versions if an approved form of the drug is available.
 

Compound Pharmacies: A Closer Look 

Compounding pharmacies have exploded in popularity in the past several decades. The compounding pharmacy market is expected to grow at 7.8% per year over the next decade. 

Historically, compounding pharmacies have filled a niche for specialty vitamins for intravenous administration as well as chemotherapy medications. They also offer controlled substances, such as ketamine lozenges and nasal sprays, which are unavailable or are in short supply from traditional manufacturers.

Compounding pharmacies fall into two categories. First are compounding pharmacies covered under Section 503A of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act; these drugs are neither tested nor monitored. Such facilities do not have to report adverse events to the FDA. The second category is Section 503B outsourcing facilities. These pharmacies choose to be tested by, to be inspected by, and to report adverse events to the FDA. 
 

The FDA’s Latest Update on This Issue

This news organization contacted the FDA for an update on the adverse events reported about compounded semaglutide. From August 8, 2021, to March 31, 2024, they received more than 20,000 adverse events reports for FDA-approved semaglutide. Comparatively, there were 210 adverse events reported on compounded semaglutide products. 

The FDA went on to describe that many of the adverse events reported were consistent with known reactions in the labeling, like nausea, diarrhea, and headache. Yet, they added that, “the FDA is unable to determine how, or if, other factors may have contributed to these adverse events, such as differences in ingredients and formulation between FDA-approved and compounded semaglutide products.” They also noted there was variation in the data quality in the reports they have received, which came only from 503B compounding pharmacies.

In conclusion, given the concerns about compounded semaglutide, it is prudent for the prescribing physicians as well as the patients taking the medication to know that risks are “higher” according to the FDA. We eagerly await more specific information from the FDA to better understand reported adverse events. 
 

How to Help Patients Receive Safe Compounded Semaglutide 

For clinicians considering prescribing semaglutide from compounding pharmacies, there are several questions worth asking, according to the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding. First, find out whether the pharmacy complies with United States Pharmacopeia compounding standards and whether they source their APIs from FDA-registered facilities, the latter being required by federal law. It’s also important to ensure that these facilities undergo periodic third-party testing to verify medication purity and dosing. 

Ask whether the pharmacy is accredited by the Pharmacy Compounding Accreditation Board (PCAB). Accreditation from the PCAB means that pharmacies have been assessed for processes related to continuous quality improvement. In addition, ask whether the pharmacy is designated as a 503B compounder and if not, why.

Finally, interviewing the pharmacist themselves can provide useful information about staffing, training, and their methods of preparing medications. For example, if they are preparing a sterile eye drop, it is important to ask about sterility testing.

Jesse M. Pines, MD, MBA, MSCE, is a clinical professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University in Washington, and a professor in the department of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Pines is also the chief of clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions in Canton, Ohio. Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. Dr. Pines reported conflicts of interest with CSL Behring and Abbott Point-of-Care. Dr. Glatter reported no relevant conflicts of interest.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists such as semaglutide (marketed as Ozempic and Rybelsus for type 2 diabetes and as Wegovy for obesity) slow down digestion and curb hunger by working on the brain’s dopamine reward center. They are prescribed to promote weight loss, metabolic health in type 2 diabetes, and heart health in coronary artery disease.

Semaglutide can be prescribed in two forms: the brand-name version, which is approved and confirmed as safe and effective by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the versions that can be obtained from a compounding pharmacy. Compounding pharmacies are permitted by the FDA to produce what is “ essentially a copy” of approved medications when there’s an official shortage, which is currently the case with semaglutide and other GLP-1 receptor agonists.

Patients are often drawn to compounding pharmacies for pricing-related reasons. If semaglutide is prescribed for a clear indication like diabetes and is covered by insurance, the brand-name version is commonly dispensed. However, if it’s not covered, patients need to pay out of pocket for branded versions, which carry a monthly cost of $1000 or more. Alternatively, their doctors can prescribe compounded semaglutide, which some telehealth companies advertise at costs of approximately $150-$300 per month.
 

Potential Issues With Compounded Semaglutide 

Compounding pharmacies produce drugs from raw materials containing active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Although compounders use many of the same ingredients found in brand-name medications, for drugs like semaglutide, they may opt for specific salts that are not identical to those involved in the production of the standard versions. These salts are typically reserved for research purposes and may not be suitable for general use.

In late 2023, the FDA issued a letter asking the public to exercise caution when using compounded products containing semaglutide or semaglutide salts. This was followed in January 2024 by an FDA communication citing adverse events reported with the use of compounded semaglutide and advising patients to avoid these versions if an approved form of the drug is available.
 

Compound Pharmacies: A Closer Look 

Compounding pharmacies have exploded in popularity in the past several decades. The compounding pharmacy market is expected to grow at 7.8% per year over the next decade. 

Historically, compounding pharmacies have filled a niche for specialty vitamins for intravenous administration as well as chemotherapy medications. They also offer controlled substances, such as ketamine lozenges and nasal sprays, which are unavailable or are in short supply from traditional manufacturers.

Compounding pharmacies fall into two categories. First are compounding pharmacies covered under Section 503A of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act; these drugs are neither tested nor monitored. Such facilities do not have to report adverse events to the FDA. The second category is Section 503B outsourcing facilities. These pharmacies choose to be tested by, to be inspected by, and to report adverse events to the FDA. 
 

The FDA’s Latest Update on This Issue

This news organization contacted the FDA for an update on the adverse events reported about compounded semaglutide. From August 8, 2021, to March 31, 2024, they received more than 20,000 adverse events reports for FDA-approved semaglutide. Comparatively, there were 210 adverse events reported on compounded semaglutide products. 

The FDA went on to describe that many of the adverse events reported were consistent with known reactions in the labeling, like nausea, diarrhea, and headache. Yet, they added that, “the FDA is unable to determine how, or if, other factors may have contributed to these adverse events, such as differences in ingredients and formulation between FDA-approved and compounded semaglutide products.” They also noted there was variation in the data quality in the reports they have received, which came only from 503B compounding pharmacies.

In conclusion, given the concerns about compounded semaglutide, it is prudent for the prescribing physicians as well as the patients taking the medication to know that risks are “higher” according to the FDA. We eagerly await more specific information from the FDA to better understand reported adverse events. 
 

How to Help Patients Receive Safe Compounded Semaglutide 

For clinicians considering prescribing semaglutide from compounding pharmacies, there are several questions worth asking, according to the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding. First, find out whether the pharmacy complies with United States Pharmacopeia compounding standards and whether they source their APIs from FDA-registered facilities, the latter being required by federal law. It’s also important to ensure that these facilities undergo periodic third-party testing to verify medication purity and dosing. 

Ask whether the pharmacy is accredited by the Pharmacy Compounding Accreditation Board (PCAB). Accreditation from the PCAB means that pharmacies have been assessed for processes related to continuous quality improvement. In addition, ask whether the pharmacy is designated as a 503B compounder and if not, why.

Finally, interviewing the pharmacist themselves can provide useful information about staffing, training, and their methods of preparing medications. For example, if they are preparing a sterile eye drop, it is important to ask about sterility testing.

Jesse M. Pines, MD, MBA, MSCE, is a clinical professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University in Washington, and a professor in the department of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Pines is also the chief of clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions in Canton, Ohio. Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. Dr. Pines reported conflicts of interest with CSL Behring and Abbott Point-of-Care. Dr. Glatter reported no relevant conflicts of interest.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists such as semaglutide (marketed as Ozempic and Rybelsus for type 2 diabetes and as Wegovy for obesity) slow down digestion and curb hunger by working on the brain’s dopamine reward center. They are prescribed to promote weight loss, metabolic health in type 2 diabetes, and heart health in coronary artery disease.

Semaglutide can be prescribed in two forms: the brand-name version, which is approved and confirmed as safe and effective by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the versions that can be obtained from a compounding pharmacy. Compounding pharmacies are permitted by the FDA to produce what is “ essentially a copy” of approved medications when there’s an official shortage, which is currently the case with semaglutide and other GLP-1 receptor agonists.

Patients are often drawn to compounding pharmacies for pricing-related reasons. If semaglutide is prescribed for a clear indication like diabetes and is covered by insurance, the brand-name version is commonly dispensed. However, if it’s not covered, patients need to pay out of pocket for branded versions, which carry a monthly cost of $1000 or more. Alternatively, their doctors can prescribe compounded semaglutide, which some telehealth companies advertise at costs of approximately $150-$300 per month.
 

Potential Issues With Compounded Semaglutide 

Compounding pharmacies produce drugs from raw materials containing active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Although compounders use many of the same ingredients found in brand-name medications, for drugs like semaglutide, they may opt for specific salts that are not identical to those involved in the production of the standard versions. These salts are typically reserved for research purposes and may not be suitable for general use.

In late 2023, the FDA issued a letter asking the public to exercise caution when using compounded products containing semaglutide or semaglutide salts. This was followed in January 2024 by an FDA communication citing adverse events reported with the use of compounded semaglutide and advising patients to avoid these versions if an approved form of the drug is available.
 

Compound Pharmacies: A Closer Look 

Compounding pharmacies have exploded in popularity in the past several decades. The compounding pharmacy market is expected to grow at 7.8% per year over the next decade. 

Historically, compounding pharmacies have filled a niche for specialty vitamins for intravenous administration as well as chemotherapy medications. They also offer controlled substances, such as ketamine lozenges and nasal sprays, which are unavailable or are in short supply from traditional manufacturers.

Compounding pharmacies fall into two categories. First are compounding pharmacies covered under Section 503A of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act; these drugs are neither tested nor monitored. Such facilities do not have to report adverse events to the FDA. The second category is Section 503B outsourcing facilities. These pharmacies choose to be tested by, to be inspected by, and to report adverse events to the FDA. 
 

The FDA’s Latest Update on This Issue

This news organization contacted the FDA for an update on the adverse events reported about compounded semaglutide. From August 8, 2021, to March 31, 2024, they received more than 20,000 adverse events reports for FDA-approved semaglutide. Comparatively, there were 210 adverse events reported on compounded semaglutide products. 

The FDA went on to describe that many of the adverse events reported were consistent with known reactions in the labeling, like nausea, diarrhea, and headache. Yet, they added that, “the FDA is unable to determine how, or if, other factors may have contributed to these adverse events, such as differences in ingredients and formulation between FDA-approved and compounded semaglutide products.” They also noted there was variation in the data quality in the reports they have received, which came only from 503B compounding pharmacies.

In conclusion, given the concerns about compounded semaglutide, it is prudent for the prescribing physicians as well as the patients taking the medication to know that risks are “higher” according to the FDA. We eagerly await more specific information from the FDA to better understand reported adverse events. 
 

How to Help Patients Receive Safe Compounded Semaglutide 

For clinicians considering prescribing semaglutide from compounding pharmacies, there are several questions worth asking, according to the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding. First, find out whether the pharmacy complies with United States Pharmacopeia compounding standards and whether they source their APIs from FDA-registered facilities, the latter being required by federal law. It’s also important to ensure that these facilities undergo periodic third-party testing to verify medication purity and dosing. 

Ask whether the pharmacy is accredited by the Pharmacy Compounding Accreditation Board (PCAB). Accreditation from the PCAB means that pharmacies have been assessed for processes related to continuous quality improvement. In addition, ask whether the pharmacy is designated as a 503B compounder and if not, why.

Finally, interviewing the pharmacist themselves can provide useful information about staffing, training, and their methods of preparing medications. For example, if they are preparing a sterile eye drop, it is important to ask about sterility testing.

Jesse M. Pines, MD, MBA, MSCE, is a clinical professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University in Washington, and a professor in the department of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Pines is also the chief of clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions in Canton, Ohio. Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. Dr. Pines reported conflicts of interest with CSL Behring and Abbott Point-of-Care. Dr. Glatter reported no relevant conflicts of interest.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on March 29, 2024. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Joining me today to discuss the use of methoxyflurane (Penthrox), an inhaled nonopioid analgesic for the relief of acute pain, is Dr. William Kenneth (Ken) Milne, an emergency physician at Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, and the founder of the well-known podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to Emergency Medicine (SGEM).

Also joining me is Dr. Sergey Motov, an emergency physician and research director at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, and an expert in pain management. I want to welcome both of you and thank you for joining me.
 

RAMPED Trial: Evaluating the Efficacy of Methoxyflurane

Dr. Glatter: Ken, your recent post on Twitter [now X] regarding the utility of Penthrox in the RAMPED trial really caught my attention. While the trial was from 2021, it really is relevant regarding the prehospital management of pain in the practice of emergency medicine, and certainly in-hospital practice. I was hoping you could review the study design but also get into the rationale behind the use of this novel agent.

William Kenneth (Ken) Milne, MD, MSc: Sure. I’d be happy to kick this episode off with talking about a study that was published in 2020 in Academic Emergency Medicine. It was an Australian study by Brichko et al., and they were doing a randomized controlled trial looking at methoxyflurane vs standard care.

They selected out a population of adults, which they defined as 18-75 years of age. They were in the prehospital setting and they had a pain score of greater than 8. They gave the participants methoxyflurane, which is also called the “green whistle.” They had the subjects take that for their prehospital pain, and they compared that with whatever your standard analgesic in the prehospital setting would be.

Their primary outcome was how many patients had at least 50% reduction in their pain score within 30 minutes. They recruited about 120 people, and they found that there was no statistical difference in the primary outcome between methoxyflurane and standard care. Again, that primary outcome was a reduction in pain score by greater than 50% at 30 minutes, and there wasn’t a statistical difference between the two.

There are obviously limits to any study, and it was a convenience sample. This was an unmasked trial, so people knew if they were getting this green whistle, which is popular in Australia. People would be familiar with this device, and they didn’t compare it with a sham or placebo group.

Pharmacology of Penthrox: Its Role and Mechanism of Action

Dr. Glatter: The primary outcome wasn’t met, but certainly secondary outcomes were. There was, again, a relatively small number of patients in this trial. That said, there was significant pain relief. I think there are issues with the trial, as with any trial limitations.

Getting to the pharmacology of Penthrox, can you describe this inhaled anesthetic and how we use it, specifically its role at the subanesthetic doses?

Sergey M. Motov, MD: Methoxyflurane is embedded in the green whistle package, and that whole contraption is called Penthrox. It’s an inhaled volatile fluorinated hydrocarbon anesthetic that was predominantly used, I’d say 40, 50 years ago, for general anesthesia and slowly but surely fell out of favor due to the fact that, when used for prolonged duration or in supratherapeutic doses, there were cases of severe or even fatal nephrotoxicity and hepatotoxicity.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, all the fluranes came on board that are slightly different as general anesthetics, and methoxyflurane started slowly falling out of favor. Because of this paucity and then a subsequent slightly greater number of cases of nephrotoxicity and hepatotoxicity, [the US Food and Drug Administration] FDA made a decision to pull the drug off the market in 2005. FDA successfully accomplished its mission and since then has pretty much banned the use of inhaled methoxyflurane in any shape, form, or color in the United States.

Going back to the green whistle, it has been used in Australia probably for about 50-60 years, and has been used in Europe for probably 10-20 years. Ken can attest that it has been used in Canada for at least a decade and the track record is phenomenal.

We are using subanesthetic, even supratherapeutic doses that, based on available literature, has no incidence of this fatal hepatotoxicity or nephrotoxicity. We’re talking about 10 million doses administered worldwide, except in the United States. There are 40-plus randomized clinical trials with over 30,000 patients enrolled that prove efficacy and safety.

That’s where we are right now, in a conundrum. We have a great deal of data all over the world, except in the United States, that push for the use of this noninvasive, patient-controlled nonopioid inhaled anesthetic. We just don’t have the access in North America, with the exception of Canada.

Regulatory Hurdles: Challenges in FDA Approval

Dr. Glatter: Absolutely. The FDA wants to be cautious, but if you look at the evidence base of data on this, it really indicates otherwise. Do you think that these roadblocks can be somehow overcome?

Dr. Milne: In the 2000s and 2010s, everybody was focused on opioids and all the dangers and potential adverse events. Opioids are great drugs like many other drugs; it depends on dose and duration. If used properly, it’s an excellent drug. Well, here’s another excellent drug if it’s used properly, and the adverse events are dependent on their dose and duration. Penthrox, or methoxyflurane, is a subtherapeutic, small dose and there have been no reported cases of addiction or abuse related to these inhalers.

Dr. Glatter: That argues for the point — and I’ll turn this over to you, Sergey — of how can this not, in my mind, be an issue that the FDA can overcome.

Dr. Motov: I agree with you. It’s very hard for me to speak on behalf of the FDA, to allude to their thinking processes, but we need to be up to speed with the evidence. The first thing is, why don’t you study the drug in the United States? I’m not asking you to lift the ban, which you put in 2005, but why don’t you honor what has been done over two decades and at least open the door a little bit and let us do what we do best? Why don’t you allow us to do the research in a controlled setting with a carefully, properly selected group of patients without underlying renal or hepatic insufficiency and see where we’re at?

Let’s compare it against placebo. If that’s not ethical, let’s compare it against active comparators — God knows we have 15-20 drugs we can use — and let’s see where we’re at. Ken has been nothing short of superb when it comes to evidence. Let us put the evidence together.

Dr. Milne: If there were concerns decades ago, those need to be addressed. As science is iterative and as other information becomes available, the scientific method would say, Let’s reexamine this and let’s reexamine our position, and do that with evidence. To do that, it has to have validity within the US system. Someone like you doing the research, you are a pain research guru; you should be doing this research to say, “Does it work or not? Does this nonapproval still stand today in 2024?”

Dr. Motov: Thank you for the shout-out, and I agree with you. All of us, those who are interested, on the frontiers of emergency care — as present clinicians — we should be doing this. There is nothing that will convince the FDA more than properly and rightly conducted research, time to reassess the evidence, and time to be less rigid. I understand that you placed a ban 20 years ago, but let’s go with the science. We cannot be behind it.

Exploring the Ecological Footprint of Methoxyflurane

Dr. Milne: There was an Austrian study in 2022 and a very interesting study out of the UK looking at life-cycle impact assessment on the environment. If we’re not just concerned about patient care —obviously, we want to provide patients with a safe and effective product, compared with other products that are available that might not have as good a safety profile — this looks at the impact on the environment.

Dr. Glatter: Ken, can you tell me about some of your recent research regarding the environmental effects related to use of Penthrox, but also its utility pharmacologically and its mechanism of action?

Dr. Milne: There was a really interesting study published this year by Martindale in the Emergency Medicine Journal. It took a different approach to this question about could we be using this drug, and why should we be using this drug? Sergey and I have already talked about the potential benefits and the potential harms. I mentioned opioids and some of the concerns about that. For this drug, if we’re using it in the prehospital setting in this little green whistle, the potential benefits look really good, and we haven’t seen any of the potential harms come through in the literature.

This was another line of evidence of why this might be a good drug, because of the environmental impact of this low-dose methoxyflurane. They compared it with nitrous oxide and said, “Well, what about the life-cycle impact on the environment of using this and the overall cradle-to-grave environmental impacts?”

Obviously, Sergey and I are interested in patient care, and we treat patients one at a time. But we have a larger responsibility to social determinants of health, like our environment. If you look at the overall cradle-to-grave environmental impact of this drug, it was better than for nitrous oxide when looking specifically at climate-change impact. That might be another reason, another line of argument, that could be put forward in the United States to say, “We want to have a healthy environment and a healthy option for patients.”

I’ll let Sergey speak to mechanisms of action and those types of things.

Dr. Motov: As a general anesthetic and hydrocarbonated volatile ones, I’m just going to say that it causes this generalized diffuse cortical depression, and there are no particular channels, receptors, or enzymes we need to worry much about. In short, it’s an inhaled gas used to put patients or people to sleep.

Over the past 30 or 40 years — and I’ll go back to the past decade — there have been numerous studies in different countries (outside of the United States, of course), and with the recent study that Ken just cited, there were comparisons for managing predominantly acute traumatic injuries in pediatric and adult populations presenting to EDs in various regions of the world that compared Penthrox, or the green whistle, with either placebo or active comparators, which included parenteral opioids, oral opioids, and NSAIDs.

The recent systematic review by Fabbri, out of Italy, showed that for ultra–short-term pain — we’re talking about 5, 10, or 15 minutes — inhaled methoxyflurane was found to be equal or even superior to standard of care, primarily related to parenteral opioids, and safety was off the hook. Interestingly, with respect to analgesia, they found that geriatric patients seemed to be responding more, with respect to changing pain score, than younger adults — we’re talking about ages 18-64 vs 65 or older. Again, we need to make sure that we carefully select those elderly people without underlying renal or hepatic insufficiency.

To wrap this up, there is evidence clearly supporting its analgesic efficacy and safety, even in comparison to commonly used and traditionally accepted analgesic modalities that we use for managing acute pain.

US Military Use and Implications for Civilian Practice

Dr. Glatter: Do you think that methoxyflurane’s use in the military will help propel its use in clinical settings in the US, and possibly convince the FDA to look at this closer? The military is currently using it in deployed combat veterans in an ongoing fashion.

Dr. Motov: I’m excited that the Department of Defense in the United States has taken the lead, and they’re being very progressive. There are data that we’ve adapted to the civilian environment by use of intranasal opioids and intranasal ketamine with more doctors who came out of the military. In the military, it’s a kingdom within a kingdom. I don’t know their relationship with the FDA, but I support the military’s pharmacologic initiative by honoring and disseminating their research once it becomes available.

For us nonmilitary folks, we still need to work with the FDA. We need to convince the FDA to let us study the drug, and then we need to pile the evidence within the United States so that the FDA will start looking at this favorably. It wouldn’t hurt and it wouldn’t harm. Any piece of evidence will add to the existing body of literature that we need to allow this medication to be available to us.

Safety Considerations and Aerosolization Concerns

Dr. Glatter: Its safety in children is well established in Australia and throughout the world. I think it deserves a careful look, and the evidence that you’ve both presented argues for the use of this prehospital but also in hospital. I guess there was concern in the hospital with underventilation and healthcare workers being exposed to the fumes, and then getting headaches, dizziness, and so forth. I don’t know if that’s borne out, Ken, in any of your experience in Canada at all.

Dr. Milne: We currently don’t have it in our shop. It’s being used in British Columbia right now in the prehospital setting, and I’m not aware of anybody using it in their department. It’s used prehospital as far as I know.

Dr. Motov: I can attest to it, if I may, because I had familiarized myself with the device. I actually was able to hold it in my hands. I have not used it yet but I had the prototype. The way it’s set up, there is an activated charcoal chamber that sits right on top of the device, which serves as the scavenger for exhaled air that contains particles of methoxyflurane. In theory, but I’m telling how it is in practicality, it significantly reduces occupational exposure, based on data that lacks specifics.

Although most of the researchers did not measure the concentration of methoxyflurane in ambient air within the treatment room in the EDs, I believe the additional data sources clearly stating that it’s within or even below the detectable level that would cause any harm. Once again, we need to honor pathology. We need to make sure that pregnant women will not be exposed to it.

Dr. Milne: In 2024, we also need to be concerned about aerosolizing procedures and aerosolizing treatments, and just take that into account because we should be considering all the potential benefits and all the potential harms. Going through the COVID-19 pandemic, there was concern about transmission and whether or not it was droplet or aerosolized.

There was an observational study published in 2022 in Austria by Trimmel in BMC Emergency Medicine showing similar results. It seemed to work well and potential harms didn’t get picked up. They had to stop the study early because of COVID-19.

We need to always focus in on the potential benefits, the potential harms; where does the science land? Where do the data lie? Then we move forward from that and make informed decisions.

Final Thoughts

Dr. Glatter: Are there any key takeaways you’d like to share with our audience?

Dr. Milne: One of the takeaways from this whole conversation is that science is iterative and science changes. When new evidence becomes available, and we’ve seen it accumulate around the world, we as scientists, as a researcher, as somebody committed to great patient care should revisit our positions on this. Since there is a prohibition against this medication, I think it’s time to reassess that stance and move forward to see if it still is accurate today.

Dr. Motov: I wholeheartedly agree with this. Thank you, Ken, for bringing this up. Good point.

Dr. Glatter: This has been a really informative discussion. I think our audience will certainly embrace this. Thank you very much for your time; it’s much appreciated.
 

Dr. Glatter is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical adviser for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. Dr. Milne is an emergency physician at Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, and the founder of the well-known podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to Emergency Medicine (SGEM). Dr. Motov is professor of emergency medicine and director of research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. He is passionate about safe and effective pain management in the emergency department, and has numerous publications on the subject of opioid alternatives in pain management. Dr. Glatter, Dr. Milne, and Dr. Motov had no conflicts of interest to disclose.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on March 29, 2024. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Joining me today to discuss the use of methoxyflurane (Penthrox), an inhaled nonopioid analgesic for the relief of acute pain, is Dr. William Kenneth (Ken) Milne, an emergency physician at Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, and the founder of the well-known podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to Emergency Medicine (SGEM).

Also joining me is Dr. Sergey Motov, an emergency physician and research director at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, and an expert in pain management. I want to welcome both of you and thank you for joining me.
 

RAMPED Trial: Evaluating the Efficacy of Methoxyflurane

Dr. Glatter: Ken, your recent post on Twitter [now X] regarding the utility of Penthrox in the RAMPED trial really caught my attention. While the trial was from 2021, it really is relevant regarding the prehospital management of pain in the practice of emergency medicine, and certainly in-hospital practice. I was hoping you could review the study design but also get into the rationale behind the use of this novel agent.

William Kenneth (Ken) Milne, MD, MSc: Sure. I’d be happy to kick this episode off with talking about a study that was published in 2020 in Academic Emergency Medicine. It was an Australian study by Brichko et al., and they were doing a randomized controlled trial looking at methoxyflurane vs standard care.

They selected out a population of adults, which they defined as 18-75 years of age. They were in the prehospital setting and they had a pain score of greater than 8. They gave the participants methoxyflurane, which is also called the “green whistle.” They had the subjects take that for their prehospital pain, and they compared that with whatever your standard analgesic in the prehospital setting would be.

Their primary outcome was how many patients had at least 50% reduction in their pain score within 30 minutes. They recruited about 120 people, and they found that there was no statistical difference in the primary outcome between methoxyflurane and standard care. Again, that primary outcome was a reduction in pain score by greater than 50% at 30 minutes, and there wasn’t a statistical difference between the two.

There are obviously limits to any study, and it was a convenience sample. This was an unmasked trial, so people knew if they were getting this green whistle, which is popular in Australia. People would be familiar with this device, and they didn’t compare it with a sham or placebo group.

Pharmacology of Penthrox: Its Role and Mechanism of Action

Dr. Glatter: The primary outcome wasn’t met, but certainly secondary outcomes were. There was, again, a relatively small number of patients in this trial. That said, there was significant pain relief. I think there are issues with the trial, as with any trial limitations.

Getting to the pharmacology of Penthrox, can you describe this inhaled anesthetic and how we use it, specifically its role at the subanesthetic doses?

Sergey M. Motov, MD: Methoxyflurane is embedded in the green whistle package, and that whole contraption is called Penthrox. It’s an inhaled volatile fluorinated hydrocarbon anesthetic that was predominantly used, I’d say 40, 50 years ago, for general anesthesia and slowly but surely fell out of favor due to the fact that, when used for prolonged duration or in supratherapeutic doses, there were cases of severe or even fatal nephrotoxicity and hepatotoxicity.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, all the fluranes came on board that are slightly different as general anesthetics, and methoxyflurane started slowly falling out of favor. Because of this paucity and then a subsequent slightly greater number of cases of nephrotoxicity and hepatotoxicity, [the US Food and Drug Administration] FDA made a decision to pull the drug off the market in 2005. FDA successfully accomplished its mission and since then has pretty much banned the use of inhaled methoxyflurane in any shape, form, or color in the United States.

Going back to the green whistle, it has been used in Australia probably for about 50-60 years, and has been used in Europe for probably 10-20 years. Ken can attest that it has been used in Canada for at least a decade and the track record is phenomenal.

We are using subanesthetic, even supratherapeutic doses that, based on available literature, has no incidence of this fatal hepatotoxicity or nephrotoxicity. We’re talking about 10 million doses administered worldwide, except in the United States. There are 40-plus randomized clinical trials with over 30,000 patients enrolled that prove efficacy and safety.

That’s where we are right now, in a conundrum. We have a great deal of data all over the world, except in the United States, that push for the use of this noninvasive, patient-controlled nonopioid inhaled anesthetic. We just don’t have the access in North America, with the exception of Canada.

Regulatory Hurdles: Challenges in FDA Approval

Dr. Glatter: Absolutely. The FDA wants to be cautious, but if you look at the evidence base of data on this, it really indicates otherwise. Do you think that these roadblocks can be somehow overcome?

Dr. Milne: In the 2000s and 2010s, everybody was focused on opioids and all the dangers and potential adverse events. Opioids are great drugs like many other drugs; it depends on dose and duration. If used properly, it’s an excellent drug. Well, here’s another excellent drug if it’s used properly, and the adverse events are dependent on their dose and duration. Penthrox, or methoxyflurane, is a subtherapeutic, small dose and there have been no reported cases of addiction or abuse related to these inhalers.

Dr. Glatter: That argues for the point — and I’ll turn this over to you, Sergey — of how can this not, in my mind, be an issue that the FDA can overcome.

Dr. Motov: I agree with you. It’s very hard for me to speak on behalf of the FDA, to allude to their thinking processes, but we need to be up to speed with the evidence. The first thing is, why don’t you study the drug in the United States? I’m not asking you to lift the ban, which you put in 2005, but why don’t you honor what has been done over two decades and at least open the door a little bit and let us do what we do best? Why don’t you allow us to do the research in a controlled setting with a carefully, properly selected group of patients without underlying renal or hepatic insufficiency and see where we’re at?

Let’s compare it against placebo. If that’s not ethical, let’s compare it against active comparators — God knows we have 15-20 drugs we can use — and let’s see where we’re at. Ken has been nothing short of superb when it comes to evidence. Let us put the evidence together.

Dr. Milne: If there were concerns decades ago, those need to be addressed. As science is iterative and as other information becomes available, the scientific method would say, Let’s reexamine this and let’s reexamine our position, and do that with evidence. To do that, it has to have validity within the US system. Someone like you doing the research, you are a pain research guru; you should be doing this research to say, “Does it work or not? Does this nonapproval still stand today in 2024?”

Dr. Motov: Thank you for the shout-out, and I agree with you. All of us, those who are interested, on the frontiers of emergency care — as present clinicians — we should be doing this. There is nothing that will convince the FDA more than properly and rightly conducted research, time to reassess the evidence, and time to be less rigid. I understand that you placed a ban 20 years ago, but let’s go with the science. We cannot be behind it.

Exploring the Ecological Footprint of Methoxyflurane

Dr. Milne: There was an Austrian study in 2022 and a very interesting study out of the UK looking at life-cycle impact assessment on the environment. If we’re not just concerned about patient care —obviously, we want to provide patients with a safe and effective product, compared with other products that are available that might not have as good a safety profile — this looks at the impact on the environment.

Dr. Glatter: Ken, can you tell me about some of your recent research regarding the environmental effects related to use of Penthrox, but also its utility pharmacologically and its mechanism of action?

Dr. Milne: There was a really interesting study published this year by Martindale in the Emergency Medicine Journal. It took a different approach to this question about could we be using this drug, and why should we be using this drug? Sergey and I have already talked about the potential benefits and the potential harms. I mentioned opioids and some of the concerns about that. For this drug, if we’re using it in the prehospital setting in this little green whistle, the potential benefits look really good, and we haven’t seen any of the potential harms come through in the literature.

This was another line of evidence of why this might be a good drug, because of the environmental impact of this low-dose methoxyflurane. They compared it with nitrous oxide and said, “Well, what about the life-cycle impact on the environment of using this and the overall cradle-to-grave environmental impacts?”

Obviously, Sergey and I are interested in patient care, and we treat patients one at a time. But we have a larger responsibility to social determinants of health, like our environment. If you look at the overall cradle-to-grave environmental impact of this drug, it was better than for nitrous oxide when looking specifically at climate-change impact. That might be another reason, another line of argument, that could be put forward in the United States to say, “We want to have a healthy environment and a healthy option for patients.”

I’ll let Sergey speak to mechanisms of action and those types of things.

Dr. Motov: As a general anesthetic and hydrocarbonated volatile ones, I’m just going to say that it causes this generalized diffuse cortical depression, and there are no particular channels, receptors, or enzymes we need to worry much about. In short, it’s an inhaled gas used to put patients or people to sleep.

Over the past 30 or 40 years — and I’ll go back to the past decade — there have been numerous studies in different countries (outside of the United States, of course), and with the recent study that Ken just cited, there were comparisons for managing predominantly acute traumatic injuries in pediatric and adult populations presenting to EDs in various regions of the world that compared Penthrox, or the green whistle, with either placebo or active comparators, which included parenteral opioids, oral opioids, and NSAIDs.

The recent systematic review by Fabbri, out of Italy, showed that for ultra–short-term pain — we’re talking about 5, 10, or 15 minutes — inhaled methoxyflurane was found to be equal or even superior to standard of care, primarily related to parenteral opioids, and safety was off the hook. Interestingly, with respect to analgesia, they found that geriatric patients seemed to be responding more, with respect to changing pain score, than younger adults — we’re talking about ages 18-64 vs 65 or older. Again, we need to make sure that we carefully select those elderly people without underlying renal or hepatic insufficiency.

To wrap this up, there is evidence clearly supporting its analgesic efficacy and safety, even in comparison to commonly used and traditionally accepted analgesic modalities that we use for managing acute pain.

US Military Use and Implications for Civilian Practice

Dr. Glatter: Do you think that methoxyflurane’s use in the military will help propel its use in clinical settings in the US, and possibly convince the FDA to look at this closer? The military is currently using it in deployed combat veterans in an ongoing fashion.

Dr. Motov: I’m excited that the Department of Defense in the United States has taken the lead, and they’re being very progressive. There are data that we’ve adapted to the civilian environment by use of intranasal opioids and intranasal ketamine with more doctors who came out of the military. In the military, it’s a kingdom within a kingdom. I don’t know their relationship with the FDA, but I support the military’s pharmacologic initiative by honoring and disseminating their research once it becomes available.

For us nonmilitary folks, we still need to work with the FDA. We need to convince the FDA to let us study the drug, and then we need to pile the evidence within the United States so that the FDA will start looking at this favorably. It wouldn’t hurt and it wouldn’t harm. Any piece of evidence will add to the existing body of literature that we need to allow this medication to be available to us.

Safety Considerations and Aerosolization Concerns

Dr. Glatter: Its safety in children is well established in Australia and throughout the world. I think it deserves a careful look, and the evidence that you’ve both presented argues for the use of this prehospital but also in hospital. I guess there was concern in the hospital with underventilation and healthcare workers being exposed to the fumes, and then getting headaches, dizziness, and so forth. I don’t know if that’s borne out, Ken, in any of your experience in Canada at all.

Dr. Milne: We currently don’t have it in our shop. It’s being used in British Columbia right now in the prehospital setting, and I’m not aware of anybody using it in their department. It’s used prehospital as far as I know.

Dr. Motov: I can attest to it, if I may, because I had familiarized myself with the device. I actually was able to hold it in my hands. I have not used it yet but I had the prototype. The way it’s set up, there is an activated charcoal chamber that sits right on top of the device, which serves as the scavenger for exhaled air that contains particles of methoxyflurane. In theory, but I’m telling how it is in practicality, it significantly reduces occupational exposure, based on data that lacks specifics.

Although most of the researchers did not measure the concentration of methoxyflurane in ambient air within the treatment room in the EDs, I believe the additional data sources clearly stating that it’s within or even below the detectable level that would cause any harm. Once again, we need to honor pathology. We need to make sure that pregnant women will not be exposed to it.

Dr. Milne: In 2024, we also need to be concerned about aerosolizing procedures and aerosolizing treatments, and just take that into account because we should be considering all the potential benefits and all the potential harms. Going through the COVID-19 pandemic, there was concern about transmission and whether or not it was droplet or aerosolized.

There was an observational study published in 2022 in Austria by Trimmel in BMC Emergency Medicine showing similar results. It seemed to work well and potential harms didn’t get picked up. They had to stop the study early because of COVID-19.

We need to always focus in on the potential benefits, the potential harms; where does the science land? Where do the data lie? Then we move forward from that and make informed decisions.

Final Thoughts

Dr. Glatter: Are there any key takeaways you’d like to share with our audience?

Dr. Milne: One of the takeaways from this whole conversation is that science is iterative and science changes. When new evidence becomes available, and we’ve seen it accumulate around the world, we as scientists, as a researcher, as somebody committed to great patient care should revisit our positions on this. Since there is a prohibition against this medication, I think it’s time to reassess that stance and move forward to see if it still is accurate today.

Dr. Motov: I wholeheartedly agree with this. Thank you, Ken, for bringing this up. Good point.

Dr. Glatter: This has been a really informative discussion. I think our audience will certainly embrace this. Thank you very much for your time; it’s much appreciated.
 

Dr. Glatter is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical adviser for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. Dr. Milne is an emergency physician at Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, and the founder of the well-known podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to Emergency Medicine (SGEM). Dr. Motov is professor of emergency medicine and director of research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. He is passionate about safe and effective pain management in the emergency department, and has numerous publications on the subject of opioid alternatives in pain management. Dr. Glatter, Dr. Milne, and Dr. Motov had no conflicts of interest to disclose.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on March 29, 2024. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Joining me today to discuss the use of methoxyflurane (Penthrox), an inhaled nonopioid analgesic for the relief of acute pain, is Dr. William Kenneth (Ken) Milne, an emergency physician at Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, and the founder of the well-known podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to Emergency Medicine (SGEM).

Also joining me is Dr. Sergey Motov, an emergency physician and research director at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, and an expert in pain management. I want to welcome both of you and thank you for joining me.
 

RAMPED Trial: Evaluating the Efficacy of Methoxyflurane

Dr. Glatter: Ken, your recent post on Twitter [now X] regarding the utility of Penthrox in the RAMPED trial really caught my attention. While the trial was from 2021, it really is relevant regarding the prehospital management of pain in the practice of emergency medicine, and certainly in-hospital practice. I was hoping you could review the study design but also get into the rationale behind the use of this novel agent.

William Kenneth (Ken) Milne, MD, MSc: Sure. I’d be happy to kick this episode off with talking about a study that was published in 2020 in Academic Emergency Medicine. It was an Australian study by Brichko et al., and they were doing a randomized controlled trial looking at methoxyflurane vs standard care.

They selected out a population of adults, which they defined as 18-75 years of age. They were in the prehospital setting and they had a pain score of greater than 8. They gave the participants methoxyflurane, which is also called the “green whistle.” They had the subjects take that for their prehospital pain, and they compared that with whatever your standard analgesic in the prehospital setting would be.

Their primary outcome was how many patients had at least 50% reduction in their pain score within 30 minutes. They recruited about 120 people, and they found that there was no statistical difference in the primary outcome between methoxyflurane and standard care. Again, that primary outcome was a reduction in pain score by greater than 50% at 30 minutes, and there wasn’t a statistical difference between the two.

There are obviously limits to any study, and it was a convenience sample. This was an unmasked trial, so people knew if they were getting this green whistle, which is popular in Australia. People would be familiar with this device, and they didn’t compare it with a sham or placebo group.

Pharmacology of Penthrox: Its Role and Mechanism of Action

Dr. Glatter: The primary outcome wasn’t met, but certainly secondary outcomes were. There was, again, a relatively small number of patients in this trial. That said, there was significant pain relief. I think there are issues with the trial, as with any trial limitations.

Getting to the pharmacology of Penthrox, can you describe this inhaled anesthetic and how we use it, specifically its role at the subanesthetic doses?

Sergey M. Motov, MD: Methoxyflurane is embedded in the green whistle package, and that whole contraption is called Penthrox. It’s an inhaled volatile fluorinated hydrocarbon anesthetic that was predominantly used, I’d say 40, 50 years ago, for general anesthesia and slowly but surely fell out of favor due to the fact that, when used for prolonged duration or in supratherapeutic doses, there were cases of severe or even fatal nephrotoxicity and hepatotoxicity.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, all the fluranes came on board that are slightly different as general anesthetics, and methoxyflurane started slowly falling out of favor. Because of this paucity and then a subsequent slightly greater number of cases of nephrotoxicity and hepatotoxicity, [the US Food and Drug Administration] FDA made a decision to pull the drug off the market in 2005. FDA successfully accomplished its mission and since then has pretty much banned the use of inhaled methoxyflurane in any shape, form, or color in the United States.

Going back to the green whistle, it has been used in Australia probably for about 50-60 years, and has been used in Europe for probably 10-20 years. Ken can attest that it has been used in Canada for at least a decade and the track record is phenomenal.

We are using subanesthetic, even supratherapeutic doses that, based on available literature, has no incidence of this fatal hepatotoxicity or nephrotoxicity. We’re talking about 10 million doses administered worldwide, except in the United States. There are 40-plus randomized clinical trials with over 30,000 patients enrolled that prove efficacy and safety.

That’s where we are right now, in a conundrum. We have a great deal of data all over the world, except in the United States, that push for the use of this noninvasive, patient-controlled nonopioid inhaled anesthetic. We just don’t have the access in North America, with the exception of Canada.

Regulatory Hurdles: Challenges in FDA Approval

Dr. Glatter: Absolutely. The FDA wants to be cautious, but if you look at the evidence base of data on this, it really indicates otherwise. Do you think that these roadblocks can be somehow overcome?

Dr. Milne: In the 2000s and 2010s, everybody was focused on opioids and all the dangers and potential adverse events. Opioids are great drugs like many other drugs; it depends on dose and duration. If used properly, it’s an excellent drug. Well, here’s another excellent drug if it’s used properly, and the adverse events are dependent on their dose and duration. Penthrox, or methoxyflurane, is a subtherapeutic, small dose and there have been no reported cases of addiction or abuse related to these inhalers.

Dr. Glatter: That argues for the point — and I’ll turn this over to you, Sergey — of how can this not, in my mind, be an issue that the FDA can overcome.

Dr. Motov: I agree with you. It’s very hard for me to speak on behalf of the FDA, to allude to their thinking processes, but we need to be up to speed with the evidence. The first thing is, why don’t you study the drug in the United States? I’m not asking you to lift the ban, which you put in 2005, but why don’t you honor what has been done over two decades and at least open the door a little bit and let us do what we do best? Why don’t you allow us to do the research in a controlled setting with a carefully, properly selected group of patients without underlying renal or hepatic insufficiency and see where we’re at?

Let’s compare it against placebo. If that’s not ethical, let’s compare it against active comparators — God knows we have 15-20 drugs we can use — and let’s see where we’re at. Ken has been nothing short of superb when it comes to evidence. Let us put the evidence together.

Dr. Milne: If there were concerns decades ago, those need to be addressed. As science is iterative and as other information becomes available, the scientific method would say, Let’s reexamine this and let’s reexamine our position, and do that with evidence. To do that, it has to have validity within the US system. Someone like you doing the research, you are a pain research guru; you should be doing this research to say, “Does it work or not? Does this nonapproval still stand today in 2024?”

Dr. Motov: Thank you for the shout-out, and I agree with you. All of us, those who are interested, on the frontiers of emergency care — as present clinicians — we should be doing this. There is nothing that will convince the FDA more than properly and rightly conducted research, time to reassess the evidence, and time to be less rigid. I understand that you placed a ban 20 years ago, but let’s go with the science. We cannot be behind it.

Exploring the Ecological Footprint of Methoxyflurane

Dr. Milne: There was an Austrian study in 2022 and a very interesting study out of the UK looking at life-cycle impact assessment on the environment. If we’re not just concerned about patient care —obviously, we want to provide patients with a safe and effective product, compared with other products that are available that might not have as good a safety profile — this looks at the impact on the environment.

Dr. Glatter: Ken, can you tell me about some of your recent research regarding the environmental effects related to use of Penthrox, but also its utility pharmacologically and its mechanism of action?

Dr. Milne: There was a really interesting study published this year by Martindale in the Emergency Medicine Journal. It took a different approach to this question about could we be using this drug, and why should we be using this drug? Sergey and I have already talked about the potential benefits and the potential harms. I mentioned opioids and some of the concerns about that. For this drug, if we’re using it in the prehospital setting in this little green whistle, the potential benefits look really good, and we haven’t seen any of the potential harms come through in the literature.

This was another line of evidence of why this might be a good drug, because of the environmental impact of this low-dose methoxyflurane. They compared it with nitrous oxide and said, “Well, what about the life-cycle impact on the environment of using this and the overall cradle-to-grave environmental impacts?”

Obviously, Sergey and I are interested in patient care, and we treat patients one at a time. But we have a larger responsibility to social determinants of health, like our environment. If you look at the overall cradle-to-grave environmental impact of this drug, it was better than for nitrous oxide when looking specifically at climate-change impact. That might be another reason, another line of argument, that could be put forward in the United States to say, “We want to have a healthy environment and a healthy option for patients.”

I’ll let Sergey speak to mechanisms of action and those types of things.

Dr. Motov: As a general anesthetic and hydrocarbonated volatile ones, I’m just going to say that it causes this generalized diffuse cortical depression, and there are no particular channels, receptors, or enzymes we need to worry much about. In short, it’s an inhaled gas used to put patients or people to sleep.

Over the past 30 or 40 years — and I’ll go back to the past decade — there have been numerous studies in different countries (outside of the United States, of course), and with the recent study that Ken just cited, there were comparisons for managing predominantly acute traumatic injuries in pediatric and adult populations presenting to EDs in various regions of the world that compared Penthrox, or the green whistle, with either placebo or active comparators, which included parenteral opioids, oral opioids, and NSAIDs.

The recent systematic review by Fabbri, out of Italy, showed that for ultra–short-term pain — we’re talking about 5, 10, or 15 minutes — inhaled methoxyflurane was found to be equal or even superior to standard of care, primarily related to parenteral opioids, and safety was off the hook. Interestingly, with respect to analgesia, they found that geriatric patients seemed to be responding more, with respect to changing pain score, than younger adults — we’re talking about ages 18-64 vs 65 or older. Again, we need to make sure that we carefully select those elderly people without underlying renal or hepatic insufficiency.

To wrap this up, there is evidence clearly supporting its analgesic efficacy and safety, even in comparison to commonly used and traditionally accepted analgesic modalities that we use for managing acute pain.

US Military Use and Implications for Civilian Practice

Dr. Glatter: Do you think that methoxyflurane’s use in the military will help propel its use in clinical settings in the US, and possibly convince the FDA to look at this closer? The military is currently using it in deployed combat veterans in an ongoing fashion.

Dr. Motov: I’m excited that the Department of Defense in the United States has taken the lead, and they’re being very progressive. There are data that we’ve adapted to the civilian environment by use of intranasal opioids and intranasal ketamine with more doctors who came out of the military. In the military, it’s a kingdom within a kingdom. I don’t know their relationship with the FDA, but I support the military’s pharmacologic initiative by honoring and disseminating their research once it becomes available.

For us nonmilitary folks, we still need to work with the FDA. We need to convince the FDA to let us study the drug, and then we need to pile the evidence within the United States so that the FDA will start looking at this favorably. It wouldn’t hurt and it wouldn’t harm. Any piece of evidence will add to the existing body of literature that we need to allow this medication to be available to us.

Safety Considerations and Aerosolization Concerns

Dr. Glatter: Its safety in children is well established in Australia and throughout the world. I think it deserves a careful look, and the evidence that you’ve both presented argues for the use of this prehospital but also in hospital. I guess there was concern in the hospital with underventilation and healthcare workers being exposed to the fumes, and then getting headaches, dizziness, and so forth. I don’t know if that’s borne out, Ken, in any of your experience in Canada at all.

Dr. Milne: We currently don’t have it in our shop. It’s being used in British Columbia right now in the prehospital setting, and I’m not aware of anybody using it in their department. It’s used prehospital as far as I know.

Dr. Motov: I can attest to it, if I may, because I had familiarized myself with the device. I actually was able to hold it in my hands. I have not used it yet but I had the prototype. The way it’s set up, there is an activated charcoal chamber that sits right on top of the device, which serves as the scavenger for exhaled air that contains particles of methoxyflurane. In theory, but I’m telling how it is in practicality, it significantly reduces occupational exposure, based on data that lacks specifics.

Although most of the researchers did not measure the concentration of methoxyflurane in ambient air within the treatment room in the EDs, I believe the additional data sources clearly stating that it’s within or even below the detectable level that would cause any harm. Once again, we need to honor pathology. We need to make sure that pregnant women will not be exposed to it.

Dr. Milne: In 2024, we also need to be concerned about aerosolizing procedures and aerosolizing treatments, and just take that into account because we should be considering all the potential benefits and all the potential harms. Going through the COVID-19 pandemic, there was concern about transmission and whether or not it was droplet or aerosolized.

There was an observational study published in 2022 in Austria by Trimmel in BMC Emergency Medicine showing similar results. It seemed to work well and potential harms didn’t get picked up. They had to stop the study early because of COVID-19.

We need to always focus in on the potential benefits, the potential harms; where does the science land? Where do the data lie? Then we move forward from that and make informed decisions.

Final Thoughts

Dr. Glatter: Are there any key takeaways you’d like to share with our audience?

Dr. Milne: One of the takeaways from this whole conversation is that science is iterative and science changes. When new evidence becomes available, and we’ve seen it accumulate around the world, we as scientists, as a researcher, as somebody committed to great patient care should revisit our positions on this. Since there is a prohibition against this medication, I think it’s time to reassess that stance and move forward to see if it still is accurate today.

Dr. Motov: I wholeheartedly agree with this. Thank you, Ken, for bringing this up. Good point.

Dr. Glatter: This has been a really informative discussion. I think our audience will certainly embrace this. Thank you very much for your time; it’s much appreciated.
 

Dr. Glatter is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical adviser for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. Dr. Milne is an emergency physician at Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, and the founder of the well-known podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to Emergency Medicine (SGEM). Dr. Motov is professor of emergency medicine and director of research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. He is passionate about safe and effective pain management in the emergency department, and has numerous publications on the subject of opioid alternatives in pain management. Dr. Glatter, Dr. Milne, and Dr. Motov had no conflicts of interest to disclose.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly recently announced that its newly approved weight loss medication Zepbound — a glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) akin to Mounjaro, Ozempic, and Wegovy — will be prescribed by independent telehealth providers on a platform managed by the company itself. The drug can be subsequently shipped direct to consumer (DTC), allowing delivery straight to patients’ homes. 

This arrangement raises serious concerns about an inherent conflict of interest, as we previously discussed. What happens when a pharmaceutical company influences access to remote providers who prescribe the very medications it manufactures? Will these remote providers truly put the patient’s interest first when debating their safety and appropriate use? Whom will patients consult if they have concerns after initiating the medication?

Without new guardrails, the potential for misleading messaging to result in dangerous prescribing patterns looms large. The United States is one of only two countries to allow DTC advertising of prescription drugs, and the explosion in demand for GLP-1 RAs is partly attributable to this model (Oh, oh, Ozempic, anyone?). Americans spent over $78 billion on weight loss goods and services in 2019; time-intensive approaches such as diet and exercise are understandably difficult, and the public has always looked for a magic cure. Although GLP-1 RAs are promising, they may present a path to disaster without proper supervision.

LillyDirect, which in addition to Zepbound offers migraine medications and other products in the company’s catalogue, primarily aims to increase access to medication and reduce costs of the drugs for consumers. The stated mission is noble: By cutting out the middlemen of traditional pharmacies and benefit managers, administrative costs drop. LillyDirect goes a step further by reducing the need for patients to visit their regular family doctor to receive these medications.

On the surface, this design appears promising. Wait times for doctor’s appointments will fall. Patients can order drugs from the comfort of their home. Everyone benefits. Or do they? 

Although easier access and reduced cost may be an apparent win for patients, DTC arrangements complicate the ethics of prescriptions and patient follow-up. This model reminds us of the roots of the opioid crisis, where powerful advertising and relationships between prescribers and drugmakers led to great harm. Providers often faced a conflict of interest when prescribing dangerous drugs to patients who requested them. We must learn from these mistakes to ensure there is critical oversight into the independence of prescribers used by LillyDirect and other DTC platforms.

Adding to these parallels, once a patient begins a GLP-1 medication such as Zepbound, stopping treatment will probably lead to regaining lost weight, serving as negative reinforcement. Hence, patients may decide never to discontinue these medications.

Obtaining what amounts to a lifelong prescription from a telehealth provider who may never follow a patient sets a dangerous precedent that will be difficult to unravel once begun. Recent challenges in access to medications such as Zepbound have been complicated by supply chain and manufacturing issues, leading to potential interruptions in patient access, ultimately affecting compliance. The rapid increase in online providers indicates competition for distribution channels has sharply increased and poses a threat to Lilly’s DTC site. 

Furthermore, the lack of a regular physician to monitor patients introduces uncertainty in safety and continuity of care. These are important tenets in protecting patients, especially patients who are not diabetic and desire a quick fix. We have already seen a huge, arguably unrestrained, rise in prescriptions of GLP-1 RAs for weight loss — up to a 352% increase in 2023.

These drugs have shown great promise and are generally safe when used in the right patient, but important contraindications exist — namely, serious gastrointestinal side effects and low blood glucose in nondiabetic persons — that an astute physician must consider. Patients desiring these medications often must undergo comprehensive laboratory testing and cardiac evaluation, both before initiation and during regular follow-up, to check for comorbidities.

The American College of Physicians cautioned against such prescribing practices in a recent position statement, emphasizing that the lack of an established care provider could adversely affect patients. We note that the potential harms of DTC sales would concentrate in economically and racially underserved communities, where obesity, lack of insurance, and low health literacy are more common. 

But the DTC genie is out of the pill bottle, and as such platforms become more common, patients will inherently take more ownership over their medical care. Remote providers will of course not be following these patients and evaluating for side effects. As a result, we in medical practice must be abreast of new downsides of these medications if and when they arise. 

Every clinician must be aware of the medications a patient is taking, even those that they did not prescribe. They should educate their patients about drug-drug interactions and side effects and order lab tests to monitor for side effects. 

Independent physicians abide by an underlying oath: First, do no harm. They serve as a trusted check on industry and a valuable long-term partner for patients. Where are the guardrails to protect patients and ensure that pharmaceutical companies are not essentially pushing prescriptions for their own products? Will traditional healthcare providers be effectively relegated to a bystander role in Lilly’s transactional approach to medication distribution? Unlike other commercial goods, pharmacologics have great nuance; not every approved medication is meant for every patient.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly recently announced that its newly approved weight loss medication Zepbound — a glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) akin to Mounjaro, Ozempic, and Wegovy — will be prescribed by independent telehealth providers on a platform managed by the company itself. The drug can be subsequently shipped direct to consumer (DTC), allowing delivery straight to patients’ homes. 

This arrangement raises serious concerns about an inherent conflict of interest, as we previously discussed. What happens when a pharmaceutical company influences access to remote providers who prescribe the very medications it manufactures? Will these remote providers truly put the patient’s interest first when debating their safety and appropriate use? Whom will patients consult if they have concerns after initiating the medication?

Without new guardrails, the potential for misleading messaging to result in dangerous prescribing patterns looms large. The United States is one of only two countries to allow DTC advertising of prescription drugs, and the explosion in demand for GLP-1 RAs is partly attributable to this model (Oh, oh, Ozempic, anyone?). Americans spent over $78 billion on weight loss goods and services in 2019; time-intensive approaches such as diet and exercise are understandably difficult, and the public has always looked for a magic cure. Although GLP-1 RAs are promising, they may present a path to disaster without proper supervision.

LillyDirect, which in addition to Zepbound offers migraine medications and other products in the company’s catalogue, primarily aims to increase access to medication and reduce costs of the drugs for consumers. The stated mission is noble: By cutting out the middlemen of traditional pharmacies and benefit managers, administrative costs drop. LillyDirect goes a step further by reducing the need for patients to visit their regular family doctor to receive these medications.

On the surface, this design appears promising. Wait times for doctor’s appointments will fall. Patients can order drugs from the comfort of their home. Everyone benefits. Or do they? 

Although easier access and reduced cost may be an apparent win for patients, DTC arrangements complicate the ethics of prescriptions and patient follow-up. This model reminds us of the roots of the opioid crisis, where powerful advertising and relationships between prescribers and drugmakers led to great harm. Providers often faced a conflict of interest when prescribing dangerous drugs to patients who requested them. We must learn from these mistakes to ensure there is critical oversight into the independence of prescribers used by LillyDirect and other DTC platforms.

Adding to these parallels, once a patient begins a GLP-1 medication such as Zepbound, stopping treatment will probably lead to regaining lost weight, serving as negative reinforcement. Hence, patients may decide never to discontinue these medications.

Obtaining what amounts to a lifelong prescription from a telehealth provider who may never follow a patient sets a dangerous precedent that will be difficult to unravel once begun. Recent challenges in access to medications such as Zepbound have been complicated by supply chain and manufacturing issues, leading to potential interruptions in patient access, ultimately affecting compliance. The rapid increase in online providers indicates competition for distribution channels has sharply increased and poses a threat to Lilly’s DTC site. 

Furthermore, the lack of a regular physician to monitor patients introduces uncertainty in safety and continuity of care. These are important tenets in protecting patients, especially patients who are not diabetic and desire a quick fix. We have already seen a huge, arguably unrestrained, rise in prescriptions of GLP-1 RAs for weight loss — up to a 352% increase in 2023.

These drugs have shown great promise and are generally safe when used in the right patient, but important contraindications exist — namely, serious gastrointestinal side effects and low blood glucose in nondiabetic persons — that an astute physician must consider. Patients desiring these medications often must undergo comprehensive laboratory testing and cardiac evaluation, both before initiation and during regular follow-up, to check for comorbidities.

The American College of Physicians cautioned against such prescribing practices in a recent position statement, emphasizing that the lack of an established care provider could adversely affect patients. We note that the potential harms of DTC sales would concentrate in economically and racially underserved communities, where obesity, lack of insurance, and low health literacy are more common. 

But the DTC genie is out of the pill bottle, and as such platforms become more common, patients will inherently take more ownership over their medical care. Remote providers will of course not be following these patients and evaluating for side effects. As a result, we in medical practice must be abreast of new downsides of these medications if and when they arise. 

Every clinician must be aware of the medications a patient is taking, even those that they did not prescribe. They should educate their patients about drug-drug interactions and side effects and order lab tests to monitor for side effects. 

Independent physicians abide by an underlying oath: First, do no harm. They serve as a trusted check on industry and a valuable long-term partner for patients. Where are the guardrails to protect patients and ensure that pharmaceutical companies are not essentially pushing prescriptions for their own products? Will traditional healthcare providers be effectively relegated to a bystander role in Lilly’s transactional approach to medication distribution? Unlike other commercial goods, pharmacologics have great nuance; not every approved medication is meant for every patient.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly recently announced that its newly approved weight loss medication Zepbound — a glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) akin to Mounjaro, Ozempic, and Wegovy — will be prescribed by independent telehealth providers on a platform managed by the company itself. The drug can be subsequently shipped direct to consumer (DTC), allowing delivery straight to patients’ homes. 

This arrangement raises serious concerns about an inherent conflict of interest, as we previously discussed. What happens when a pharmaceutical company influences access to remote providers who prescribe the very medications it manufactures? Will these remote providers truly put the patient’s interest first when debating their safety and appropriate use? Whom will patients consult if they have concerns after initiating the medication?

Without new guardrails, the potential for misleading messaging to result in dangerous prescribing patterns looms large. The United States is one of only two countries to allow DTC advertising of prescription drugs, and the explosion in demand for GLP-1 RAs is partly attributable to this model (Oh, oh, Ozempic, anyone?). Americans spent over $78 billion on weight loss goods and services in 2019; time-intensive approaches such as diet and exercise are understandably difficult, and the public has always looked for a magic cure. Although GLP-1 RAs are promising, they may present a path to disaster without proper supervision.

LillyDirect, which in addition to Zepbound offers migraine medications and other products in the company’s catalogue, primarily aims to increase access to medication and reduce costs of the drugs for consumers. The stated mission is noble: By cutting out the middlemen of traditional pharmacies and benefit managers, administrative costs drop. LillyDirect goes a step further by reducing the need for patients to visit their regular family doctor to receive these medications.

On the surface, this design appears promising. Wait times for doctor’s appointments will fall. Patients can order drugs from the comfort of their home. Everyone benefits. Or do they? 

Although easier access and reduced cost may be an apparent win for patients, DTC arrangements complicate the ethics of prescriptions and patient follow-up. This model reminds us of the roots of the opioid crisis, where powerful advertising and relationships between prescribers and drugmakers led to great harm. Providers often faced a conflict of interest when prescribing dangerous drugs to patients who requested them. We must learn from these mistakes to ensure there is critical oversight into the independence of prescribers used by LillyDirect and other DTC platforms.

Adding to these parallels, once a patient begins a GLP-1 medication such as Zepbound, stopping treatment will probably lead to regaining lost weight, serving as negative reinforcement. Hence, patients may decide never to discontinue these medications.

Obtaining what amounts to a lifelong prescription from a telehealth provider who may never follow a patient sets a dangerous precedent that will be difficult to unravel once begun. Recent challenges in access to medications such as Zepbound have been complicated by supply chain and manufacturing issues, leading to potential interruptions in patient access, ultimately affecting compliance. The rapid increase in online providers indicates competition for distribution channels has sharply increased and poses a threat to Lilly’s DTC site. 

Furthermore, the lack of a regular physician to monitor patients introduces uncertainty in safety and continuity of care. These are important tenets in protecting patients, especially patients who are not diabetic and desire a quick fix. We have already seen a huge, arguably unrestrained, rise in prescriptions of GLP-1 RAs for weight loss — up to a 352% increase in 2023.

These drugs have shown great promise and are generally safe when used in the right patient, but important contraindications exist — namely, serious gastrointestinal side effects and low blood glucose in nondiabetic persons — that an astute physician must consider. Patients desiring these medications often must undergo comprehensive laboratory testing and cardiac evaluation, both before initiation and during regular follow-up, to check for comorbidities.

The American College of Physicians cautioned against such prescribing practices in a recent position statement, emphasizing that the lack of an established care provider could adversely affect patients. We note that the potential harms of DTC sales would concentrate in economically and racially underserved communities, where obesity, lack of insurance, and low health literacy are more common. 

But the DTC genie is out of the pill bottle, and as such platforms become more common, patients will inherently take more ownership over their medical care. Remote providers will of course not be following these patients and evaluating for side effects. As a result, we in medical practice must be abreast of new downsides of these medications if and when they arise. 

Every clinician must be aware of the medications a patient is taking, even those that they did not prescribe. They should educate their patients about drug-drug interactions and side effects and order lab tests to monitor for side effects. 

Independent physicians abide by an underlying oath: First, do no harm. They serve as a trusted check on industry and a valuable long-term partner for patients. Where are the guardrails to protect patients and ensure that pharmaceutical companies are not essentially pushing prescriptions for their own products? Will traditional healthcare providers be effectively relegated to a bystander role in Lilly’s transactional approach to medication distribution? Unlike other commercial goods, pharmacologics have great nuance; not every approved medication is meant for every patient.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

As emergency medicine doctors, we regularly give medical advice to family and close friends when they get sick or are injured and don’t know what to do. In a matter of moments, we triage, diagnose, and assemble a logical plan, whatever the issue may be. This skill comes from our training and years of experience in treating emergencies and also routine medical matters. The value proposition is clear.

Frankly, it’s a service everyone should have. Think about the potential time and money saved if this option for medical care and triage was broadly available. Overtriage would plummet. That’s when people run to the emergency department (ED) and wait endless hours, only to be reassured or receive limited treatment. Undertriage would also decline. That’s when people should go to the ED but, unwisely, wait. For example, this may occur when symptoms of dizziness end up being a stroke.

Why doesn’t everyone have an ED doctor they can call? The primary reason is that the current system mostly doesn’t support it. The most common scenario is that insurance companies pay us to see patients in an expensive box called the ED. Most EDs are situated within an even more expensive box, called a hospital.

Here’s the good news: Better access to emergency care and people who are formally trained in emergency medicine and routine matters of urgent care is increasing.

One example is telemedicine, where a remote doctor — either your own or a doctor through an app — conducts a visit. Telemedicine is more common since the pandemic, now that insurance pays for it. In emergency situations, it’s rare that your own doctor can see you immediately by telemedicine. By contrast, direct-to-consumer telemedicine (eg, Teladoc, Doctor On Demand, and others) connects you with a random doctor.

In many apps, it’s unclear not only who the doctor is, but more importantly, what their specific medical specialty or training is. It may be an ED doctor evaluating your child’s fever, or it may be a retired general surgeon or an adult rheumatology specialist in the midst of their fellowship, making an extra buck, who may have no pediatric training.
 

Training Matters

Clinical training and whether the doctor knows you matters. A recent JAMA study from Ontario, Canada, found that patients with virtual visits who saw outside family physicians (whom they had never met) compared with their own family physicians were 66% more likely to visit an ED within 7 days after the visit. This illustrates the importance of understanding your personal history in assessing acute symptoms.

Some healthcare systems do use ED physicians for on-demand telehealth services, such as Thomas Jefferson’s JeffConnect. Amazon Clinic recently entered this space, providing condition-specific acute or chronic care to adults aged 18-64 years for a fee that is, notably, not covered by insurance.

A second innovative approach, albeit not specifically in the realm of a personal emergency medicine doctor, is artificial intelligence (AI)–powered kiosks. A concierge medicine company known as Forward recently unveiled an innovative concept known as CarePods that are now available in Sacramento, California; Chandler, Arizona; and Chicago. For a membership fee, you swipe into what looks like an oversize, space-age porta-potty. You sit in a chair and run through a series of health apps, which includes a biometric body scan along with mental health screenings. It even takes your blood (without a needle) and sequences your DNA. Results are reviewed by a doctor (not yours) who talks to you by video. They advertise that AI helps make the diagnosis. Although diagnostic AI is emerging and exciting, its benefit is not clear in emergency conditions. Yet, one clear value in a kiosk over telemedicine is the ability to obtain vital signs and lab results, which are useful for diagnosis.

Another approach is the telehealth offerings used in integrated systems of care, such as Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser is both an insurance company and a deliverer of healthcare services. Kaiser maintains a nurse call center and can handle urgent e-visits. Integrated systems not only help triage patients’ acute issues but also have access to their personal health histories. They can also provide a definitive plan for in-person treatment or a specific referral. A downside of integrated care is that it often limits your choice of provider.

Insurance companies also maintain call-in lines such as HumanaFirst, which is also staffed by nurses. We have not seen data on the calls such services receive, but we doubt people that want to call their insurance company when sick or injured, knowing that the insurer benefits when you receive less care. Additionally, studies have found that nurse-only triage is not as effective as physician triage and results in higher ED referral rates.
 

The Concierge Option

Probably the closest thing to having your own personal emergency medicine doctor is concierge medicine, which combines personalized care and accessibility. Concierge doctors come in many forms, but they usually charge a fixed fee for 24/7 availability and same-day appointments. A downside of concierge medicine is its expense ($2000–$3500 per year), and that many don’t take insurance. Concierge medicine is also criticized because, as doctors gravitate toward it, people in the community often lose their physician if they can’t afford the fees.

Ultimately, remote medical advice for emergency care is clearly evolving in new ways. The inability of traditional care models to achieve this goal will lead to innovation to improve the available options that have led us to think outside of the proverbial “box” we refer to as the ED-in-the-case.

At this time, will any option come close to having a personal emergency medicine physician willing to answer your questions, real-time, as with family and close friends? We think not.

But the future certainly holds promise for alternatives that will hopefully make payers and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services take notice. Innovations in personalized care that reduce costs will be critical in our current healthcare landscape.
 

Dr. Pines is clinical professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and chief of clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions in Canton, Ohio. He disclosed ties with CSL Behring and Abbott Point-of-Care. Dr. Glatter is assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. He has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

As emergency medicine doctors, we regularly give medical advice to family and close friends when they get sick or are injured and don’t know what to do. In a matter of moments, we triage, diagnose, and assemble a logical plan, whatever the issue may be. This skill comes from our training and years of experience in treating emergencies and also routine medical matters. The value proposition is clear.

Frankly, it’s a service everyone should have. Think about the potential time and money saved if this option for medical care and triage was broadly available. Overtriage would plummet. That’s when people run to the emergency department (ED) and wait endless hours, only to be reassured or receive limited treatment. Undertriage would also decline. That’s when people should go to the ED but, unwisely, wait. For example, this may occur when symptoms of dizziness end up being a stroke.

Why doesn’t everyone have an ED doctor they can call? The primary reason is that the current system mostly doesn’t support it. The most common scenario is that insurance companies pay us to see patients in an expensive box called the ED. Most EDs are situated within an even more expensive box, called a hospital.

Here’s the good news: Better access to emergency care and people who are formally trained in emergency medicine and routine matters of urgent care is increasing.

One example is telemedicine, where a remote doctor — either your own or a doctor through an app — conducts a visit. Telemedicine is more common since the pandemic, now that insurance pays for it. In emergency situations, it’s rare that your own doctor can see you immediately by telemedicine. By contrast, direct-to-consumer telemedicine (eg, Teladoc, Doctor On Demand, and others) connects you with a random doctor.

In many apps, it’s unclear not only who the doctor is, but more importantly, what their specific medical specialty or training is. It may be an ED doctor evaluating your child’s fever, or it may be a retired general surgeon or an adult rheumatology specialist in the midst of their fellowship, making an extra buck, who may have no pediatric training.
 

Training Matters

Clinical training and whether the doctor knows you matters. A recent JAMA study from Ontario, Canada, found that patients with virtual visits who saw outside family physicians (whom they had never met) compared with their own family physicians were 66% more likely to visit an ED within 7 days after the visit. This illustrates the importance of understanding your personal history in assessing acute symptoms.

Some healthcare systems do use ED physicians for on-demand telehealth services, such as Thomas Jefferson’s JeffConnect. Amazon Clinic recently entered this space, providing condition-specific acute or chronic care to adults aged 18-64 years for a fee that is, notably, not covered by insurance.

A second innovative approach, albeit not specifically in the realm of a personal emergency medicine doctor, is artificial intelligence (AI)–powered kiosks. A concierge medicine company known as Forward recently unveiled an innovative concept known as CarePods that are now available in Sacramento, California; Chandler, Arizona; and Chicago. For a membership fee, you swipe into what looks like an oversize, space-age porta-potty. You sit in a chair and run through a series of health apps, which includes a biometric body scan along with mental health screenings. It even takes your blood (without a needle) and sequences your DNA. Results are reviewed by a doctor (not yours) who talks to you by video. They advertise that AI helps make the diagnosis. Although diagnostic AI is emerging and exciting, its benefit is not clear in emergency conditions. Yet, one clear value in a kiosk over telemedicine is the ability to obtain vital signs and lab results, which are useful for diagnosis.

Another approach is the telehealth offerings used in integrated systems of care, such as Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser is both an insurance company and a deliverer of healthcare services. Kaiser maintains a nurse call center and can handle urgent e-visits. Integrated systems not only help triage patients’ acute issues but also have access to their personal health histories. They can also provide a definitive plan for in-person treatment or a specific referral. A downside of integrated care is that it often limits your choice of provider.

Insurance companies also maintain call-in lines such as HumanaFirst, which is also staffed by nurses. We have not seen data on the calls such services receive, but we doubt people that want to call their insurance company when sick or injured, knowing that the insurer benefits when you receive less care. Additionally, studies have found that nurse-only triage is not as effective as physician triage and results in higher ED referral rates.
 

The Concierge Option

Probably the closest thing to having your own personal emergency medicine doctor is concierge medicine, which combines personalized care and accessibility. Concierge doctors come in many forms, but they usually charge a fixed fee for 24/7 availability and same-day appointments. A downside of concierge medicine is its expense ($2000–$3500 per year), and that many don’t take insurance. Concierge medicine is also criticized because, as doctors gravitate toward it, people in the community often lose their physician if they can’t afford the fees.

Ultimately, remote medical advice for emergency care is clearly evolving in new ways. The inability of traditional care models to achieve this goal will lead to innovation to improve the available options that have led us to think outside of the proverbial “box” we refer to as the ED-in-the-case.

At this time, will any option come close to having a personal emergency medicine physician willing to answer your questions, real-time, as with family and close friends? We think not.

But the future certainly holds promise for alternatives that will hopefully make payers and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services take notice. Innovations in personalized care that reduce costs will be critical in our current healthcare landscape.
 

Dr. Pines is clinical professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and chief of clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions in Canton, Ohio. He disclosed ties with CSL Behring and Abbott Point-of-Care. Dr. Glatter is assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. He has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

As emergency medicine doctors, we regularly give medical advice to family and close friends when they get sick or are injured and don’t know what to do. In a matter of moments, we triage, diagnose, and assemble a logical plan, whatever the issue may be. This skill comes from our training and years of experience in treating emergencies and also routine medical matters. The value proposition is clear.

Frankly, it’s a service everyone should have. Think about the potential time and money saved if this option for medical care and triage was broadly available. Overtriage would plummet. That’s when people run to the emergency department (ED) and wait endless hours, only to be reassured or receive limited treatment. Undertriage would also decline. That’s when people should go to the ED but, unwisely, wait. For example, this may occur when symptoms of dizziness end up being a stroke.

Why doesn’t everyone have an ED doctor they can call? The primary reason is that the current system mostly doesn’t support it. The most common scenario is that insurance companies pay us to see patients in an expensive box called the ED. Most EDs are situated within an even more expensive box, called a hospital.

Here’s the good news: Better access to emergency care and people who are formally trained in emergency medicine and routine matters of urgent care is increasing.

One example is telemedicine, where a remote doctor — either your own or a doctor through an app — conducts a visit. Telemedicine is more common since the pandemic, now that insurance pays for it. In emergency situations, it’s rare that your own doctor can see you immediately by telemedicine. By contrast, direct-to-consumer telemedicine (eg, Teladoc, Doctor On Demand, and others) connects you with a random doctor.

In many apps, it’s unclear not only who the doctor is, but more importantly, what their specific medical specialty or training is. It may be an ED doctor evaluating your child’s fever, or it may be a retired general surgeon or an adult rheumatology specialist in the midst of their fellowship, making an extra buck, who may have no pediatric training.
 

Training Matters

Clinical training and whether the doctor knows you matters. A recent JAMA study from Ontario, Canada, found that patients with virtual visits who saw outside family physicians (whom they had never met) compared with their own family physicians were 66% more likely to visit an ED within 7 days after the visit. This illustrates the importance of understanding your personal history in assessing acute symptoms.

Some healthcare systems do use ED physicians for on-demand telehealth services, such as Thomas Jefferson’s JeffConnect. Amazon Clinic recently entered this space, providing condition-specific acute or chronic care to adults aged 18-64 years for a fee that is, notably, not covered by insurance.

A second innovative approach, albeit not specifically in the realm of a personal emergency medicine doctor, is artificial intelligence (AI)–powered kiosks. A concierge medicine company known as Forward recently unveiled an innovative concept known as CarePods that are now available in Sacramento, California; Chandler, Arizona; and Chicago. For a membership fee, you swipe into what looks like an oversize, space-age porta-potty. You sit in a chair and run through a series of health apps, which includes a biometric body scan along with mental health screenings. It even takes your blood (without a needle) and sequences your DNA. Results are reviewed by a doctor (not yours) who talks to you by video. They advertise that AI helps make the diagnosis. Although diagnostic AI is emerging and exciting, its benefit is not clear in emergency conditions. Yet, one clear value in a kiosk over telemedicine is the ability to obtain vital signs and lab results, which are useful for diagnosis.

Another approach is the telehealth offerings used in integrated systems of care, such as Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser is both an insurance company and a deliverer of healthcare services. Kaiser maintains a nurse call center and can handle urgent e-visits. Integrated systems not only help triage patients’ acute issues but also have access to their personal health histories. They can also provide a definitive plan for in-person treatment or a specific referral. A downside of integrated care is that it often limits your choice of provider.

Insurance companies also maintain call-in lines such as HumanaFirst, which is also staffed by nurses. We have not seen data on the calls such services receive, but we doubt people that want to call their insurance company when sick or injured, knowing that the insurer benefits when you receive less care. Additionally, studies have found that nurse-only triage is not as effective as physician triage and results in higher ED referral rates.
 

The Concierge Option

Probably the closest thing to having your own personal emergency medicine doctor is concierge medicine, which combines personalized care and accessibility. Concierge doctors come in many forms, but they usually charge a fixed fee for 24/7 availability and same-day appointments. A downside of concierge medicine is its expense ($2000–$3500 per year), and that many don’t take insurance. Concierge medicine is also criticized because, as doctors gravitate toward it, people in the community often lose their physician if they can’t afford the fees.

Ultimately, remote medical advice for emergency care is clearly evolving in new ways. The inability of traditional care models to achieve this goal will lead to innovation to improve the available options that have led us to think outside of the proverbial “box” we refer to as the ED-in-the-case.

At this time, will any option come close to having a personal emergency medicine physician willing to answer your questions, real-time, as with family and close friends? We think not.

But the future certainly holds promise for alternatives that will hopefully make payers and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services take notice. Innovations in personalized care that reduce costs will be critical in our current healthcare landscape.
 

Dr. Pines is clinical professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and chief of clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions in Canton, Ohio. He disclosed ties with CSL Behring and Abbott Point-of-Care. Dr. Glatter is assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. He has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on November 16, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today is Dr. Brian J. Miller, a hospitalist with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a health policy expert, to discuss the current and renewed interest in physician-owned hospitals.

Welcome, Dr. Miller. It’s a pleasure to have you join me today.

Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH: Thank you for having me.

History and Controversies Surrounding Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: I want to start off by having you describe the history associated with the moratorium on new physician-owned hospitals in 2010 that’s related ultimately to the Affordable Care Act, but also, the current and renewed media interest in physician-owned hospitals that’s linked to recent congressional hearings last month.

Dr. Miller: Thank you. I should note that my views are my own and don’t represent those of Hopkins or the American Enterprise Institute, where I’m a nonresident fellow nor the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, of which I’m a Commissioner.

The story about physician-owned hospitals is an interesting one. Hospitals turned into health systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and physicians started to shift purely from an independent model into a more organized group practice or employed model. Physicians realized that they wanted an alternative operating arrangement. You want a choice of how you practice and what your employment is. And as community hospitals started to buy physicians and also establish their own physician groups de novo, physicians opened physician-owned hospitals.

Physician-owned hospitals fell into a couple of buckets. One is what we call community hospitals, or what the antitrust lawyers would call general acute care hospitals: those offering emergency room (ER) services, labor and delivery, primary care, general surgery — the whole regular gamut, except that some of the owners were physicians.

The other half of the marketplace ended up being specialty hospitals: those built around a specific medical specialty and series of procedures and chronic care. For example, cardiac hospitals often do CABG, TAVR, maybe abdominal aortic aneurysm (triple A) repairs, and they have cardiology clinics, cath labs, a cardiac intensive care unit (ICU), ER, etc. There were also orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, which were sort of like an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) plus several beds. Then there were general surgical specialty hospitals. At one point, there were some women’s health–focused specialty hospitals.

The hospital industry, of course, as you can understand, didn’t exactly like this. They had a series of concerns about what we would historically call cherry-picking or lemon-dropping of patients. They were worried that physician-owned facilities didn’t want to serve public payer patients, and there was a whole series of reports and investigations.

Around the time the Affordable Care Act passed, the hospital industry had many concerns about physician-owned specialty hospitals, and there was a moratorium as part of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. As part of the bargaining over the hospital industry support for the Affordable Care Act, they traded their support for, among other things, their number one priority, which is a statutory prohibition on new or expanded physician-owned hospitals from participating in Medicare. That included both physician-owned community hospitals and physician-owned specialty hospitals.

Dr. Glatter: I guess the main interest is that, when physicians have an ownership or a stake in the hospital, this is what the Stark laws obviously were aimed at. That was part of the impetus to prevent physicians from referring patients where they had an ownership stake. Certainly, hospitals can be owned by attorneys and nonprofit organizations, and certainly, ASCs can be owned by physicians. There is an ongoing issue in terms of physicians not being able to have an ownership stake. In terms of equity ownership, we know that certain other models allow this, but basically, it sounds like this is an issue with Medicare. That seems to be the crux of it, correct?

Dr. Miller: Yes. I would also add that it’s interesting when we look at other professions. When we look at lawyers, nonlawyers are actually not allowed to own an equity stake in a law practice. In many other professions, you either have corporate ownership or professional ownership, or the alternative is you have only professional ownership. I would say the hospital industry is one of the few areas where professional ownership not only is not allowed, but also is statutorily prohibited functionally through the Medicare program.

Unveiling the Dynamics of Hospital Ownership

Dr. Glatter: A recent study done by two PhDs looked at 2019 data on 20 of the most expensive diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). It examined the cost savings, and we’re talking over $1 billion in expenditures when you look at the data from general acute care hospitals vs physician-owned hospitals. This is what appears to me to be a key driver of the push to loosen restrictions on physician-owned hospitals. Isn’t that correct?

Dr. Miller: I would say that’s one of many components. There’s more history to this issue. I remember sitting at a think tank talking to someone several years ago about hospital consolidation as an issue. We went through the usual levers that us policy wonks go through. We talked about antitrust enforcement, certificate of need, rising hospital costs from consolidation, lower quality (or at least no quality gains, as shown by a New England Journal of Medicine study), and decrements in patient experience that result from the diseconomies of scale. They sort of pooh-poohed many of the policy ideas. They basically said that there was no hope for hospital consolidation as an issue.

Well, what about physician ownership? I started with my research team to comb through the literature and found a variety of studies — some of which were sort of entertaining, because they’d do things like study physician-owned specialty hospitals, nonprofit-owned specialty hospitals, and for-profit specialty hospitals and compare them with nonprofit or for-profit community hospitals, and then say physician-owned hospitals that were specialty were bad.

They mixed ownership and service markets right there in so many ways, I’m not sure where to start. My team did a systematic review of around 30 years of research, looking at the evidence base in this space. We found a couple of things.

We found that physician-owned community hospitals did not have a cost or quality difference, meaning that there was no definitive evidence that the physician-owned community hospitals were cheaper based on historical evidence, which was very old. That means there’s not specific harm from them. When you permit market entry for community hospitals, that promotes competition, which results in lower prices and higher quality.

Then we also looked at the specialty hospital markets — surgical specialty hospitals, orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, and cardiac hospitals. We noted for cardiac hospitals, there wasn’t clear evidence about cost savings, but there was definitive evidence of higher quality, from things like 30-day mortality for significant procedures like treatment of acute MI, triple A repair, stuff like that.

For orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, we noted lower costs and higher quality, which again fits with operationally what we would know. If you have a facility that’s doing 20 total hips a day, you’re creating a focused factory. Just like if you think about it for interventional cardiology, your boards have a minimum number of procedures that you have to do to stay certified because we know about the volume-quality relationship.

Then we looked at general surgical specialty hospitals. There wasn’t enough evidence to make a conclusive thought about costs, and there was a clear trend toward higher quality. I would say this recent study is important, but there is a whole bunch of other literature out there, too.

Exploring the Scope of Emergency Care in Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: Certainly, your colleague Wang from Johns Hopkins has done important research in this sector. The paper, “Reconsidering the Ban on Physician-Owned Hospitals to Combat Consolidation,” by you and several colleagues, mentions and highlights the issues that you just described. I understand that it’s going to be published in the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy.

One thing I want to bring up — and this is an important issue — is that the risk for patients has been talked about by the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals, in terms of limited or no emergency services at such physician-owned hospitals and having to call 911 when patients need emergent care or stabilization. That’s been the rebuttal, along with an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report from 2008. Almost, I guess, three quarters of the patients that needed emergent care got this at publicly funded hospitals.

Dr. Miller: I’m familiar with the argument about emergency care. If you actually go and look at it, it differs by specialty market. Physician-owned community hospitals have ERs because that’s how they get their business. If you are running a hospital medicine floor, a general surgical specialty floor, you have a labor delivery unit, a primary care clinic, and a cardiology clinic. You have all the things that all the other hospitals have. The physician-owned community hospitals almost uniformly have an ER.

When you look at the physician-owned specialty hospitals, it’s a little more granular. If you look at the cardiac hospitals, they have ERs. They also have cardiac ICUs, operating rooms, etc. The area where the hospital industry had concerns — which I think is valid to point out — is that physician-owned orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals don’t have ERs. But this makes sense because of what that hospital functionally is: a factory for whatever the scope of procedures is, be it joint replacements or shoulder arthroscopy. The orthopedic surgical specialty hospital is like an ASC plus several hospital beds. Many of those did not have ERs because clinically it didn’t make sense.

What’s interesting, though, is that the hospital industry also operates specialty hospitals. If you go into many of the large systems, they have cardiac specialty hospitals and cancer specialty hospitals. I would say that some of them have ERs, as they appropriately should, and some of those specialty hospitals do not. They might have a community hospital down the street that’s part of that health system that has an ER, but some of the specialty hospitals don’t necessarily have a dedicated ER.

I agree, that’s a valid concern. I would say, though, the question is, what are the scope of services in that hospital? Is an ER required? Community hospitals should have ERs. It makes sense also for a cardiac hospital to have one. If you’re running a total joint replacement factory, it might not make clinical sense.

Dr. Glatter: The patients who are treated at that hospital, if they do have emergent conditions, need to have board-certified emergency physicians treating them, in my view because I’m an ER physician. Having surgeons that are not emergency physicians staff a department at a specialty orthopedic hospital or, say, a cancer hospital is not acceptable from my standpoint. That›s my opinion and recommendation, coming from emergency medicine.

Dr. Miller: I would say that anesthesiologists are actually highly qualified in critical care. The question is about clinical decompensation; if you’re doing a procedure, you have an anesthesiologist right there who is capable of critical care. The function of the ER is to either serve as a window into the hospital for patient volume or to serve as a referral for emergent complaints.

Dr. Glatter: An anesthesiologist — I’ll take issue with that — does not have the training of an emergency physician in terms of scope of practice.

Dr. Miller: My anesthesiology colleagues would probably disagree for managing an emergency during an operating room case.

Dr. Glatter: Fair enough, but I think in the general sense. The other issue is that, in terms of emergent responses to patients that decompensate, when you have to transfer a patient, that violates Medicare requirements. How is that even a valid issue or argument if you’re going to have to transfer a patient from your specialty hospital? That happens. Again, I know that you’re saying these hospitals are completely independent and can function, stabilize patients, and treat emergencies, but that’s not the reality across the country, in my opinion.

Dr. Miller: I don’t think that’s the case for the physician-owned specialty cardiac hospitals, for starters. Many of those have ICUs in addition to operating rooms as a matter of routine in addition to ERs. I don’t think that’s the case for physician-owned community hospitals, which have ERs, ICUs, medicine floors, and surgical floors. Physician-owned community hospitals are around half the market. Of that remaining market, a significant percentage are cardiac hospitals. If you’re taking an issue with orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, that’s a clinical operational question that can and should be answered.

I’d also posit that the nonprofit and for-profit hospital industries also operate specialty hospitals. Any of these questions, we shouldn’t just be asking about physician-owned facilities; we should be asking about them across ownership types, because we’re talking about scope of service and quality and safety. The ownership in that case doesn’t matter. The broader question is, are orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals owned by physicians, tax-exempt hospitals, or tax-paying hospitals? Is that a valid clinical business model? Is it safe? Does it meet Medicare conditions of participation? I would say that’s what that question is, because other ownership models do operate those facilities.

Dr. Glatter: You make some valid points, and I do agree on some of them. I think that, ultimately, these models of care, and certainly cost and quality, are issues. Again, it goes back to being able, in my opinion, to provide emergent care, which seems to me a very important issue.

Dr. Miller: I agree that providing emergent care is an issue. It›s an issue in any site of care. The hospital industry posits that all hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs) have emergent care. I can tell you, having worked in HOPDs (I›ve trained in them during residency), the response if something emergent happens is to either call 911 or wheel the patient down to the ER in a wheelchair or stretcher. I think that these hospital claims about emergency care coverage — these are important questions, but we should be asking them across all clinical settings and say what is the appropriate scope of care provided? What is the appropriate level of acuity and ability to provide emergent or critical care? That›s an important question regardless of ownership model across the entire industry.

Deeper Dive Into Data on Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: We need to really focus on that. I’ll agree with you on that.

There was a March 2023 report from Dobson | DaVanzo. It showed that physician-owned hospitals had lower Medicaid, dual-eligible, and uncompensated care and charity care discharges than full-service acute care hospitals. Physician-owned hospitals had less than half the proportion of Medicaid discharges compared with non–physician-owned hospitals. They were also less likely to care for dual-eligible patients overall compared with non–physician-owned hospitals.

In addition, when COVID hit, the physician-owned hospitals overall — and again, there may be exceptions — were not equipped to handle these patient surges in the acute setting of a public health emergency. There was a hospital in Texas that did pivot that I’m aware of — Renaissance Hospital, which ramped up a long-term care facility to become a COVID hospital — but I think that’s the exception. I think this report raises some valid concerns; I’ll let you rebut that.

Dr. Miller: A couple of things. One, I am not aware that there’s any clear market evidence or a systematic study that shows that physician-owned hospitals had trouble responding to COVID. I don’t think that assertion has been proven. The study was funded by the hospital industry. First of all, it was not a peer-reviewed study; it was funded by an industry that paid a consulting firm. It doesn’t mean that we still shouldn’t read it, but that brings bias into question. The joke in Washington is, pick your favorite statistician or economist, and they can say what you want and have a battle of economists and statisticians.

For example, in that study, they didn’t include the entire ownership universe of physician-owned hospitals. If we go to the peer-reviewed literature, there’s a great 2015 BMJ paper showing that the Medicaid payer mix is actually the same between physician-owned hospitals vs not. The mix of patients by ethnicity — for example, think about African American patients — was the same. I would be more inclined to believe the peer-reviewed literature in BMJ as opposed to an industry-funded study that was not peer-reviewed and not independent and has methodological questions.

Dr. Glatter: Those data are 8 years old, so I’d like to see more recent data. It would be interesting, just as a follow-up to that, to see where the needle has moved — if it has, for that matter — in terms of Medicaid patients that you’re referring to.

Dr. Miller: I tend to be skeptical of all industry research, regardless of who published it, because they have an economic incentive. If they’re selecting certain age groups or excluding certain hospitals, that makes you wonder about the validity of the study. Your job as an industry-funded researcher is that, essentially, you’re being paid to look for an answer. It’s not necessarily an honest evaluation of the data.

Dr. Glatter: I want to bring up another point about the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) and the data on how physician-owned hospitals compared with acute care hospitals that are non–physician-owned and have you comment on that. The Dobson | DaVanzo study called into question that physician-owned hospitals treat fewer patients who are dual-eligible, which we know.

Dr. Miller: I don’t think we do know that.

Dr. Glatter: There are data that point to that, again, looking at the studies.

Dr. Miller: I’m saying that’s a single study funded by industry as opposed to an independent, academic, peer-reviewed literature paper. That would be like saying, during the debate of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), that you should read the pharmaceutical industries research but take any of it at pure face value as factual. Yes, we should read it. Yes, we should evaluate it on its own merits. I think, again, appropriately, you need to be concerned when people have an economic incentive.

The question about the HRRP I’m going to take a little broader, because I think that program is unfair to the industry overall. There are many factors that drive hospital readmission. Whether Mrs Smith went home and ate potato chips and then took her Lasix, that’s very much outside of the hospital industry’s control, and there’s some evidence that the HRRP increases mortality in some patient populations.

In terms of a quality metric, it’s unfair to the industry. I think we took an operating process, internal metric for the hospital industry, turned it into a quality metric, and attached it to a financial bonus, which is an inappropriate policy decision.

Rethinking Ownership Models and Empowering Clinicians

Dr. Glatter: I agree with you on that. One thing I do want to bring up is that whether the physician-owned hospitals are subject to many of the quality measures that full-service, acute care hospitals are. That really is, I think, a broader context.

Dr. Miller: Fifty-five percent of physician-owned hospitals are full-service community hospitals, so I would say at least half the market is 100% subject to that.

Dr. Glatter: If only 50% are, that’s already an issue.

Dr. Miller: Cardiac specialty hospitals — which, as I said, nonprofit and for-profit hospital chains also operate — are also subject to the appropriate quality measures, readmissions, etc. Just because we don’t necessarily have the best quality measurement in the system in the country, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow care specialization. As I’d point out, if we’re concerned about specialty hospitals, the concern shouldn’t just be about physician-owned specialty hospitals; it should be about specialty hospitals by and large. Many health systems run cardiac specialty hospitals, cancer specialty hospitals, and orthopedic specialty hospitals. If we’re going to have a discussion about concerns there, it should be about the entire industry of specialty hospitals.

I think specialty hospitals serve an important role in society, allowing for specialization and exploiting in a positive way the volume-quality relationship. Whether those are owned by a for-profit publicly traded company, a tax-exempt facility, or physicians, I think that is an important way to have innovation and care delivery because frankly, we haven’t had much innovation in care delivery. Much of what we do in terms of how we practice clinically hasn’t really changed in the 50 years since my late father graduated from medical school. We still have rounds, we’re still taking notes, we’re still operating in the same way. Many processes are manual. We don’t have the mass production and mass customization of care that we need.

When you have a focused factory, it allows you to design care in a way that drives up quality, not just for the average patient but also the patients at the tail ends, because you have time to focus on that specific service line and that specific patient population.

Physician-owned community hospitals offer an important opportunity for a different employment model. I remember going to the dermatologist and the dermatologist was depressed, shuffling around the room, sad, and I asked him why. He said he didn’t really like his employer, and I said, “Why don’t you pick another one?” He’s like, “There are only two large health systems I can work for. They all have the same clinical practice environment and functionally the same value.”

Physicians are increasingly burned out. They face monopsony power in who purchases their labor. They have little control. They don’t want to go through five committees, seven administrators, and attend 25 meetings just to change a single small process in clinical operations. If you’re an owner operator, you have a much better ability to do it.

Frankly, when many facilities do well now, when they do well clinically and do well financially, who benefits? The hospital administration and the hospital executives. The doctors aren’t benefiting. The nurses aren’t benefiting. The CNA is not benefiting. The secretary is not benefiting. The custodian is not benefiting. Shouldn’t the workers have a right to own and operate the business and do well when the business does well serving the community? That puts me in the weird space of agreeing with both conservatives and progressives.

Dr. Glatter: I agree with you. I think an ownership stake is always attractive. It helps with retention of employed persons. There›s no question that, when they have a stake, when they have skin in the game, they feel more empowered. I will not argue with you about that.

Dr. Miller: We don’t have business models where workers have that option in healthcare. Like the National Academy of Medicine said, one of the key drivers of burnout is the externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice, and the current business operating models guarantee an externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice.

If you actually look at the recent American Medical Association (AMA) meeting, there was a resolution to ban the corporate practice of medicine. They wanted to go more toward the legal professions model where only physicians can own and operate care delivery.

Dr. Glatter: Well, I think the shift is certainly something that the AMA would like and physicians collectively would agree with. Having a better lifestyle and being able to have control are factors in burnout.

Dr. Miller: It’s not just doctors. I think nurses want a better lifestyle. The nurses are treated as interchangeable lines on a spreadsheet. The nurses are an integral part of our clinical team. Why don’t we work together as a clinical unit to build a better delivery system? What better way to do that than to have clinicians in charge of it, right?

My favorite bakery that’s about 30 minutes away is owned by a baker. It is not owned by a large tax-exempt corporation. It’s owned by an owner operator who takes pride in their work. I think that is something that the profession would do well to return to. When I was a resident, one of my colleagues was already planning their retirement. That’s how depressed they were.

I went into medicine to actually care for patients. I think that we can make the world a better place for our patients. What that means is not only treating them with drugs and devices, but also creating a delivery system where they don’t have to wander from lobby to lobby in a 200,000 square-foot facility, wait in line for hours on end, get bills 6 months later, and fill out endless paper forms over and over again.

All of these basic processes in healthcare delivery that are broken could have and should have been fixed — and have been fixed in almost every other industry. I had to replace one of my car tires because I had a flat tire. The local tire shop has an app, and it sends me SMS text messages telling me when my appointment is and when my car is ready. We have solved all of these problems in many other businesses.

We have not solved them in healthcare delivery because, one, we have massive monopolies that are raising prices, have lower quality, and deliver a crappy patient experience, and we have also subjugated the clinical worker into a corporate automaton. We are functionally drones. We don’t have the agency and the authority to improve clinical operations anymore. It’s really depressing, and we should have that option again.

I trust my doctor. I trust the nurses that I work with, and I would like them to help make clinical decisions in a financially responsible and a sensible operational manner. We need to empower our workforce in order to do that so we can recapture the value of what it means to be a clinician again.

The current model of corporate employment: massive scale, more administrators, more processes, more emails, more meetings, more PowerPoint decks, more federal subsidies. The hospital industry has choices. It can improve clinical operations. It can show up in Washington and lobby for increased subsidies. It can invest in the market and not pay taxes for the tax-exempt facilities. Obviously, it makes the logical choices as an economic actor to show up, lobby for increased subsidies, and then also invest in the stock market.

Improving clinical operations is hard. It hasn’t happened. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private community hospital industry has had flat labor productivity growth, on average, for the past 25 years, and for some years it even declined. This is totally atypical across the economy.

We have failed our clinicians, and most importantly, we have failed our patients. I’ve been sick. My relatives have been sick, waiting hours, not able to get appointments, and redoing forms. It’s a total disaster. It’s time and reasonable to try an alternative ownership and operating model. There are obviously problems. The problems can and should be addressed, but it doesn’t mean that we should have a statutory prohibition on professionals owning and operating their own business.

Dr. Glatter: There was a report that $500 million was saved by limiting or banning or putting a moratorium on physician-owned hospitals by the Congressional Budget Office.

Dr. Miller: Yes, I’m very aware of those data. I’d say that the CBO also is off by 50% on the estimation of the implementation of the Part D program. They overestimated the Affordable Care Act market enrollment by over 10 million people — again, around 50%. They also estimated that the CMS Innovation Center initially would be a savings. Now they’ve re-estimated it as a 10-year expenditure and it has actually cost the taxpayers money.

The CBO is not transparent about what its assumptions are or its analysis and methods. As a researcher, we have to publish our information. It has to go through peer review. I want to know what goes into that $500 million figure — what the assumptions are and what the model is. It’s hard to comment without knowing how they came up with it.

Dr. Glatter: The points you make are very valid. Physicians and nurses want a better lifestyle.

Dr. Miller: It’s not even a better lifestyle. It’s about having a say in how clinical operations work and helping make them better. We want the delivery system to work better. This is an opportunity for us to do so.

Dr. Glatter: That translates into technology: obviously, generative artificial intelligence (AI) coming into the forefront, as we know, and changing care delivery models as you’re referring to, which is going to happen. It’s going to be a slow process. I think that the evolution is happening and will happen, as you accurately described.

Dr. Miller: The other thing that’s different now vs 20 years ago is that managed care is here, there, and everywhere, as Dr Seuss would say. You have utilization review and prior authorization, which I’ve experienced as a patient and a physician, and boy, is it not a fun process. There’s a large amount of friction that needs to be improved. If we’re worried about induced demand or inappropriate utilization, we have managed care right there to help police bad behavior.

Reforming Healthcare Systems and Restoring Patient-Centric Focus

Dr. Glatter: If you were to come up with, say, three bullet points of how we can work our way out of this current morass of where our healthcare systems exist, where do you see the solutions or how can we make and effect change?

Dr. Miller: I’d say there are a couple of things. One is, let business models compete fairly on an equal playing field. Let the physician-owned hospital compete with the tax-exempt hospital and the nonprofit hospital. Put them on an equal playing field. We have things like 340B, which favors tax-exempt hospitals. For-profit or tax-paying hospitals are not able to participate in that. That doesn’t make any sense just from a public policy perspective. Tax-paying hospitals and physician-owned hospitals pay taxes on investments, but tax-exempt hospitals don’t. I think, in public policy, we need to equalize the playing field between business models. Let the best business model win.

The other thing we need to do is to encourage the adoption of technology. The physician will eventually be an arbiter of tech-driven or AI-driven tools. In fact, at some point, the standard of care might be to use those tools. Not using those tools would be seen as negligence. If you think about placing a jugular or central venous catheter, to not use ultrasound would be considered insane. Thirty years ago, to use ultrasound would be considered novel. I think technology and AI will get us to that point of helping make care more efficient and more customized.

Those are the two biggest interventions, I would say. Third, every time we have a conversation in public policy, we need to remember what it is to be a patient. The decision should be driven not around any one industry’s profitability, but what it is to be a patient and how we can make that experience less burdensome, less expensive, or in plain English, suck less.

Dr. Glatter: Safety net hospitals and critical access hospitals are part of this discussion that, yes, we want everything to, in an ideal world, function more efficiently and effectively, with less cost and less red tape. The safety net of our nation is struggling.

Dr. Miller: I 100% agree. The Cook County hospitals of the world are deserving of our support and, frankly, our gratitude. Facilities like that have huge burdens of patients with Medicaid. We also still have millions of uninsured patients. The neighborhoods that they serve are also poorer. I think facilities like that are deserving of public support.

I also think we need to clearly define what those hospitals are. One of the challenges I’ve realized as I waded into this space is that market definitions of what a service market is for a hospital, its specialty type or what a safety net hospital is need to be more clearly defined because those facilities 100% are deserving of our support. We just need to be clear about what they are.

Regarding critical access hospitals, when you practice in a rural area, you have to think differently about care delivery. I’d say many of the rural systems are highly creative in how they structure clinical operations. Before the public health emergency, during the COVID pandemic, when we had a massive change in telehealth, rural hospitals were using — within the very narrow confines — as much telehealth as they could and should.

Rural hospitals also make greater use of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). For many of the specialty services, I remember, your first call was an NP or a PA because the physician was downstairs doing procedures. They’d come up and assess the patient before the procedure, but most of your consult questions were answered by the NP or PA. I’m not saying that’s the model we should use nationwide, but that rural systems are highly innovative and creative; they’re deserving of our time, attention, and support, and frankly, we can learn from them.

Dr. Glatter: I want to thank you for your time and your expertise in this area. We’ll see how the congressional hearings affect the industry as a whole, how the needle moves, and whether the ban or moratorium on physician-owned hospitals continues to exist going forward.

Dr. Miller: I appreciate you having me. The hospital industry is one of the most important industries for health care. This is a time of inflection, right? We need to go back to the value of what it means to be a clinician and serve patients. Hospitals need to reorient themselves around that core concern. How do we help support clinicians — doctors, nurses, pharmacists, whomever it is — in serving patients? Hospitals have become too corporate, so I think that this is an expected pushback.

Dr. Glatter: Again, I want to thank you for your time. This was a very important discussion. Thank you for your expertise.



Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. He disclosed no relevant financial relationships.Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH, is a hospitalist and an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2014 to 2017, Dr. Miller worked at four federal regulatory agencies: Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Miller disclosed ties with the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
 

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on November 16, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today is Dr. Brian J. Miller, a hospitalist with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a health policy expert, to discuss the current and renewed interest in physician-owned hospitals.

Welcome, Dr. Miller. It’s a pleasure to have you join me today.

Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH: Thank you for having me.

History and Controversies Surrounding Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: I want to start off by having you describe the history associated with the moratorium on new physician-owned hospitals in 2010 that’s related ultimately to the Affordable Care Act, but also, the current and renewed media interest in physician-owned hospitals that’s linked to recent congressional hearings last month.

Dr. Miller: Thank you. I should note that my views are my own and don’t represent those of Hopkins or the American Enterprise Institute, where I’m a nonresident fellow nor the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, of which I’m a Commissioner.

The story about physician-owned hospitals is an interesting one. Hospitals turned into health systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and physicians started to shift purely from an independent model into a more organized group practice or employed model. Physicians realized that they wanted an alternative operating arrangement. You want a choice of how you practice and what your employment is. And as community hospitals started to buy physicians and also establish their own physician groups de novo, physicians opened physician-owned hospitals.

Physician-owned hospitals fell into a couple of buckets. One is what we call community hospitals, or what the antitrust lawyers would call general acute care hospitals: those offering emergency room (ER) services, labor and delivery, primary care, general surgery — the whole regular gamut, except that some of the owners were physicians.

The other half of the marketplace ended up being specialty hospitals: those built around a specific medical specialty and series of procedures and chronic care. For example, cardiac hospitals often do CABG, TAVR, maybe abdominal aortic aneurysm (triple A) repairs, and they have cardiology clinics, cath labs, a cardiac intensive care unit (ICU), ER, etc. There were also orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, which were sort of like an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) plus several beds. Then there were general surgical specialty hospitals. At one point, there were some women’s health–focused specialty hospitals.

The hospital industry, of course, as you can understand, didn’t exactly like this. They had a series of concerns about what we would historically call cherry-picking or lemon-dropping of patients. They were worried that physician-owned facilities didn’t want to serve public payer patients, and there was a whole series of reports and investigations.

Around the time the Affordable Care Act passed, the hospital industry had many concerns about physician-owned specialty hospitals, and there was a moratorium as part of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. As part of the bargaining over the hospital industry support for the Affordable Care Act, they traded their support for, among other things, their number one priority, which is a statutory prohibition on new or expanded physician-owned hospitals from participating in Medicare. That included both physician-owned community hospitals and physician-owned specialty hospitals.

Dr. Glatter: I guess the main interest is that, when physicians have an ownership or a stake in the hospital, this is what the Stark laws obviously were aimed at. That was part of the impetus to prevent physicians from referring patients where they had an ownership stake. Certainly, hospitals can be owned by attorneys and nonprofit organizations, and certainly, ASCs can be owned by physicians. There is an ongoing issue in terms of physicians not being able to have an ownership stake. In terms of equity ownership, we know that certain other models allow this, but basically, it sounds like this is an issue with Medicare. That seems to be the crux of it, correct?

Dr. Miller: Yes. I would also add that it’s interesting when we look at other professions. When we look at lawyers, nonlawyers are actually not allowed to own an equity stake in a law practice. In many other professions, you either have corporate ownership or professional ownership, or the alternative is you have only professional ownership. I would say the hospital industry is one of the few areas where professional ownership not only is not allowed, but also is statutorily prohibited functionally through the Medicare program.

Unveiling the Dynamics of Hospital Ownership

Dr. Glatter: A recent study done by two PhDs looked at 2019 data on 20 of the most expensive diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). It examined the cost savings, and we’re talking over $1 billion in expenditures when you look at the data from general acute care hospitals vs physician-owned hospitals. This is what appears to me to be a key driver of the push to loosen restrictions on physician-owned hospitals. Isn’t that correct?

Dr. Miller: I would say that’s one of many components. There’s more history to this issue. I remember sitting at a think tank talking to someone several years ago about hospital consolidation as an issue. We went through the usual levers that us policy wonks go through. We talked about antitrust enforcement, certificate of need, rising hospital costs from consolidation, lower quality (or at least no quality gains, as shown by a New England Journal of Medicine study), and decrements in patient experience that result from the diseconomies of scale. They sort of pooh-poohed many of the policy ideas. They basically said that there was no hope for hospital consolidation as an issue.

Well, what about physician ownership? I started with my research team to comb through the literature and found a variety of studies — some of which were sort of entertaining, because they’d do things like study physician-owned specialty hospitals, nonprofit-owned specialty hospitals, and for-profit specialty hospitals and compare them with nonprofit or for-profit community hospitals, and then say physician-owned hospitals that were specialty were bad.

They mixed ownership and service markets right there in so many ways, I’m not sure where to start. My team did a systematic review of around 30 years of research, looking at the evidence base in this space. We found a couple of things.

We found that physician-owned community hospitals did not have a cost or quality difference, meaning that there was no definitive evidence that the physician-owned community hospitals were cheaper based on historical evidence, which was very old. That means there’s not specific harm from them. When you permit market entry for community hospitals, that promotes competition, which results in lower prices and higher quality.

Then we also looked at the specialty hospital markets — surgical specialty hospitals, orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, and cardiac hospitals. We noted for cardiac hospitals, there wasn’t clear evidence about cost savings, but there was definitive evidence of higher quality, from things like 30-day mortality for significant procedures like treatment of acute MI, triple A repair, stuff like that.

For orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, we noted lower costs and higher quality, which again fits with operationally what we would know. If you have a facility that’s doing 20 total hips a day, you’re creating a focused factory. Just like if you think about it for interventional cardiology, your boards have a minimum number of procedures that you have to do to stay certified because we know about the volume-quality relationship.

Then we looked at general surgical specialty hospitals. There wasn’t enough evidence to make a conclusive thought about costs, and there was a clear trend toward higher quality. I would say this recent study is important, but there is a whole bunch of other literature out there, too.

Exploring the Scope of Emergency Care in Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: Certainly, your colleague Wang from Johns Hopkins has done important research in this sector. The paper, “Reconsidering the Ban on Physician-Owned Hospitals to Combat Consolidation,” by you and several colleagues, mentions and highlights the issues that you just described. I understand that it’s going to be published in the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy.

One thing I want to bring up — and this is an important issue — is that the risk for patients has been talked about by the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals, in terms of limited or no emergency services at such physician-owned hospitals and having to call 911 when patients need emergent care or stabilization. That’s been the rebuttal, along with an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report from 2008. Almost, I guess, three quarters of the patients that needed emergent care got this at publicly funded hospitals.

Dr. Miller: I’m familiar with the argument about emergency care. If you actually go and look at it, it differs by specialty market. Physician-owned community hospitals have ERs because that’s how they get their business. If you are running a hospital medicine floor, a general surgical specialty floor, you have a labor delivery unit, a primary care clinic, and a cardiology clinic. You have all the things that all the other hospitals have. The physician-owned community hospitals almost uniformly have an ER.

When you look at the physician-owned specialty hospitals, it’s a little more granular. If you look at the cardiac hospitals, they have ERs. They also have cardiac ICUs, operating rooms, etc. The area where the hospital industry had concerns — which I think is valid to point out — is that physician-owned orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals don’t have ERs. But this makes sense because of what that hospital functionally is: a factory for whatever the scope of procedures is, be it joint replacements or shoulder arthroscopy. The orthopedic surgical specialty hospital is like an ASC plus several hospital beds. Many of those did not have ERs because clinically it didn’t make sense.

What’s interesting, though, is that the hospital industry also operates specialty hospitals. If you go into many of the large systems, they have cardiac specialty hospitals and cancer specialty hospitals. I would say that some of them have ERs, as they appropriately should, and some of those specialty hospitals do not. They might have a community hospital down the street that’s part of that health system that has an ER, but some of the specialty hospitals don’t necessarily have a dedicated ER.

I agree, that’s a valid concern. I would say, though, the question is, what are the scope of services in that hospital? Is an ER required? Community hospitals should have ERs. It makes sense also for a cardiac hospital to have one. If you’re running a total joint replacement factory, it might not make clinical sense.

Dr. Glatter: The patients who are treated at that hospital, if they do have emergent conditions, need to have board-certified emergency physicians treating them, in my view because I’m an ER physician. Having surgeons that are not emergency physicians staff a department at a specialty orthopedic hospital or, say, a cancer hospital is not acceptable from my standpoint. That›s my opinion and recommendation, coming from emergency medicine.

Dr. Miller: I would say that anesthesiologists are actually highly qualified in critical care. The question is about clinical decompensation; if you’re doing a procedure, you have an anesthesiologist right there who is capable of critical care. The function of the ER is to either serve as a window into the hospital for patient volume or to serve as a referral for emergent complaints.

Dr. Glatter: An anesthesiologist — I’ll take issue with that — does not have the training of an emergency physician in terms of scope of practice.

Dr. Miller: My anesthesiology colleagues would probably disagree for managing an emergency during an operating room case.

Dr. Glatter: Fair enough, but I think in the general sense. The other issue is that, in terms of emergent responses to patients that decompensate, when you have to transfer a patient, that violates Medicare requirements. How is that even a valid issue or argument if you’re going to have to transfer a patient from your specialty hospital? That happens. Again, I know that you’re saying these hospitals are completely independent and can function, stabilize patients, and treat emergencies, but that’s not the reality across the country, in my opinion.

Dr. Miller: I don’t think that’s the case for the physician-owned specialty cardiac hospitals, for starters. Many of those have ICUs in addition to operating rooms as a matter of routine in addition to ERs. I don’t think that’s the case for physician-owned community hospitals, which have ERs, ICUs, medicine floors, and surgical floors. Physician-owned community hospitals are around half the market. Of that remaining market, a significant percentage are cardiac hospitals. If you’re taking an issue with orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, that’s a clinical operational question that can and should be answered.

I’d also posit that the nonprofit and for-profit hospital industries also operate specialty hospitals. Any of these questions, we shouldn’t just be asking about physician-owned facilities; we should be asking about them across ownership types, because we’re talking about scope of service and quality and safety. The ownership in that case doesn’t matter. The broader question is, are orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals owned by physicians, tax-exempt hospitals, or tax-paying hospitals? Is that a valid clinical business model? Is it safe? Does it meet Medicare conditions of participation? I would say that’s what that question is, because other ownership models do operate those facilities.

Dr. Glatter: You make some valid points, and I do agree on some of them. I think that, ultimately, these models of care, and certainly cost and quality, are issues. Again, it goes back to being able, in my opinion, to provide emergent care, which seems to me a very important issue.

Dr. Miller: I agree that providing emergent care is an issue. It›s an issue in any site of care. The hospital industry posits that all hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs) have emergent care. I can tell you, having worked in HOPDs (I›ve trained in them during residency), the response if something emergent happens is to either call 911 or wheel the patient down to the ER in a wheelchair or stretcher. I think that these hospital claims about emergency care coverage — these are important questions, but we should be asking them across all clinical settings and say what is the appropriate scope of care provided? What is the appropriate level of acuity and ability to provide emergent or critical care? That›s an important question regardless of ownership model across the entire industry.

Deeper Dive Into Data on Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: We need to really focus on that. I’ll agree with you on that.

There was a March 2023 report from Dobson | DaVanzo. It showed that physician-owned hospitals had lower Medicaid, dual-eligible, and uncompensated care and charity care discharges than full-service acute care hospitals. Physician-owned hospitals had less than half the proportion of Medicaid discharges compared with non–physician-owned hospitals. They were also less likely to care for dual-eligible patients overall compared with non–physician-owned hospitals.

In addition, when COVID hit, the physician-owned hospitals overall — and again, there may be exceptions — were not equipped to handle these patient surges in the acute setting of a public health emergency. There was a hospital in Texas that did pivot that I’m aware of — Renaissance Hospital, which ramped up a long-term care facility to become a COVID hospital — but I think that’s the exception. I think this report raises some valid concerns; I’ll let you rebut that.

Dr. Miller: A couple of things. One, I am not aware that there’s any clear market evidence or a systematic study that shows that physician-owned hospitals had trouble responding to COVID. I don’t think that assertion has been proven. The study was funded by the hospital industry. First of all, it was not a peer-reviewed study; it was funded by an industry that paid a consulting firm. It doesn’t mean that we still shouldn’t read it, but that brings bias into question. The joke in Washington is, pick your favorite statistician or economist, and they can say what you want and have a battle of economists and statisticians.

For example, in that study, they didn’t include the entire ownership universe of physician-owned hospitals. If we go to the peer-reviewed literature, there’s a great 2015 BMJ paper showing that the Medicaid payer mix is actually the same between physician-owned hospitals vs not. The mix of patients by ethnicity — for example, think about African American patients — was the same. I would be more inclined to believe the peer-reviewed literature in BMJ as opposed to an industry-funded study that was not peer-reviewed and not independent and has methodological questions.

Dr. Glatter: Those data are 8 years old, so I’d like to see more recent data. It would be interesting, just as a follow-up to that, to see where the needle has moved — if it has, for that matter — in terms of Medicaid patients that you’re referring to.

Dr. Miller: I tend to be skeptical of all industry research, regardless of who published it, because they have an economic incentive. If they’re selecting certain age groups or excluding certain hospitals, that makes you wonder about the validity of the study. Your job as an industry-funded researcher is that, essentially, you’re being paid to look for an answer. It’s not necessarily an honest evaluation of the data.

Dr. Glatter: I want to bring up another point about the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) and the data on how physician-owned hospitals compared with acute care hospitals that are non–physician-owned and have you comment on that. The Dobson | DaVanzo study called into question that physician-owned hospitals treat fewer patients who are dual-eligible, which we know.

Dr. Miller: I don’t think we do know that.

Dr. Glatter: There are data that point to that, again, looking at the studies.

Dr. Miller: I’m saying that’s a single study funded by industry as opposed to an independent, academic, peer-reviewed literature paper. That would be like saying, during the debate of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), that you should read the pharmaceutical industries research but take any of it at pure face value as factual. Yes, we should read it. Yes, we should evaluate it on its own merits. I think, again, appropriately, you need to be concerned when people have an economic incentive.

The question about the HRRP I’m going to take a little broader, because I think that program is unfair to the industry overall. There are many factors that drive hospital readmission. Whether Mrs Smith went home and ate potato chips and then took her Lasix, that’s very much outside of the hospital industry’s control, and there’s some evidence that the HRRP increases mortality in some patient populations.

In terms of a quality metric, it’s unfair to the industry. I think we took an operating process, internal metric for the hospital industry, turned it into a quality metric, and attached it to a financial bonus, which is an inappropriate policy decision.

Rethinking Ownership Models and Empowering Clinicians

Dr. Glatter: I agree with you on that. One thing I do want to bring up is that whether the physician-owned hospitals are subject to many of the quality measures that full-service, acute care hospitals are. That really is, I think, a broader context.

Dr. Miller: Fifty-five percent of physician-owned hospitals are full-service community hospitals, so I would say at least half the market is 100% subject to that.

Dr. Glatter: If only 50% are, that’s already an issue.

Dr. Miller: Cardiac specialty hospitals — which, as I said, nonprofit and for-profit hospital chains also operate — are also subject to the appropriate quality measures, readmissions, etc. Just because we don’t necessarily have the best quality measurement in the system in the country, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow care specialization. As I’d point out, if we’re concerned about specialty hospitals, the concern shouldn’t just be about physician-owned specialty hospitals; it should be about specialty hospitals by and large. Many health systems run cardiac specialty hospitals, cancer specialty hospitals, and orthopedic specialty hospitals. If we’re going to have a discussion about concerns there, it should be about the entire industry of specialty hospitals.

I think specialty hospitals serve an important role in society, allowing for specialization and exploiting in a positive way the volume-quality relationship. Whether those are owned by a for-profit publicly traded company, a tax-exempt facility, or physicians, I think that is an important way to have innovation and care delivery because frankly, we haven’t had much innovation in care delivery. Much of what we do in terms of how we practice clinically hasn’t really changed in the 50 years since my late father graduated from medical school. We still have rounds, we’re still taking notes, we’re still operating in the same way. Many processes are manual. We don’t have the mass production and mass customization of care that we need.

When you have a focused factory, it allows you to design care in a way that drives up quality, not just for the average patient but also the patients at the tail ends, because you have time to focus on that specific service line and that specific patient population.

Physician-owned community hospitals offer an important opportunity for a different employment model. I remember going to the dermatologist and the dermatologist was depressed, shuffling around the room, sad, and I asked him why. He said he didn’t really like his employer, and I said, “Why don’t you pick another one?” He’s like, “There are only two large health systems I can work for. They all have the same clinical practice environment and functionally the same value.”

Physicians are increasingly burned out. They face monopsony power in who purchases their labor. They have little control. They don’t want to go through five committees, seven administrators, and attend 25 meetings just to change a single small process in clinical operations. If you’re an owner operator, you have a much better ability to do it.

Frankly, when many facilities do well now, when they do well clinically and do well financially, who benefits? The hospital administration and the hospital executives. The doctors aren’t benefiting. The nurses aren’t benefiting. The CNA is not benefiting. The secretary is not benefiting. The custodian is not benefiting. Shouldn’t the workers have a right to own and operate the business and do well when the business does well serving the community? That puts me in the weird space of agreeing with both conservatives and progressives.

Dr. Glatter: I agree with you. I think an ownership stake is always attractive. It helps with retention of employed persons. There›s no question that, when they have a stake, when they have skin in the game, they feel more empowered. I will not argue with you about that.

Dr. Miller: We don’t have business models where workers have that option in healthcare. Like the National Academy of Medicine said, one of the key drivers of burnout is the externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice, and the current business operating models guarantee an externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice.

If you actually look at the recent American Medical Association (AMA) meeting, there was a resolution to ban the corporate practice of medicine. They wanted to go more toward the legal professions model where only physicians can own and operate care delivery.

Dr. Glatter: Well, I think the shift is certainly something that the AMA would like and physicians collectively would agree with. Having a better lifestyle and being able to have control are factors in burnout.

Dr. Miller: It’s not just doctors. I think nurses want a better lifestyle. The nurses are treated as interchangeable lines on a spreadsheet. The nurses are an integral part of our clinical team. Why don’t we work together as a clinical unit to build a better delivery system? What better way to do that than to have clinicians in charge of it, right?

My favorite bakery that’s about 30 minutes away is owned by a baker. It is not owned by a large tax-exempt corporation. It’s owned by an owner operator who takes pride in their work. I think that is something that the profession would do well to return to. When I was a resident, one of my colleagues was already planning their retirement. That’s how depressed they were.

I went into medicine to actually care for patients. I think that we can make the world a better place for our patients. What that means is not only treating them with drugs and devices, but also creating a delivery system where they don’t have to wander from lobby to lobby in a 200,000 square-foot facility, wait in line for hours on end, get bills 6 months later, and fill out endless paper forms over and over again.

All of these basic processes in healthcare delivery that are broken could have and should have been fixed — and have been fixed in almost every other industry. I had to replace one of my car tires because I had a flat tire. The local tire shop has an app, and it sends me SMS text messages telling me when my appointment is and when my car is ready. We have solved all of these problems in many other businesses.

We have not solved them in healthcare delivery because, one, we have massive monopolies that are raising prices, have lower quality, and deliver a crappy patient experience, and we have also subjugated the clinical worker into a corporate automaton. We are functionally drones. We don’t have the agency and the authority to improve clinical operations anymore. It’s really depressing, and we should have that option again.

I trust my doctor. I trust the nurses that I work with, and I would like them to help make clinical decisions in a financially responsible and a sensible operational manner. We need to empower our workforce in order to do that so we can recapture the value of what it means to be a clinician again.

The current model of corporate employment: massive scale, more administrators, more processes, more emails, more meetings, more PowerPoint decks, more federal subsidies. The hospital industry has choices. It can improve clinical operations. It can show up in Washington and lobby for increased subsidies. It can invest in the market and not pay taxes for the tax-exempt facilities. Obviously, it makes the logical choices as an economic actor to show up, lobby for increased subsidies, and then also invest in the stock market.

Improving clinical operations is hard. It hasn’t happened. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private community hospital industry has had flat labor productivity growth, on average, for the past 25 years, and for some years it even declined. This is totally atypical across the economy.

We have failed our clinicians, and most importantly, we have failed our patients. I’ve been sick. My relatives have been sick, waiting hours, not able to get appointments, and redoing forms. It’s a total disaster. It’s time and reasonable to try an alternative ownership and operating model. There are obviously problems. The problems can and should be addressed, but it doesn’t mean that we should have a statutory prohibition on professionals owning and operating their own business.

Dr. Glatter: There was a report that $500 million was saved by limiting or banning or putting a moratorium on physician-owned hospitals by the Congressional Budget Office.

Dr. Miller: Yes, I’m very aware of those data. I’d say that the CBO also is off by 50% on the estimation of the implementation of the Part D program. They overestimated the Affordable Care Act market enrollment by over 10 million people — again, around 50%. They also estimated that the CMS Innovation Center initially would be a savings. Now they’ve re-estimated it as a 10-year expenditure and it has actually cost the taxpayers money.

The CBO is not transparent about what its assumptions are or its analysis and methods. As a researcher, we have to publish our information. It has to go through peer review. I want to know what goes into that $500 million figure — what the assumptions are and what the model is. It’s hard to comment without knowing how they came up with it.

Dr. Glatter: The points you make are very valid. Physicians and nurses want a better lifestyle.

Dr. Miller: It’s not even a better lifestyle. It’s about having a say in how clinical operations work and helping make them better. We want the delivery system to work better. This is an opportunity for us to do so.

Dr. Glatter: That translates into technology: obviously, generative artificial intelligence (AI) coming into the forefront, as we know, and changing care delivery models as you’re referring to, which is going to happen. It’s going to be a slow process. I think that the evolution is happening and will happen, as you accurately described.

Dr. Miller: The other thing that’s different now vs 20 years ago is that managed care is here, there, and everywhere, as Dr Seuss would say. You have utilization review and prior authorization, which I’ve experienced as a patient and a physician, and boy, is it not a fun process. There’s a large amount of friction that needs to be improved. If we’re worried about induced demand or inappropriate utilization, we have managed care right there to help police bad behavior.

Reforming Healthcare Systems and Restoring Patient-Centric Focus

Dr. Glatter: If you were to come up with, say, three bullet points of how we can work our way out of this current morass of where our healthcare systems exist, where do you see the solutions or how can we make and effect change?

Dr. Miller: I’d say there are a couple of things. One is, let business models compete fairly on an equal playing field. Let the physician-owned hospital compete with the tax-exempt hospital and the nonprofit hospital. Put them on an equal playing field. We have things like 340B, which favors tax-exempt hospitals. For-profit or tax-paying hospitals are not able to participate in that. That doesn’t make any sense just from a public policy perspective. Tax-paying hospitals and physician-owned hospitals pay taxes on investments, but tax-exempt hospitals don’t. I think, in public policy, we need to equalize the playing field between business models. Let the best business model win.

The other thing we need to do is to encourage the adoption of technology. The physician will eventually be an arbiter of tech-driven or AI-driven tools. In fact, at some point, the standard of care might be to use those tools. Not using those tools would be seen as negligence. If you think about placing a jugular or central venous catheter, to not use ultrasound would be considered insane. Thirty years ago, to use ultrasound would be considered novel. I think technology and AI will get us to that point of helping make care more efficient and more customized.

Those are the two biggest interventions, I would say. Third, every time we have a conversation in public policy, we need to remember what it is to be a patient. The decision should be driven not around any one industry’s profitability, but what it is to be a patient and how we can make that experience less burdensome, less expensive, or in plain English, suck less.

Dr. Glatter: Safety net hospitals and critical access hospitals are part of this discussion that, yes, we want everything to, in an ideal world, function more efficiently and effectively, with less cost and less red tape. The safety net of our nation is struggling.

Dr. Miller: I 100% agree. The Cook County hospitals of the world are deserving of our support and, frankly, our gratitude. Facilities like that have huge burdens of patients with Medicaid. We also still have millions of uninsured patients. The neighborhoods that they serve are also poorer. I think facilities like that are deserving of public support.

I also think we need to clearly define what those hospitals are. One of the challenges I’ve realized as I waded into this space is that market definitions of what a service market is for a hospital, its specialty type or what a safety net hospital is need to be more clearly defined because those facilities 100% are deserving of our support. We just need to be clear about what they are.

Regarding critical access hospitals, when you practice in a rural area, you have to think differently about care delivery. I’d say many of the rural systems are highly creative in how they structure clinical operations. Before the public health emergency, during the COVID pandemic, when we had a massive change in telehealth, rural hospitals were using — within the very narrow confines — as much telehealth as they could and should.

Rural hospitals also make greater use of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). For many of the specialty services, I remember, your first call was an NP or a PA because the physician was downstairs doing procedures. They’d come up and assess the patient before the procedure, but most of your consult questions were answered by the NP or PA. I’m not saying that’s the model we should use nationwide, but that rural systems are highly innovative and creative; they’re deserving of our time, attention, and support, and frankly, we can learn from them.

Dr. Glatter: I want to thank you for your time and your expertise in this area. We’ll see how the congressional hearings affect the industry as a whole, how the needle moves, and whether the ban or moratorium on physician-owned hospitals continues to exist going forward.

Dr. Miller: I appreciate you having me. The hospital industry is one of the most important industries for health care. This is a time of inflection, right? We need to go back to the value of what it means to be a clinician and serve patients. Hospitals need to reorient themselves around that core concern. How do we help support clinicians — doctors, nurses, pharmacists, whomever it is — in serving patients? Hospitals have become too corporate, so I think that this is an expected pushback.

Dr. Glatter: Again, I want to thank you for your time. This was a very important discussion. Thank you for your expertise.



Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. He disclosed no relevant financial relationships.Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH, is a hospitalist and an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2014 to 2017, Dr. Miller worked at four federal regulatory agencies: Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Miller disclosed ties with the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
 

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on November 16, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today is Dr. Brian J. Miller, a hospitalist with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a health policy expert, to discuss the current and renewed interest in physician-owned hospitals.

Welcome, Dr. Miller. It’s a pleasure to have you join me today.

Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH: Thank you for having me.

History and Controversies Surrounding Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: I want to start off by having you describe the history associated with the moratorium on new physician-owned hospitals in 2010 that’s related ultimately to the Affordable Care Act, but also, the current and renewed media interest in physician-owned hospitals that’s linked to recent congressional hearings last month.

Dr. Miller: Thank you. I should note that my views are my own and don’t represent those of Hopkins or the American Enterprise Institute, where I’m a nonresident fellow nor the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, of which I’m a Commissioner.

The story about physician-owned hospitals is an interesting one. Hospitals turned into health systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and physicians started to shift purely from an independent model into a more organized group practice or employed model. Physicians realized that they wanted an alternative operating arrangement. You want a choice of how you practice and what your employment is. And as community hospitals started to buy physicians and also establish their own physician groups de novo, physicians opened physician-owned hospitals.

Physician-owned hospitals fell into a couple of buckets. One is what we call community hospitals, or what the antitrust lawyers would call general acute care hospitals: those offering emergency room (ER) services, labor and delivery, primary care, general surgery — the whole regular gamut, except that some of the owners were physicians.

The other half of the marketplace ended up being specialty hospitals: those built around a specific medical specialty and series of procedures and chronic care. For example, cardiac hospitals often do CABG, TAVR, maybe abdominal aortic aneurysm (triple A) repairs, and they have cardiology clinics, cath labs, a cardiac intensive care unit (ICU), ER, etc. There were also orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, which were sort of like an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) plus several beds. Then there were general surgical specialty hospitals. At one point, there were some women’s health–focused specialty hospitals.

The hospital industry, of course, as you can understand, didn’t exactly like this. They had a series of concerns about what we would historically call cherry-picking or lemon-dropping of patients. They were worried that physician-owned facilities didn’t want to serve public payer patients, and there was a whole series of reports and investigations.

Around the time the Affordable Care Act passed, the hospital industry had many concerns about physician-owned specialty hospitals, and there was a moratorium as part of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. As part of the bargaining over the hospital industry support for the Affordable Care Act, they traded their support for, among other things, their number one priority, which is a statutory prohibition on new or expanded physician-owned hospitals from participating in Medicare. That included both physician-owned community hospitals and physician-owned specialty hospitals.

Dr. Glatter: I guess the main interest is that, when physicians have an ownership or a stake in the hospital, this is what the Stark laws obviously were aimed at. That was part of the impetus to prevent physicians from referring patients where they had an ownership stake. Certainly, hospitals can be owned by attorneys and nonprofit organizations, and certainly, ASCs can be owned by physicians. There is an ongoing issue in terms of physicians not being able to have an ownership stake. In terms of equity ownership, we know that certain other models allow this, but basically, it sounds like this is an issue with Medicare. That seems to be the crux of it, correct?

Dr. Miller: Yes. I would also add that it’s interesting when we look at other professions. When we look at lawyers, nonlawyers are actually not allowed to own an equity stake in a law practice. In many other professions, you either have corporate ownership or professional ownership, or the alternative is you have only professional ownership. I would say the hospital industry is one of the few areas where professional ownership not only is not allowed, but also is statutorily prohibited functionally through the Medicare program.

Unveiling the Dynamics of Hospital Ownership

Dr. Glatter: A recent study done by two PhDs looked at 2019 data on 20 of the most expensive diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). It examined the cost savings, and we’re talking over $1 billion in expenditures when you look at the data from general acute care hospitals vs physician-owned hospitals. This is what appears to me to be a key driver of the push to loosen restrictions on physician-owned hospitals. Isn’t that correct?

Dr. Miller: I would say that’s one of many components. There’s more history to this issue. I remember sitting at a think tank talking to someone several years ago about hospital consolidation as an issue. We went through the usual levers that us policy wonks go through. We talked about antitrust enforcement, certificate of need, rising hospital costs from consolidation, lower quality (or at least no quality gains, as shown by a New England Journal of Medicine study), and decrements in patient experience that result from the diseconomies of scale. They sort of pooh-poohed many of the policy ideas. They basically said that there was no hope for hospital consolidation as an issue.

Well, what about physician ownership? I started with my research team to comb through the literature and found a variety of studies — some of which were sort of entertaining, because they’d do things like study physician-owned specialty hospitals, nonprofit-owned specialty hospitals, and for-profit specialty hospitals and compare them with nonprofit or for-profit community hospitals, and then say physician-owned hospitals that were specialty were bad.

They mixed ownership and service markets right there in so many ways, I’m not sure where to start. My team did a systematic review of around 30 years of research, looking at the evidence base in this space. We found a couple of things.

We found that physician-owned community hospitals did not have a cost or quality difference, meaning that there was no definitive evidence that the physician-owned community hospitals were cheaper based on historical evidence, which was very old. That means there’s not specific harm from them. When you permit market entry for community hospitals, that promotes competition, which results in lower prices and higher quality.

Then we also looked at the specialty hospital markets — surgical specialty hospitals, orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, and cardiac hospitals. We noted for cardiac hospitals, there wasn’t clear evidence about cost savings, but there was definitive evidence of higher quality, from things like 30-day mortality for significant procedures like treatment of acute MI, triple A repair, stuff like that.

For orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, we noted lower costs and higher quality, which again fits with operationally what we would know. If you have a facility that’s doing 20 total hips a day, you’re creating a focused factory. Just like if you think about it for interventional cardiology, your boards have a minimum number of procedures that you have to do to stay certified because we know about the volume-quality relationship.

Then we looked at general surgical specialty hospitals. There wasn’t enough evidence to make a conclusive thought about costs, and there was a clear trend toward higher quality. I would say this recent study is important, but there is a whole bunch of other literature out there, too.

Exploring the Scope of Emergency Care in Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: Certainly, your colleague Wang from Johns Hopkins has done important research in this sector. The paper, “Reconsidering the Ban on Physician-Owned Hospitals to Combat Consolidation,” by you and several colleagues, mentions and highlights the issues that you just described. I understand that it’s going to be published in the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy.

One thing I want to bring up — and this is an important issue — is that the risk for patients has been talked about by the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals, in terms of limited or no emergency services at such physician-owned hospitals and having to call 911 when patients need emergent care or stabilization. That’s been the rebuttal, along with an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report from 2008. Almost, I guess, three quarters of the patients that needed emergent care got this at publicly funded hospitals.

Dr. Miller: I’m familiar with the argument about emergency care. If you actually go and look at it, it differs by specialty market. Physician-owned community hospitals have ERs because that’s how they get their business. If you are running a hospital medicine floor, a general surgical specialty floor, you have a labor delivery unit, a primary care clinic, and a cardiology clinic. You have all the things that all the other hospitals have. The physician-owned community hospitals almost uniformly have an ER.

When you look at the physician-owned specialty hospitals, it’s a little more granular. If you look at the cardiac hospitals, they have ERs. They also have cardiac ICUs, operating rooms, etc. The area where the hospital industry had concerns — which I think is valid to point out — is that physician-owned orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals don’t have ERs. But this makes sense because of what that hospital functionally is: a factory for whatever the scope of procedures is, be it joint replacements or shoulder arthroscopy. The orthopedic surgical specialty hospital is like an ASC plus several hospital beds. Many of those did not have ERs because clinically it didn’t make sense.

What’s interesting, though, is that the hospital industry also operates specialty hospitals. If you go into many of the large systems, they have cardiac specialty hospitals and cancer specialty hospitals. I would say that some of them have ERs, as they appropriately should, and some of those specialty hospitals do not. They might have a community hospital down the street that’s part of that health system that has an ER, but some of the specialty hospitals don’t necessarily have a dedicated ER.

I agree, that’s a valid concern. I would say, though, the question is, what are the scope of services in that hospital? Is an ER required? Community hospitals should have ERs. It makes sense also for a cardiac hospital to have one. If you’re running a total joint replacement factory, it might not make clinical sense.

Dr. Glatter: The patients who are treated at that hospital, if they do have emergent conditions, need to have board-certified emergency physicians treating them, in my view because I’m an ER physician. Having surgeons that are not emergency physicians staff a department at a specialty orthopedic hospital or, say, a cancer hospital is not acceptable from my standpoint. That›s my opinion and recommendation, coming from emergency medicine.

Dr. Miller: I would say that anesthesiologists are actually highly qualified in critical care. The question is about clinical decompensation; if you’re doing a procedure, you have an anesthesiologist right there who is capable of critical care. The function of the ER is to either serve as a window into the hospital for patient volume or to serve as a referral for emergent complaints.

Dr. Glatter: An anesthesiologist — I’ll take issue with that — does not have the training of an emergency physician in terms of scope of practice.

Dr. Miller: My anesthesiology colleagues would probably disagree for managing an emergency during an operating room case.

Dr. Glatter: Fair enough, but I think in the general sense. The other issue is that, in terms of emergent responses to patients that decompensate, when you have to transfer a patient, that violates Medicare requirements. How is that even a valid issue or argument if you’re going to have to transfer a patient from your specialty hospital? That happens. Again, I know that you’re saying these hospitals are completely independent and can function, stabilize patients, and treat emergencies, but that’s not the reality across the country, in my opinion.

Dr. Miller: I don’t think that’s the case for the physician-owned specialty cardiac hospitals, for starters. Many of those have ICUs in addition to operating rooms as a matter of routine in addition to ERs. I don’t think that’s the case for physician-owned community hospitals, which have ERs, ICUs, medicine floors, and surgical floors. Physician-owned community hospitals are around half the market. Of that remaining market, a significant percentage are cardiac hospitals. If you’re taking an issue with orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, that’s a clinical operational question that can and should be answered.

I’d also posit that the nonprofit and for-profit hospital industries also operate specialty hospitals. Any of these questions, we shouldn’t just be asking about physician-owned facilities; we should be asking about them across ownership types, because we’re talking about scope of service and quality and safety. The ownership in that case doesn’t matter. The broader question is, are orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals owned by physicians, tax-exempt hospitals, or tax-paying hospitals? Is that a valid clinical business model? Is it safe? Does it meet Medicare conditions of participation? I would say that’s what that question is, because other ownership models do operate those facilities.

Dr. Glatter: You make some valid points, and I do agree on some of them. I think that, ultimately, these models of care, and certainly cost and quality, are issues. Again, it goes back to being able, in my opinion, to provide emergent care, which seems to me a very important issue.

Dr. Miller: I agree that providing emergent care is an issue. It›s an issue in any site of care. The hospital industry posits that all hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs) have emergent care. I can tell you, having worked in HOPDs (I›ve trained in them during residency), the response if something emergent happens is to either call 911 or wheel the patient down to the ER in a wheelchair or stretcher. I think that these hospital claims about emergency care coverage — these are important questions, but we should be asking them across all clinical settings and say what is the appropriate scope of care provided? What is the appropriate level of acuity and ability to provide emergent or critical care? That›s an important question regardless of ownership model across the entire industry.

Deeper Dive Into Data on Physician-Owned Hospitals

Dr. Glatter: We need to really focus on that. I’ll agree with you on that.

There was a March 2023 report from Dobson | DaVanzo. It showed that physician-owned hospitals had lower Medicaid, dual-eligible, and uncompensated care and charity care discharges than full-service acute care hospitals. Physician-owned hospitals had less than half the proportion of Medicaid discharges compared with non–physician-owned hospitals. They were also less likely to care for dual-eligible patients overall compared with non–physician-owned hospitals.

In addition, when COVID hit, the physician-owned hospitals overall — and again, there may be exceptions — were not equipped to handle these patient surges in the acute setting of a public health emergency. There was a hospital in Texas that did pivot that I’m aware of — Renaissance Hospital, which ramped up a long-term care facility to become a COVID hospital — but I think that’s the exception. I think this report raises some valid concerns; I’ll let you rebut that.

Dr. Miller: A couple of things. One, I am not aware that there’s any clear market evidence or a systematic study that shows that physician-owned hospitals had trouble responding to COVID. I don’t think that assertion has been proven. The study was funded by the hospital industry. First of all, it was not a peer-reviewed study; it was funded by an industry that paid a consulting firm. It doesn’t mean that we still shouldn’t read it, but that brings bias into question. The joke in Washington is, pick your favorite statistician or economist, and they can say what you want and have a battle of economists and statisticians.

For example, in that study, they didn’t include the entire ownership universe of physician-owned hospitals. If we go to the peer-reviewed literature, there’s a great 2015 BMJ paper showing that the Medicaid payer mix is actually the same between physician-owned hospitals vs not. The mix of patients by ethnicity — for example, think about African American patients — was the same. I would be more inclined to believe the peer-reviewed literature in BMJ as opposed to an industry-funded study that was not peer-reviewed and not independent and has methodological questions.

Dr. Glatter: Those data are 8 years old, so I’d like to see more recent data. It would be interesting, just as a follow-up to that, to see where the needle has moved — if it has, for that matter — in terms of Medicaid patients that you’re referring to.

Dr. Miller: I tend to be skeptical of all industry research, regardless of who published it, because they have an economic incentive. If they’re selecting certain age groups or excluding certain hospitals, that makes you wonder about the validity of the study. Your job as an industry-funded researcher is that, essentially, you’re being paid to look for an answer. It’s not necessarily an honest evaluation of the data.

Dr. Glatter: I want to bring up another point about the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) and the data on how physician-owned hospitals compared with acute care hospitals that are non–physician-owned and have you comment on that. The Dobson | DaVanzo study called into question that physician-owned hospitals treat fewer patients who are dual-eligible, which we know.

Dr. Miller: I don’t think we do know that.

Dr. Glatter: There are data that point to that, again, looking at the studies.

Dr. Miller: I’m saying that’s a single study funded by industry as opposed to an independent, academic, peer-reviewed literature paper. That would be like saying, during the debate of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), that you should read the pharmaceutical industries research but take any of it at pure face value as factual. Yes, we should read it. Yes, we should evaluate it on its own merits. I think, again, appropriately, you need to be concerned when people have an economic incentive.

The question about the HRRP I’m going to take a little broader, because I think that program is unfair to the industry overall. There are many factors that drive hospital readmission. Whether Mrs Smith went home and ate potato chips and then took her Lasix, that’s very much outside of the hospital industry’s control, and there’s some evidence that the HRRP increases mortality in some patient populations.

In terms of a quality metric, it’s unfair to the industry. I think we took an operating process, internal metric for the hospital industry, turned it into a quality metric, and attached it to a financial bonus, which is an inappropriate policy decision.

Rethinking Ownership Models and Empowering Clinicians

Dr. Glatter: I agree with you on that. One thing I do want to bring up is that whether the physician-owned hospitals are subject to many of the quality measures that full-service, acute care hospitals are. That really is, I think, a broader context.

Dr. Miller: Fifty-five percent of physician-owned hospitals are full-service community hospitals, so I would say at least half the market is 100% subject to that.

Dr. Glatter: If only 50% are, that’s already an issue.

Dr. Miller: Cardiac specialty hospitals — which, as I said, nonprofit and for-profit hospital chains also operate — are also subject to the appropriate quality measures, readmissions, etc. Just because we don’t necessarily have the best quality measurement in the system in the country, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow care specialization. As I’d point out, if we’re concerned about specialty hospitals, the concern shouldn’t just be about physician-owned specialty hospitals; it should be about specialty hospitals by and large. Many health systems run cardiac specialty hospitals, cancer specialty hospitals, and orthopedic specialty hospitals. If we’re going to have a discussion about concerns there, it should be about the entire industry of specialty hospitals.

I think specialty hospitals serve an important role in society, allowing for specialization and exploiting in a positive way the volume-quality relationship. Whether those are owned by a for-profit publicly traded company, a tax-exempt facility, or physicians, I think that is an important way to have innovation and care delivery because frankly, we haven’t had much innovation in care delivery. Much of what we do in terms of how we practice clinically hasn’t really changed in the 50 years since my late father graduated from medical school. We still have rounds, we’re still taking notes, we’re still operating in the same way. Many processes are manual. We don’t have the mass production and mass customization of care that we need.

When you have a focused factory, it allows you to design care in a way that drives up quality, not just for the average patient but also the patients at the tail ends, because you have time to focus on that specific service line and that specific patient population.

Physician-owned community hospitals offer an important opportunity for a different employment model. I remember going to the dermatologist and the dermatologist was depressed, shuffling around the room, sad, and I asked him why. He said he didn’t really like his employer, and I said, “Why don’t you pick another one?” He’s like, “There are only two large health systems I can work for. They all have the same clinical practice environment and functionally the same value.”

Physicians are increasingly burned out. They face monopsony power in who purchases their labor. They have little control. They don’t want to go through five committees, seven administrators, and attend 25 meetings just to change a single small process in clinical operations. If you’re an owner operator, you have a much better ability to do it.

Frankly, when many facilities do well now, when they do well clinically and do well financially, who benefits? The hospital administration and the hospital executives. The doctors aren’t benefiting. The nurses aren’t benefiting. The CNA is not benefiting. The secretary is not benefiting. The custodian is not benefiting. Shouldn’t the workers have a right to own and operate the business and do well when the business does well serving the community? That puts me in the weird space of agreeing with both conservatives and progressives.

Dr. Glatter: I agree with you. I think an ownership stake is always attractive. It helps with retention of employed persons. There›s no question that, when they have a stake, when they have skin in the game, they feel more empowered. I will not argue with you about that.

Dr. Miller: We don’t have business models where workers have that option in healthcare. Like the National Academy of Medicine said, one of the key drivers of burnout is the externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice, and the current business operating models guarantee an externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice.

If you actually look at the recent American Medical Association (AMA) meeting, there was a resolution to ban the corporate practice of medicine. They wanted to go more toward the legal professions model where only physicians can own and operate care delivery.

Dr. Glatter: Well, I think the shift is certainly something that the AMA would like and physicians collectively would agree with. Having a better lifestyle and being able to have control are factors in burnout.

Dr. Miller: It’s not just doctors. I think nurses want a better lifestyle. The nurses are treated as interchangeable lines on a spreadsheet. The nurses are an integral part of our clinical team. Why don’t we work together as a clinical unit to build a better delivery system? What better way to do that than to have clinicians in charge of it, right?

My favorite bakery that’s about 30 minutes away is owned by a baker. It is not owned by a large tax-exempt corporation. It’s owned by an owner operator who takes pride in their work. I think that is something that the profession would do well to return to. When I was a resident, one of my colleagues was already planning their retirement. That’s how depressed they were.

I went into medicine to actually care for patients. I think that we can make the world a better place for our patients. What that means is not only treating them with drugs and devices, but also creating a delivery system where they don’t have to wander from lobby to lobby in a 200,000 square-foot facility, wait in line for hours on end, get bills 6 months later, and fill out endless paper forms over and over again.

All of these basic processes in healthcare delivery that are broken could have and should have been fixed — and have been fixed in almost every other industry. I had to replace one of my car tires because I had a flat tire. The local tire shop has an app, and it sends me SMS text messages telling me when my appointment is and when my car is ready. We have solved all of these problems in many other businesses.

We have not solved them in healthcare delivery because, one, we have massive monopolies that are raising prices, have lower quality, and deliver a crappy patient experience, and we have also subjugated the clinical worker into a corporate automaton. We are functionally drones. We don’t have the agency and the authority to improve clinical operations anymore. It’s really depressing, and we should have that option again.

I trust my doctor. I trust the nurses that I work with, and I would like them to help make clinical decisions in a financially responsible and a sensible operational manner. We need to empower our workforce in order to do that so we can recapture the value of what it means to be a clinician again.

The current model of corporate employment: massive scale, more administrators, more processes, more emails, more meetings, more PowerPoint decks, more federal subsidies. The hospital industry has choices. It can improve clinical operations. It can show up in Washington and lobby for increased subsidies. It can invest in the market and not pay taxes for the tax-exempt facilities. Obviously, it makes the logical choices as an economic actor to show up, lobby for increased subsidies, and then also invest in the stock market.

Improving clinical operations is hard. It hasn’t happened. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private community hospital industry has had flat labor productivity growth, on average, for the past 25 years, and for some years it even declined. This is totally atypical across the economy.

We have failed our clinicians, and most importantly, we have failed our patients. I’ve been sick. My relatives have been sick, waiting hours, not able to get appointments, and redoing forms. It’s a total disaster. It’s time and reasonable to try an alternative ownership and operating model. There are obviously problems. The problems can and should be addressed, but it doesn’t mean that we should have a statutory prohibition on professionals owning and operating their own business.

Dr. Glatter: There was a report that $500 million was saved by limiting or banning or putting a moratorium on physician-owned hospitals by the Congressional Budget Office.

Dr. Miller: Yes, I’m very aware of those data. I’d say that the CBO also is off by 50% on the estimation of the implementation of the Part D program. They overestimated the Affordable Care Act market enrollment by over 10 million people — again, around 50%. They also estimated that the CMS Innovation Center initially would be a savings. Now they’ve re-estimated it as a 10-year expenditure and it has actually cost the taxpayers money.

The CBO is not transparent about what its assumptions are or its analysis and methods. As a researcher, we have to publish our information. It has to go through peer review. I want to know what goes into that $500 million figure — what the assumptions are and what the model is. It’s hard to comment without knowing how they came up with it.

Dr. Glatter: The points you make are very valid. Physicians and nurses want a better lifestyle.

Dr. Miller: It’s not even a better lifestyle. It’s about having a say in how clinical operations work and helping make them better. We want the delivery system to work better. This is an opportunity for us to do so.

Dr. Glatter: That translates into technology: obviously, generative artificial intelligence (AI) coming into the forefront, as we know, and changing care delivery models as you’re referring to, which is going to happen. It’s going to be a slow process. I think that the evolution is happening and will happen, as you accurately described.

Dr. Miller: The other thing that’s different now vs 20 years ago is that managed care is here, there, and everywhere, as Dr Seuss would say. You have utilization review and prior authorization, which I’ve experienced as a patient and a physician, and boy, is it not a fun process. There’s a large amount of friction that needs to be improved. If we’re worried about induced demand or inappropriate utilization, we have managed care right there to help police bad behavior.

Reforming Healthcare Systems and Restoring Patient-Centric Focus

Dr. Glatter: If you were to come up with, say, three bullet points of how we can work our way out of this current morass of where our healthcare systems exist, where do you see the solutions or how can we make and effect change?

Dr. Miller: I’d say there are a couple of things. One is, let business models compete fairly on an equal playing field. Let the physician-owned hospital compete with the tax-exempt hospital and the nonprofit hospital. Put them on an equal playing field. We have things like 340B, which favors tax-exempt hospitals. For-profit or tax-paying hospitals are not able to participate in that. That doesn’t make any sense just from a public policy perspective. Tax-paying hospitals and physician-owned hospitals pay taxes on investments, but tax-exempt hospitals don’t. I think, in public policy, we need to equalize the playing field between business models. Let the best business model win.

The other thing we need to do is to encourage the adoption of technology. The physician will eventually be an arbiter of tech-driven or AI-driven tools. In fact, at some point, the standard of care might be to use those tools. Not using those tools would be seen as negligence. If you think about placing a jugular or central venous catheter, to not use ultrasound would be considered insane. Thirty years ago, to use ultrasound would be considered novel. I think technology and AI will get us to that point of helping make care more efficient and more customized.

Those are the two biggest interventions, I would say. Third, every time we have a conversation in public policy, we need to remember what it is to be a patient. The decision should be driven not around any one industry’s profitability, but what it is to be a patient and how we can make that experience less burdensome, less expensive, or in plain English, suck less.

Dr. Glatter: Safety net hospitals and critical access hospitals are part of this discussion that, yes, we want everything to, in an ideal world, function more efficiently and effectively, with less cost and less red tape. The safety net of our nation is struggling.

Dr. Miller: I 100% agree. The Cook County hospitals of the world are deserving of our support and, frankly, our gratitude. Facilities like that have huge burdens of patients with Medicaid. We also still have millions of uninsured patients. The neighborhoods that they serve are also poorer. I think facilities like that are deserving of public support.

I also think we need to clearly define what those hospitals are. One of the challenges I’ve realized as I waded into this space is that market definitions of what a service market is for a hospital, its specialty type or what a safety net hospital is need to be more clearly defined because those facilities 100% are deserving of our support. We just need to be clear about what they are.

Regarding critical access hospitals, when you practice in a rural area, you have to think differently about care delivery. I’d say many of the rural systems are highly creative in how they structure clinical operations. Before the public health emergency, during the COVID pandemic, when we had a massive change in telehealth, rural hospitals were using — within the very narrow confines — as much telehealth as they could and should.

Rural hospitals also make greater use of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). For many of the specialty services, I remember, your first call was an NP or a PA because the physician was downstairs doing procedures. They’d come up and assess the patient before the procedure, but most of your consult questions were answered by the NP or PA. I’m not saying that’s the model we should use nationwide, but that rural systems are highly innovative and creative; they’re deserving of our time, attention, and support, and frankly, we can learn from them.

Dr. Glatter: I want to thank you for your time and your expertise in this area. We’ll see how the congressional hearings affect the industry as a whole, how the needle moves, and whether the ban or moratorium on physician-owned hospitals continues to exist going forward.

Dr. Miller: I appreciate you having me. The hospital industry is one of the most important industries for health care. This is a time of inflection, right? We need to go back to the value of what it means to be a clinician and serve patients. Hospitals need to reorient themselves around that core concern. How do we help support clinicians — doctors, nurses, pharmacists, whomever it is — in serving patients? Hospitals have become too corporate, so I think that this is an expected pushback.

Dr. Glatter: Again, I want to thank you for your time. This was a very important discussion. Thank you for your expertise.



Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. He disclosed no relevant financial relationships.Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH, is a hospitalist and an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2014 to 2017, Dr. Miller worked at four federal regulatory agencies: Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Miller disclosed ties with the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
 

A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on April 6, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining us today is Dr. Lewis Nelson, professor and chair of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and a certified medical toxicologist.

Today, we will be discussing an important and disturbing Gen Z trend circulating on social media, known as blackout rage gallon, or BORG.

Welcome, Lewis.

Lewis S. Nelson, MD: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Glatter: Thanks so much for joining us. This trend that’s been circulating on social media is really disturbing. It has elements that focus on binge drinking: Talking about taking a jug; emptying half of it out; and putting one fifth of vodka and some electrolytes, caffeine, or other things too is just incredibly disturbing. Teens and parents are looking at this. I’ll let you jump into the discussion.

Dr. Nelson: You’re totally right, it is disturbing. Binge drinking is a huge problem in this country in general. It’s a particular problem with young people – teenagers and young adults. I don’t think people appreciate the dangers associated with binge drinking, such as the amount of alcohol they consume and some of the unintended consequences of doing that.

To frame things quickly, we think there are probably around six people a day in the United States who die of alcohol poisoning. Alcohol poisoning basically is binge drinking to such an extent that you die of the alcohol itself. You’re not dying of a car crash or doing something that injures you. You’re dying of the alcohol. You’re drinking so much that your breathing slows, it stops, you have heart rhythm disturbances, and so on. It totals about 2,200 people a year in the United States.

Dr. Glatter: That’s alarming. For this trend, their argument is that half of the gallon is water. Therefore, I’m fine. I can drink it over 8-12 hours and it’s not an issue. How would you respond to that?

Dr. Nelson: Well, alcohol is alcohol. It’s all about how much you take in over what time period. I guess, in concept, it could be safer if you do it right. That’s not the way it’s been, so to speak, marketed on the various social media platforms. It’s meant to be a way to protect yourself from having your drink spiked or eating or ingesting contaminants from other people’s mouths when you share glasses or dip cups into communal pots like jungle juice or something.

Clearly, if you’re going to drink a large amount of alcohol over a short or long period of time, you do run the risk of having significant consequences, including bad decision-making if you’re just a little drunk all the way down to that of the complications you described about alcohol poisoning.

Dr. Glatter: There has been a comment made that this could be a form of harm reduction. The point of harm reduction is that we run trials, we validate it, and we test it. This, certainly in my mind, is no form of true harm reduction. I think you would agree.

Dr. Nelson: Many things that are marketed as harm reduction aren’t. There could be some aspects of this that could be considered harm reduction. You may believe – and there’s no reason not to – that protecting your drink is a good idea. If you’re at a bar and you leave your glass open and somebody put something in it, you can be drugged. Drug-facilitated sexual assault, for example, is a big issue. That means you have to leave your glass unattended. If you tend to your glass, it’s probably fine. One of the ways of harm reduction they mention is that by having a cap and having this bottle with you at all times, that can’t happen.

Now, in fairness, by far the drug most commonly associated with sexual assault is alcohol. It’s not gamma-hydroxybutyrate or ketamine. It’s not the other things that people are concerned about. Those happen, but those are small problems in the big picture. It’s drinking too much.

A form of harm reduction that you can comment on perhaps is that you make this drink concoction yourself, so you know what is in there. You can take that bottle, pour out half the water, and fill up the other half with water and nobody’s going to know. More likely, the way they say you should do it is you take your gallon jug, you pour it out, and you fill it up with one fifth of vodka.

One fifth of vodka is the same amount of volume as a bottle of wine. At 750 mL, that’s a huge amount of alcohol. If you measure the number of shots in that bottle, it’s about 17 shots. Even if you drink that over 6 hours, that’s still several shots an hour. That’s a large amount of alcohol. You might do two or three shots once and then not drink for a few hours. To sit and drink two or three shots an hour for 6 hours, that’s just an exceptional amount of alcohol.

They flavorize it and add caffeine, which only adds to the risk. It doesn’t make it in any way safer. With the volume, 1 gal of water or equivalent over a short period of time in and of itself could be a problem. There’s a large amount of mismessaging here. Whether something’s harm reduction, it could flip around to be easily construed or understood as being harmful.

Not to mention, the idea that when you make something safer, one of the unintended consequences of harm reduction is what we call risk compensation. This is best probably described as what’s called the Peltzman effect. The way that we think about airbags and seatbelts is that they’re going to reduce car crash deaths; and they do, but people drive faster and more recklessly because they know they’re safe.

This is a well-described problem in epidemiology: You expect a certain amount of harm reduction through some implemented process, but you don’t meet that because people take increased risks.

Dr. Glatter: Right. The idea of not developing a hangover is common among many teens and 20-somethings, thinking that because there’s hydration there, because half of it is water, it’s just not going to happen. There’s your “harm reduction,” but your judgment’s impaired. It’s day drinking at its best, all day long. Then someone has the idea to get behind the wheel. These are the disastrous consequences that we all fear.

Dr. Nelson: There is a great example, perhaps of an unintended consequence of harm reduction. By putting caffeine in it, depending on how much caffeine you put in, some of these mixtures can have up to 1,000 mg of caffeine. Remember, a cup of coffee is about 1-200 mg, so you’re talking about several cups of coffee. The idea is that you will not be able to sense, as you normally do, how drunk you are. You’re not going to be a sleepy drunk, you’re going to be an awake drunk.

The idea that you’re going to have to drive so you’re going to drink a strong cup of black coffee before you go driving, you’re not going to drive any better. I can assure you that. You’re going to be more awake, perhaps, and not fall asleep at the wheel, but you’re still going to have psychomotor impairment. Your judgment is going to be impaired. There’s nothing good that comes with adding caffeine except that you’re going to be awake.

From a hangover perspective, there are many things that we’ve guessed at or suggested as either prevention or cures for hangovers. I don’t doubt that you’re going to have some volume depletion if you drink a large amount of alcohol. Alcohol’s a diuretic, so you’re going to lose more volume than you bring in.

Hydrating is probably always a good idea, but there is hydrating and then there’s overhydrating. We don’t need volumes like that. If you drink a cup or two of water, you’re probably fine. You don’t need to drink half a gallon of water. That can lead to problems like delusional hyponatremia, and so forth. There’s not any clear benefit to doing it.

If you want to prevent a hangover, one of the ways you might do it is by using vodka. There are nice data that show that clear alcohols typically, particularly vodka, don’t have many of the congeners that make the specific forms of alcohol what they are. Bourbon smells and tastes like bourbon because of these little molecules, these alkalis and ketones and amino acids and things that make it taste and smell the way it does. That’s true for all the other alcohols.

Vodka has the least amount of that. Even wine and beer have those in them, but vodka is basically alcohol mixed with water. It’s probably the least hangover-prone of all the alcohols; but still, if you drink a lot of vodka, you’re going to have a hangover. It’s just a dose-response curve to how much alcohol you drink, to how drunk you get, and to how much of a hangover you’re going to have.

Dr. Glatter: The hangover is really what it’s about because people want to be functional the next day. There are many companies out there that market hangover remedies, but people are using this as the hangover remedy in a way that’s socially accepted. That’s a good point you make.

The question is how do we get the message out to parents and teens? What’s the best way you feel to really sound the alarm here?

Dr. Nelson: These are challenging issues. We face this all the time with all the sorts of social media in particular. Most parents are not as savvy on social media as their kids are. You have to know what your children are doing. You should know what they’re listening to and watching. You do have to pay attention to the media directed at parents that will inform you a little bit about what your kids are doing. You have to talk with your kids and make sure they understand what it is that they’re doing.

We do this with our kids for some things. Hopefully, we talk about drinking, smoking, sex, and other things with our children (like driving if they get to that stage) and make sure they understand what the risks are and how to mitigate those risks. Being an attentive parent is part of it.

Sometimes you need outside messengers to do it. We’d like to believe that these social media companies are able to police themselves – at least they pay lip service to the fact they do. They have warnings that they’ll take things down that aren’t socially appropriate. Whether they do or not, I don’t know, because you keep seeing things about BORG on these media sites. If they are doing it, they’re not doing it efficiently or quickly enough.

Dr. Glatter: There has to be some censorship. These are young persons who are impressionable, who have developing brains, who are looking at this, thinking that if it’s out there on social media, such as TikTok or Instagram, then it’s okay to do so. That message has to be driven home.

Dr. Nelson: That’s a great point, and it’s tough. We know there’s been debate over the liability of social media or what they post, and whether or not they should be held liable like a more conventional media company or not. That’s politics and philosophy, and we’re probably not going to solve it here.

All these things wind up going viral and there’s probably got to be some filter on things that go viral. Maybe they need to have a bit more attentiveness to that when those things start happening. Now, clearly not every one of these is viral. When you think about some of the challenges we’ve seen in the past, such as the Tide Pod challenge and cinnamon challenge, some of these things could be quickly figured out to be dangerous.

I remember that the ice bucket challenge for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was pretty benign. You pour a bucket of water over your head, and people aren’t really getting hurt. That’s fun and good, and let people go out and do that. That could pass through the filter. When you start to see people drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, it doesn’t take an emergency physician to know that’s not a good thing. Any parent should know that if my kid drinks half a bottle or a bottle of vodka over a short period of time, that just can’t be okay.

Dr. Glatter: It’s a public health issue. That’s what we need to elevate it to because ultimately that’s what it impacts: welfare and safety.

Speaking of buckets, there’s a new bucket challenge, wherein unsuspecting people have a bucket put on their head, can’t breathe, and then pass out. There’s been a number of these reported and actually filmed on social media. Here’s another example of dangerous types of behavior that essentially are a form of assault. Unsuspecting people suffer injuries from young children and teens trying to play pranks.

Again, had there not been this medium, we wouldn’t necessarily see the extent of the injuries. I guess going forward, the next step would be to send a message to colleges that there should be some form of warning if this trend is seen, at least from a public health standpoint.

Dr. Nelson: Education is a necessary thing to do, but it’s almost never the real solution to a problem. We can educate people as best we can that they need to do things right. At some point, we’re going to need to regulate it or manage it somehow.

Whether it’s through a carrot or a stick approach, or whether you want to give people kudos for doing the right thing or punish them for doing something wrong, that’s a tough decision to make and one that is going to be made by a parent or guardian, a school official, or law enforcement. Somehow, we have to figure out how to make this happen.

There’s not going to be a single size that fits all for this. At some level, we have to do something to educate and regulate. The balance between those two things is going to be political and philosophical in nature.

Dr. Glatter: Right, and the element of peer pressure and conformity in this is really part of the element. If we try to remove that aspect of it, then often these trends would go away. That aspect of conformity and peer pressure is instrumental in fueling these trends. Maybe we can make a full gallon of water be the trend without any alcohol in there.

Dr. Nelson: We say water is only water, but as a medical toxicologist, I can tell you that one of the foundations in medical toxicology is that everything is toxic. It’s just the dose that determines the toxicity. Oxygen is toxic, water is toxic. Everything’s toxic if you take enough of it.

We know that whether it’s psychogenic or intentional, polydipsia by drinking excessive amounts of water, especially without electrolytes, is one of the reasons they say you should add electrolytes. That’s all relative as well, because depending on the electrolyte and how much you put in and things like that, that could also become dangerous. Drinking excessive amounts of water like they’re suggesting, which sounds like a good thing to prevent hangover and so on, can in and of itself be a problem too.

Dr. Glatter: Right, and we know that there’s no magic bullet for a hangover. Obviously, abstinence is the only thing that truly works.

Dr. Nelson: Or moderation.

Dr. Glatter: Until research proves further.

Thank you so much. You’ve made some really important points. Thank you for talking about the BORG phenomenon, how it relates to society in general, and what we can do to try to change people’s perception of alcohol and the bigger picture of binge drinking. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Nelson: Thanks, Rob, for having me. It’s an important topic and hopefully we can get a handle on this. I appreciate your time.

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y. Dr. Nelson is professor and chair of the department of emergency medicine and chief of the division of medical toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Board of Emergency Medicine, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, and Association of Academic Chairs in Emergency Medicine and is past-president of the American College of Medical Toxicology. Dr. Glatter and Dr. Nelson disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on April 6, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining us today is Dr. Lewis Nelson, professor and chair of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and a certified medical toxicologist.

Today, we will be discussing an important and disturbing Gen Z trend circulating on social media, known as blackout rage gallon, or BORG.

Welcome, Lewis.

Lewis S. Nelson, MD: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Glatter: Thanks so much for joining us. This trend that’s been circulating on social media is really disturbing. It has elements that focus on binge drinking: Talking about taking a jug; emptying half of it out; and putting one fifth of vodka and some electrolytes, caffeine, or other things too is just incredibly disturbing. Teens and parents are looking at this. I’ll let you jump into the discussion.

Dr. Nelson: You’re totally right, it is disturbing. Binge drinking is a huge problem in this country in general. It’s a particular problem with young people – teenagers and young adults. I don’t think people appreciate the dangers associated with binge drinking, such as the amount of alcohol they consume and some of the unintended consequences of doing that.

To frame things quickly, we think there are probably around six people a day in the United States who die of alcohol poisoning. Alcohol poisoning basically is binge drinking to such an extent that you die of the alcohol itself. You’re not dying of a car crash or doing something that injures you. You’re dying of the alcohol. You’re drinking so much that your breathing slows, it stops, you have heart rhythm disturbances, and so on. It totals about 2,200 people a year in the United States.

Dr. Glatter: That’s alarming. For this trend, their argument is that half of the gallon is water. Therefore, I’m fine. I can drink it over 8-12 hours and it’s not an issue. How would you respond to that?

Dr. Nelson: Well, alcohol is alcohol. It’s all about how much you take in over what time period. I guess, in concept, it could be safer if you do it right. That’s not the way it’s been, so to speak, marketed on the various social media platforms. It’s meant to be a way to protect yourself from having your drink spiked or eating or ingesting contaminants from other people’s mouths when you share glasses or dip cups into communal pots like jungle juice or something.

Clearly, if you’re going to drink a large amount of alcohol over a short or long period of time, you do run the risk of having significant consequences, including bad decision-making if you’re just a little drunk all the way down to that of the complications you described about alcohol poisoning.

Dr. Glatter: There has been a comment made that this could be a form of harm reduction. The point of harm reduction is that we run trials, we validate it, and we test it. This, certainly in my mind, is no form of true harm reduction. I think you would agree.

Dr. Nelson: Many things that are marketed as harm reduction aren’t. There could be some aspects of this that could be considered harm reduction. You may believe – and there’s no reason not to – that protecting your drink is a good idea. If you’re at a bar and you leave your glass open and somebody put something in it, you can be drugged. Drug-facilitated sexual assault, for example, is a big issue. That means you have to leave your glass unattended. If you tend to your glass, it’s probably fine. One of the ways of harm reduction they mention is that by having a cap and having this bottle with you at all times, that can’t happen.

Now, in fairness, by far the drug most commonly associated with sexual assault is alcohol. It’s not gamma-hydroxybutyrate or ketamine. It’s not the other things that people are concerned about. Those happen, but those are small problems in the big picture. It’s drinking too much.

A form of harm reduction that you can comment on perhaps is that you make this drink concoction yourself, so you know what is in there. You can take that bottle, pour out half the water, and fill up the other half with water and nobody’s going to know. More likely, the way they say you should do it is you take your gallon jug, you pour it out, and you fill it up with one fifth of vodka.

One fifth of vodka is the same amount of volume as a bottle of wine. At 750 mL, that’s a huge amount of alcohol. If you measure the number of shots in that bottle, it’s about 17 shots. Even if you drink that over 6 hours, that’s still several shots an hour. That’s a large amount of alcohol. You might do two or three shots once and then not drink for a few hours. To sit and drink two or three shots an hour for 6 hours, that’s just an exceptional amount of alcohol.

They flavorize it and add caffeine, which only adds to the risk. It doesn’t make it in any way safer. With the volume, 1 gal of water or equivalent over a short period of time in and of itself could be a problem. There’s a large amount of mismessaging here. Whether something’s harm reduction, it could flip around to be easily construed or understood as being harmful.

Not to mention, the idea that when you make something safer, one of the unintended consequences of harm reduction is what we call risk compensation. This is best probably described as what’s called the Peltzman effect. The way that we think about airbags and seatbelts is that they’re going to reduce car crash deaths; and they do, but people drive faster and more recklessly because they know they’re safe.

This is a well-described problem in epidemiology: You expect a certain amount of harm reduction through some implemented process, but you don’t meet that because people take increased risks.

Dr. Glatter: Right. The idea of not developing a hangover is common among many teens and 20-somethings, thinking that because there’s hydration there, because half of it is water, it’s just not going to happen. There’s your “harm reduction,” but your judgment’s impaired. It’s day drinking at its best, all day long. Then someone has the idea to get behind the wheel. These are the disastrous consequences that we all fear.

Dr. Nelson: There is a great example, perhaps of an unintended consequence of harm reduction. By putting caffeine in it, depending on how much caffeine you put in, some of these mixtures can have up to 1,000 mg of caffeine. Remember, a cup of coffee is about 1-200 mg, so you’re talking about several cups of coffee. The idea is that you will not be able to sense, as you normally do, how drunk you are. You’re not going to be a sleepy drunk, you’re going to be an awake drunk.

The idea that you’re going to have to drive so you’re going to drink a strong cup of black coffee before you go driving, you’re not going to drive any better. I can assure you that. You’re going to be more awake, perhaps, and not fall asleep at the wheel, but you’re still going to have psychomotor impairment. Your judgment is going to be impaired. There’s nothing good that comes with adding caffeine except that you’re going to be awake.

From a hangover perspective, there are many things that we’ve guessed at or suggested as either prevention or cures for hangovers. I don’t doubt that you’re going to have some volume depletion if you drink a large amount of alcohol. Alcohol’s a diuretic, so you’re going to lose more volume than you bring in.

Hydrating is probably always a good idea, but there is hydrating and then there’s overhydrating. We don’t need volumes like that. If you drink a cup or two of water, you’re probably fine. You don’t need to drink half a gallon of water. That can lead to problems like delusional hyponatremia, and so forth. There’s not any clear benefit to doing it.

If you want to prevent a hangover, one of the ways you might do it is by using vodka. There are nice data that show that clear alcohols typically, particularly vodka, don’t have many of the congeners that make the specific forms of alcohol what they are. Bourbon smells and tastes like bourbon because of these little molecules, these alkalis and ketones and amino acids and things that make it taste and smell the way it does. That’s true for all the other alcohols.

Vodka has the least amount of that. Even wine and beer have those in them, but vodka is basically alcohol mixed with water. It’s probably the least hangover-prone of all the alcohols; but still, if you drink a lot of vodka, you’re going to have a hangover. It’s just a dose-response curve to how much alcohol you drink, to how drunk you get, and to how much of a hangover you’re going to have.

Dr. Glatter: The hangover is really what it’s about because people want to be functional the next day. There are many companies out there that market hangover remedies, but people are using this as the hangover remedy in a way that’s socially accepted. That’s a good point you make.

The question is how do we get the message out to parents and teens? What’s the best way you feel to really sound the alarm here?

Dr. Nelson: These are challenging issues. We face this all the time with all the sorts of social media in particular. Most parents are not as savvy on social media as their kids are. You have to know what your children are doing. You should know what they’re listening to and watching. You do have to pay attention to the media directed at parents that will inform you a little bit about what your kids are doing. You have to talk with your kids and make sure they understand what it is that they’re doing.

We do this with our kids for some things. Hopefully, we talk about drinking, smoking, sex, and other things with our children (like driving if they get to that stage) and make sure they understand what the risks are and how to mitigate those risks. Being an attentive parent is part of it.

Sometimes you need outside messengers to do it. We’d like to believe that these social media companies are able to police themselves – at least they pay lip service to the fact they do. They have warnings that they’ll take things down that aren’t socially appropriate. Whether they do or not, I don’t know, because you keep seeing things about BORG on these media sites. If they are doing it, they’re not doing it efficiently or quickly enough.

Dr. Glatter: There has to be some censorship. These are young persons who are impressionable, who have developing brains, who are looking at this, thinking that if it’s out there on social media, such as TikTok or Instagram, then it’s okay to do so. That message has to be driven home.

Dr. Nelson: That’s a great point, and it’s tough. We know there’s been debate over the liability of social media or what they post, and whether or not they should be held liable like a more conventional media company or not. That’s politics and philosophy, and we’re probably not going to solve it here.

All these things wind up going viral and there’s probably got to be some filter on things that go viral. Maybe they need to have a bit more attentiveness to that when those things start happening. Now, clearly not every one of these is viral. When you think about some of the challenges we’ve seen in the past, such as the Tide Pod challenge and cinnamon challenge, some of these things could be quickly figured out to be dangerous.

I remember that the ice bucket challenge for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was pretty benign. You pour a bucket of water over your head, and people aren’t really getting hurt. That’s fun and good, and let people go out and do that. That could pass through the filter. When you start to see people drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, it doesn’t take an emergency physician to know that’s not a good thing. Any parent should know that if my kid drinks half a bottle or a bottle of vodka over a short period of time, that just can’t be okay.

Dr. Glatter: It’s a public health issue. That’s what we need to elevate it to because ultimately that’s what it impacts: welfare and safety.

Speaking of buckets, there’s a new bucket challenge, wherein unsuspecting people have a bucket put on their head, can’t breathe, and then pass out. There’s been a number of these reported and actually filmed on social media. Here’s another example of dangerous types of behavior that essentially are a form of assault. Unsuspecting people suffer injuries from young children and teens trying to play pranks.

Again, had there not been this medium, we wouldn’t necessarily see the extent of the injuries. I guess going forward, the next step would be to send a message to colleges that there should be some form of warning if this trend is seen, at least from a public health standpoint.

Dr. Nelson: Education is a necessary thing to do, but it’s almost never the real solution to a problem. We can educate people as best we can that they need to do things right. At some point, we’re going to need to regulate it or manage it somehow.

Whether it’s through a carrot or a stick approach, or whether you want to give people kudos for doing the right thing or punish them for doing something wrong, that’s a tough decision to make and one that is going to be made by a parent or guardian, a school official, or law enforcement. Somehow, we have to figure out how to make this happen.

There’s not going to be a single size that fits all for this. At some level, we have to do something to educate and regulate. The balance between those two things is going to be political and philosophical in nature.

Dr. Glatter: Right, and the element of peer pressure and conformity in this is really part of the element. If we try to remove that aspect of it, then often these trends would go away. That aspect of conformity and peer pressure is instrumental in fueling these trends. Maybe we can make a full gallon of water be the trend without any alcohol in there.

Dr. Nelson: We say water is only water, but as a medical toxicologist, I can tell you that one of the foundations in medical toxicology is that everything is toxic. It’s just the dose that determines the toxicity. Oxygen is toxic, water is toxic. Everything’s toxic if you take enough of it.

We know that whether it’s psychogenic or intentional, polydipsia by drinking excessive amounts of water, especially without electrolytes, is one of the reasons they say you should add electrolytes. That’s all relative as well, because depending on the electrolyte and how much you put in and things like that, that could also become dangerous. Drinking excessive amounts of water like they’re suggesting, which sounds like a good thing to prevent hangover and so on, can in and of itself be a problem too.

Dr. Glatter: Right, and we know that there’s no magic bullet for a hangover. Obviously, abstinence is the only thing that truly works.

Dr. Nelson: Or moderation.

Dr. Glatter: Until research proves further.

Thank you so much. You’ve made some really important points. Thank you for talking about the BORG phenomenon, how it relates to society in general, and what we can do to try to change people’s perception of alcohol and the bigger picture of binge drinking. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Nelson: Thanks, Rob, for having me. It’s an important topic and hopefully we can get a handle on this. I appreciate your time.

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y. Dr. Nelson is professor and chair of the department of emergency medicine and chief of the division of medical toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Board of Emergency Medicine, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, and Association of Academic Chairs in Emergency Medicine and is past-president of the American College of Medical Toxicology. Dr. Glatter and Dr. Nelson disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on April 6, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining us today is Dr. Lewis Nelson, professor and chair of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and a certified medical toxicologist.

Today, we will be discussing an important and disturbing Gen Z trend circulating on social media, known as blackout rage gallon, or BORG.

Welcome, Lewis.

Lewis S. Nelson, MD: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Glatter: Thanks so much for joining us. This trend that’s been circulating on social media is really disturbing. It has elements that focus on binge drinking: Talking about taking a jug; emptying half of it out; and putting one fifth of vodka and some electrolytes, caffeine, or other things too is just incredibly disturbing. Teens and parents are looking at this. I’ll let you jump into the discussion.

Dr. Nelson: You’re totally right, it is disturbing. Binge drinking is a huge problem in this country in general. It’s a particular problem with young people – teenagers and young adults. I don’t think people appreciate the dangers associated with binge drinking, such as the amount of alcohol they consume and some of the unintended consequences of doing that.

To frame things quickly, we think there are probably around six people a day in the United States who die of alcohol poisoning. Alcohol poisoning basically is binge drinking to such an extent that you die of the alcohol itself. You’re not dying of a car crash or doing something that injures you. You’re dying of the alcohol. You’re drinking so much that your breathing slows, it stops, you have heart rhythm disturbances, and so on. It totals about 2,200 people a year in the United States.

Dr. Glatter: That’s alarming. For this trend, their argument is that half of the gallon is water. Therefore, I’m fine. I can drink it over 8-12 hours and it’s not an issue. How would you respond to that?

Dr. Nelson: Well, alcohol is alcohol. It’s all about how much you take in over what time period. I guess, in concept, it could be safer if you do it right. That’s not the way it’s been, so to speak, marketed on the various social media platforms. It’s meant to be a way to protect yourself from having your drink spiked or eating or ingesting contaminants from other people’s mouths when you share glasses or dip cups into communal pots like jungle juice or something.

Clearly, if you’re going to drink a large amount of alcohol over a short or long period of time, you do run the risk of having significant consequences, including bad decision-making if you’re just a little drunk all the way down to that of the complications you described about alcohol poisoning.

Dr. Glatter: There has been a comment made that this could be a form of harm reduction. The point of harm reduction is that we run trials, we validate it, and we test it. This, certainly in my mind, is no form of true harm reduction. I think you would agree.

Dr. Nelson: Many things that are marketed as harm reduction aren’t. There could be some aspects of this that could be considered harm reduction. You may believe – and there’s no reason not to – that protecting your drink is a good idea. If you’re at a bar and you leave your glass open and somebody put something in it, you can be drugged. Drug-facilitated sexual assault, for example, is a big issue. That means you have to leave your glass unattended. If you tend to your glass, it’s probably fine. One of the ways of harm reduction they mention is that by having a cap and having this bottle with you at all times, that can’t happen.

Now, in fairness, by far the drug most commonly associated with sexual assault is alcohol. It’s not gamma-hydroxybutyrate or ketamine. It’s not the other things that people are concerned about. Those happen, but those are small problems in the big picture. It’s drinking too much.

A form of harm reduction that you can comment on perhaps is that you make this drink concoction yourself, so you know what is in there. You can take that bottle, pour out half the water, and fill up the other half with water and nobody’s going to know. More likely, the way they say you should do it is you take your gallon jug, you pour it out, and you fill it up with one fifth of vodka.

One fifth of vodka is the same amount of volume as a bottle of wine. At 750 mL, that’s a huge amount of alcohol. If you measure the number of shots in that bottle, it’s about 17 shots. Even if you drink that over 6 hours, that’s still several shots an hour. That’s a large amount of alcohol. You might do two or three shots once and then not drink for a few hours. To sit and drink two or three shots an hour for 6 hours, that’s just an exceptional amount of alcohol.

They flavorize it and add caffeine, which only adds to the risk. It doesn’t make it in any way safer. With the volume, 1 gal of water or equivalent over a short period of time in and of itself could be a problem. There’s a large amount of mismessaging here. Whether something’s harm reduction, it could flip around to be easily construed or understood as being harmful.

Not to mention, the idea that when you make something safer, one of the unintended consequences of harm reduction is what we call risk compensation. This is best probably described as what’s called the Peltzman effect. The way that we think about airbags and seatbelts is that they’re going to reduce car crash deaths; and they do, but people drive faster and more recklessly because they know they’re safe.

This is a well-described problem in epidemiology: You expect a certain amount of harm reduction through some implemented process, but you don’t meet that because people take increased risks.

Dr. Glatter: Right. The idea of not developing a hangover is common among many teens and 20-somethings, thinking that because there’s hydration there, because half of it is water, it’s just not going to happen. There’s your “harm reduction,” but your judgment’s impaired. It’s day drinking at its best, all day long. Then someone has the idea to get behind the wheel. These are the disastrous consequences that we all fear.

Dr. Nelson: There is a great example, perhaps of an unintended consequence of harm reduction. By putting caffeine in it, depending on how much caffeine you put in, some of these mixtures can have up to 1,000 mg of caffeine. Remember, a cup of coffee is about 1-200 mg, so you’re talking about several cups of coffee. The idea is that you will not be able to sense, as you normally do, how drunk you are. You’re not going to be a sleepy drunk, you’re going to be an awake drunk.

The idea that you’re going to have to drive so you’re going to drink a strong cup of black coffee before you go driving, you’re not going to drive any better. I can assure you that. You’re going to be more awake, perhaps, and not fall asleep at the wheel, but you’re still going to have psychomotor impairment. Your judgment is going to be impaired. There’s nothing good that comes with adding caffeine except that you’re going to be awake.

From a hangover perspective, there are many things that we’ve guessed at or suggested as either prevention or cures for hangovers. I don’t doubt that you’re going to have some volume depletion if you drink a large amount of alcohol. Alcohol’s a diuretic, so you’re going to lose more volume than you bring in.

Hydrating is probably always a good idea, but there is hydrating and then there’s overhydrating. We don’t need volumes like that. If you drink a cup or two of water, you’re probably fine. You don’t need to drink half a gallon of water. That can lead to problems like delusional hyponatremia, and so forth. There’s not any clear benefit to doing it.

If you want to prevent a hangover, one of the ways you might do it is by using vodka. There are nice data that show that clear alcohols typically, particularly vodka, don’t have many of the congeners that make the specific forms of alcohol what they are. Bourbon smells and tastes like bourbon because of these little molecules, these alkalis and ketones and amino acids and things that make it taste and smell the way it does. That’s true for all the other alcohols.

Vodka has the least amount of that. Even wine and beer have those in them, but vodka is basically alcohol mixed with water. It’s probably the least hangover-prone of all the alcohols; but still, if you drink a lot of vodka, you’re going to have a hangover. It’s just a dose-response curve to how much alcohol you drink, to how drunk you get, and to how much of a hangover you’re going to have.

Dr. Glatter: The hangover is really what it’s about because people want to be functional the next day. There are many companies out there that market hangover remedies, but people are using this as the hangover remedy in a way that’s socially accepted. That’s a good point you make.

The question is how do we get the message out to parents and teens? What’s the best way you feel to really sound the alarm here?

Dr. Nelson: These are challenging issues. We face this all the time with all the sorts of social media in particular. Most parents are not as savvy on social media as their kids are. You have to know what your children are doing. You should know what they’re listening to and watching. You do have to pay attention to the media directed at parents that will inform you a little bit about what your kids are doing. You have to talk with your kids and make sure they understand what it is that they’re doing.

We do this with our kids for some things. Hopefully, we talk about drinking, smoking, sex, and other things with our children (like driving if they get to that stage) and make sure they understand what the risks are and how to mitigate those risks. Being an attentive parent is part of it.

Sometimes you need outside messengers to do it. We’d like to believe that these social media companies are able to police themselves – at least they pay lip service to the fact they do. They have warnings that they’ll take things down that aren’t socially appropriate. Whether they do or not, I don’t know, because you keep seeing things about BORG on these media sites. If they are doing it, they’re not doing it efficiently or quickly enough.

Dr. Glatter: There has to be some censorship. These are young persons who are impressionable, who have developing brains, who are looking at this, thinking that if it’s out there on social media, such as TikTok or Instagram, then it’s okay to do so. That message has to be driven home.

Dr. Nelson: That’s a great point, and it’s tough. We know there’s been debate over the liability of social media or what they post, and whether or not they should be held liable like a more conventional media company or not. That’s politics and philosophy, and we’re probably not going to solve it here.

All these things wind up going viral and there’s probably got to be some filter on things that go viral. Maybe they need to have a bit more attentiveness to that when those things start happening. Now, clearly not every one of these is viral. When you think about some of the challenges we’ve seen in the past, such as the Tide Pod challenge and cinnamon challenge, some of these things could be quickly figured out to be dangerous.

I remember that the ice bucket challenge for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was pretty benign. You pour a bucket of water over your head, and people aren’t really getting hurt. That’s fun and good, and let people go out and do that. That could pass through the filter. When you start to see people drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, it doesn’t take an emergency physician to know that’s not a good thing. Any parent should know that if my kid drinks half a bottle or a bottle of vodka over a short period of time, that just can’t be okay.

Dr. Glatter: It’s a public health issue. That’s what we need to elevate it to because ultimately that’s what it impacts: welfare and safety.

Speaking of buckets, there’s a new bucket challenge, wherein unsuspecting people have a bucket put on their head, can’t breathe, and then pass out. There’s been a number of these reported and actually filmed on social media. Here’s another example of dangerous types of behavior that essentially are a form of assault. Unsuspecting people suffer injuries from young children and teens trying to play pranks.

Again, had there not been this medium, we wouldn’t necessarily see the extent of the injuries. I guess going forward, the next step would be to send a message to colleges that there should be some form of warning if this trend is seen, at least from a public health standpoint.

Dr. Nelson: Education is a necessary thing to do, but it’s almost never the real solution to a problem. We can educate people as best we can that they need to do things right. At some point, we’re going to need to regulate it or manage it somehow.

Whether it’s through a carrot or a stick approach, or whether you want to give people kudos for doing the right thing or punish them for doing something wrong, that’s a tough decision to make and one that is going to be made by a parent or guardian, a school official, or law enforcement. Somehow, we have to figure out how to make this happen.

There’s not going to be a single size that fits all for this. At some level, we have to do something to educate and regulate. The balance between those two things is going to be political and philosophical in nature.

Dr. Glatter: Right, and the element of peer pressure and conformity in this is really part of the element. If we try to remove that aspect of it, then often these trends would go away. That aspect of conformity and peer pressure is instrumental in fueling these trends. Maybe we can make a full gallon of water be the trend without any alcohol in there.

Dr. Nelson: We say water is only water, but as a medical toxicologist, I can tell you that one of the foundations in medical toxicology is that everything is toxic. It’s just the dose that determines the toxicity. Oxygen is toxic, water is toxic. Everything’s toxic if you take enough of it.

We know that whether it’s psychogenic or intentional, polydipsia by drinking excessive amounts of water, especially without electrolytes, is one of the reasons they say you should add electrolytes. That’s all relative as well, because depending on the electrolyte and how much you put in and things like that, that could also become dangerous. Drinking excessive amounts of water like they’re suggesting, which sounds like a good thing to prevent hangover and so on, can in and of itself be a problem too.

Dr. Glatter: Right, and we know that there’s no magic bullet for a hangover. Obviously, abstinence is the only thing that truly works.

Dr. Nelson: Or moderation.

Dr. Glatter: Until research proves further.

Thank you so much. You’ve made some really important points. Thank you for talking about the BORG phenomenon, how it relates to society in general, and what we can do to try to change people’s perception of alcohol and the bigger picture of binge drinking. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Nelson: Thanks, Rob, for having me. It’s an important topic and hopefully we can get a handle on this. I appreciate your time.

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y. Dr. Nelson is professor and chair of the department of emergency medicine and chief of the division of medical toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Board of Emergency Medicine, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, and Association of Academic Chairs in Emergency Medicine and is past-president of the American College of Medical Toxicology. Dr. Glatter and Dr. Nelson disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on Feb. 21, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today is Gilberto Salazar, MD, an emergency physician at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, to discuss a new virtual reality tool to help health care providers deescalate workplace violence. Welcome, Dr. Salazar. It’s a pleasure to have you join us today.

Gilberto A. Salazar, MD: The pleasure is all mine, Dr. Glatter. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Glatter: This is such an important topic, as you can imagine. Workplace violence is affecting so many providers in hospital emergency departments but also throughout other parts of the hospital.

First, can you describe how the virtual reality (VR) program was designed that you developed and what type of situations it simulates?

Dr. Salazar: We worked in conjunction with the University of Texas at Dallas. They help people like me, subject matter experts in health care, to bring ideas to reality. I worked very closely with a group of engineers from their department in designing a module specifically designed to tackle, as you mentioned, one of our biggest threats in workplace violence.

We decided to bring in a series of competencies and proficiencies that we wanted to bring into the virtual reality space. In leveraging the technology and the expertise from UT Dallas, we were able to make that happen.

Dr. Glatter: I think it’s important to understand, in terms of virtual reality, what type of environment the program creates. Can you describe what a provider who puts the goggles on is experiencing? Do they feel anything? Is there technology that enables this?

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. We were able to bring to reality a series of scenarios very common from what you and I see in the emergency department on a daily basis. We wanted to immerse a learner into that specific environment. We didn’t feel that a module or something on a computer or a slide set could really bring the reality of what it’s like to interact with a patient who may be escalating or may be aggressive.

162602_photo1_web.jpg

162602_photo2_web.jpg

We were able to create our own algorithm, but it’s not brand new. We’re just borrowing what we think is the best to create something that the majority of health care personnel are going to be able to relate to and be able to really be proficient at.

This includes things like active listening, bargaining, how to respond, where to put yourself in a situation, and the best possible situation to respond to a scenario, how to prevent things – how to get out of a chokehold, for example. We’re borrowing from several different disciplines and creating something that can be very concise and organized.

Dr. Glatter: Does this program that you’ve developed allow the provider to get feedback in the sense that when they’re in such a danger, their life could be at risk? For example, if they don’t remove themselves in a certain amount of time, this could be lethal.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, 100%. Probably the one thing that differentiates our project from any others is the ability to customize the experience so that a learner who is doing the things that we ask them to do in terms of safety and response is able to get out of a situation successfully within the environment. If they don’t, they get some kind of feedback.

Not to spoil the surprise here, but we’re going to be doing things like looking at decibel meters to see what the volume in the room is doing and how you’re managing the volume and the stimulation within the room. If you are able to maintain the decibel readings at a specific level, you’re going to succeed through the module. If you don’t, we keep the patient escalation going.

Dr. Glatter: There is a debrief built into this type of approach where, in other words, learning points are emphasized – where you could have done better and such.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. We are going to be able to get individualized data for each learner so that we can tailor the debrief to their own performance and be able to give them actionable items to work on. It’s a debrief that’s productive and individualized, and folks can walk away with something useful in the end.

Dr. Glatter: Are the data shared or confidential at present?

Dr. Salazar: At this very moment, the data are confidential. We are going to look at how to best use this. We’re hoping to eventually write this up and see how this information can be best used to train personnel.

Eventually, we may see that some of the advice that we’re giving is very common to most folks. Others may require some individualized type of feedback. That said, it remains to be seen, but right now, it’s confidential.

Dr. Glatter: Is this currently being implemented as part of your curriculum for emergency medicine residents?

Dr. Salazar: We’re going to study it first. We’re very excited to include our emergency medicine residents as one of our cohorts that’s going to be undergoing the module, and we’re going to be studying other forms of workplace violence mitigation strategies. We’re really excited about the possibility of this eventually becoming the standard of education for not only our emergency medicine residents, but also health care personnel all over the world.

Dr. Glatter: I’m glad you mentioned that, because obviously nurses, clerks in the department, and anyone who’s working in the department, for that matter, and who interfaces with patients really should undergo such training.

Dr. Salazar: Absolutely. The folks at intake, at check-in, and at kiosks. Do they go through a separate area for screening? You’re absolutely right. There are many folks who interface with patients and all of us are potential victims of workplace violence. We want to give our health care family the best opportunity to succeed in these situations.

Dr. Glatter:: Absolutely. Even EMS providers, being on the front lines and encountering patients in such situations, would benefit, in my opinion.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. Behavioral health emergencies and organically induced altered mental status results in injury, both physical and mental, to EMS professionals as well, and there’s good evidence of that. I’ll be very glad to see this type of education make it out to our initial and continuing education efforts for EMS as well.

Dr. Glatter: I want to thank you. This has been very helpful. It’s such an important task that you’ve started to explore, and I look forward to follow-up on this. Again, thank you for your time.

Dr. Salazar: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
 

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, N.Y. He is an editorial adviser and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series on Medscape. He is also a medical contributor for Forbes. Dr. Salazar is a board-certified emergency physician and associate professor at UT Southwestern Medicine Center in Dallas. He is involved with the UTSW Emergency Medicine Education Program and serves as the medical director to teach both initial and continuing the emergency medicine education for emergency medical technicians and paramedics, which trains most of the Dallas Fire Rescue personnel and the vast majority for EMS providers in the Dallas County. In addition, he serves as an associate chief of service at Parkland’s emergency department, and liaison to surgical services. A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on Feb. 21, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today is Gilberto Salazar, MD, an emergency physician at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, to discuss a new virtual reality tool to help health care providers deescalate workplace violence. Welcome, Dr. Salazar. It’s a pleasure to have you join us today.

Gilberto A. Salazar, MD: The pleasure is all mine, Dr. Glatter. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Glatter: This is such an important topic, as you can imagine. Workplace violence is affecting so many providers in hospital emergency departments but also throughout other parts of the hospital.

First, can you describe how the virtual reality (VR) program was designed that you developed and what type of situations it simulates?

Dr. Salazar: We worked in conjunction with the University of Texas at Dallas. They help people like me, subject matter experts in health care, to bring ideas to reality. I worked very closely with a group of engineers from their department in designing a module specifically designed to tackle, as you mentioned, one of our biggest threats in workplace violence.

We decided to bring in a series of competencies and proficiencies that we wanted to bring into the virtual reality space. In leveraging the technology and the expertise from UT Dallas, we were able to make that happen.

Dr. Glatter: I think it’s important to understand, in terms of virtual reality, what type of environment the program creates. Can you describe what a provider who puts the goggles on is experiencing? Do they feel anything? Is there technology that enables this?

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. We were able to bring to reality a series of scenarios very common from what you and I see in the emergency department on a daily basis. We wanted to immerse a learner into that specific environment. We didn’t feel that a module or something on a computer or a slide set could really bring the reality of what it’s like to interact with a patient who may be escalating or may be aggressive.

162602_photo1_web.jpg

162602_photo2_web.jpg

We were able to create our own algorithm, but it’s not brand new. We’re just borrowing what we think is the best to create something that the majority of health care personnel are going to be able to relate to and be able to really be proficient at.

This includes things like active listening, bargaining, how to respond, where to put yourself in a situation, and the best possible situation to respond to a scenario, how to prevent things – how to get out of a chokehold, for example. We’re borrowing from several different disciplines and creating something that can be very concise and organized.

Dr. Glatter: Does this program that you’ve developed allow the provider to get feedback in the sense that when they’re in such a danger, their life could be at risk? For example, if they don’t remove themselves in a certain amount of time, this could be lethal.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, 100%. Probably the one thing that differentiates our project from any others is the ability to customize the experience so that a learner who is doing the things that we ask them to do in terms of safety and response is able to get out of a situation successfully within the environment. If they don’t, they get some kind of feedback.

Not to spoil the surprise here, but we’re going to be doing things like looking at decibel meters to see what the volume in the room is doing and how you’re managing the volume and the stimulation within the room. If you are able to maintain the decibel readings at a specific level, you’re going to succeed through the module. If you don’t, we keep the patient escalation going.

Dr. Glatter: There is a debrief built into this type of approach where, in other words, learning points are emphasized – where you could have done better and such.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. We are going to be able to get individualized data for each learner so that we can tailor the debrief to their own performance and be able to give them actionable items to work on. It’s a debrief that’s productive and individualized, and folks can walk away with something useful in the end.

Dr. Glatter: Are the data shared or confidential at present?

Dr. Salazar: At this very moment, the data are confidential. We are going to look at how to best use this. We’re hoping to eventually write this up and see how this information can be best used to train personnel.

Eventually, we may see that some of the advice that we’re giving is very common to most folks. Others may require some individualized type of feedback. That said, it remains to be seen, but right now, it’s confidential.

Dr. Glatter: Is this currently being implemented as part of your curriculum for emergency medicine residents?

Dr. Salazar: We’re going to study it first. We’re very excited to include our emergency medicine residents as one of our cohorts that’s going to be undergoing the module, and we’re going to be studying other forms of workplace violence mitigation strategies. We’re really excited about the possibility of this eventually becoming the standard of education for not only our emergency medicine residents, but also health care personnel all over the world.

Dr. Glatter: I’m glad you mentioned that, because obviously nurses, clerks in the department, and anyone who’s working in the department, for that matter, and who interfaces with patients really should undergo such training.

Dr. Salazar: Absolutely. The folks at intake, at check-in, and at kiosks. Do they go through a separate area for screening? You’re absolutely right. There are many folks who interface with patients and all of us are potential victims of workplace violence. We want to give our health care family the best opportunity to succeed in these situations.

Dr. Glatter:: Absolutely. Even EMS providers, being on the front lines and encountering patients in such situations, would benefit, in my opinion.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. Behavioral health emergencies and organically induced altered mental status results in injury, both physical and mental, to EMS professionals as well, and there’s good evidence of that. I’ll be very glad to see this type of education make it out to our initial and continuing education efforts for EMS as well.

Dr. Glatter: I want to thank you. This has been very helpful. It’s such an important task that you’ve started to explore, and I look forward to follow-up on this. Again, thank you for your time.

Dr. Salazar: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
 

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, N.Y. He is an editorial adviser and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series on Medscape. He is also a medical contributor for Forbes. Dr. Salazar is a board-certified emergency physician and associate professor at UT Southwestern Medicine Center in Dallas. He is involved with the UTSW Emergency Medicine Education Program and serves as the medical director to teach both initial and continuing the emergency medicine education for emergency medical technicians and paramedics, which trains most of the Dallas Fire Rescue personnel and the vast majority for EMS providers in the Dallas County. In addition, he serves as an associate chief of service at Parkland’s emergency department, and liaison to surgical services. A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

This discussion was recorded on Feb. 21, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr. Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today is Gilberto Salazar, MD, an emergency physician at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, to discuss a new virtual reality tool to help health care providers deescalate workplace violence. Welcome, Dr. Salazar. It’s a pleasure to have you join us today.

Gilberto A. Salazar, MD: The pleasure is all mine, Dr. Glatter. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Glatter: This is such an important topic, as you can imagine. Workplace violence is affecting so many providers in hospital emergency departments but also throughout other parts of the hospital.

First, can you describe how the virtual reality (VR) program was designed that you developed and what type of situations it simulates?

Dr. Salazar: We worked in conjunction with the University of Texas at Dallas. They help people like me, subject matter experts in health care, to bring ideas to reality. I worked very closely with a group of engineers from their department in designing a module specifically designed to tackle, as you mentioned, one of our biggest threats in workplace violence.

We decided to bring in a series of competencies and proficiencies that we wanted to bring into the virtual reality space. In leveraging the technology and the expertise from UT Dallas, we were able to make that happen.

Dr. Glatter: I think it’s important to understand, in terms of virtual reality, what type of environment the program creates. Can you describe what a provider who puts the goggles on is experiencing? Do they feel anything? Is there technology that enables this?

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. We were able to bring to reality a series of scenarios very common from what you and I see in the emergency department on a daily basis. We wanted to immerse a learner into that specific environment. We didn’t feel that a module or something on a computer or a slide set could really bring the reality of what it’s like to interact with a patient who may be escalating or may be aggressive.

162602_photo1_web.jpg

162602_photo2_web.jpg

We were able to create our own algorithm, but it’s not brand new. We’re just borrowing what we think is the best to create something that the majority of health care personnel are going to be able to relate to and be able to really be proficient at.

This includes things like active listening, bargaining, how to respond, where to put yourself in a situation, and the best possible situation to respond to a scenario, how to prevent things – how to get out of a chokehold, for example. We’re borrowing from several different disciplines and creating something that can be very concise and organized.

Dr. Glatter: Does this program that you’ve developed allow the provider to get feedback in the sense that when they’re in such a danger, their life could be at risk? For example, if they don’t remove themselves in a certain amount of time, this could be lethal.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, 100%. Probably the one thing that differentiates our project from any others is the ability to customize the experience so that a learner who is doing the things that we ask them to do in terms of safety and response is able to get out of a situation successfully within the environment. If they don’t, they get some kind of feedback.

Not to spoil the surprise here, but we’re going to be doing things like looking at decibel meters to see what the volume in the room is doing and how you’re managing the volume and the stimulation within the room. If you are able to maintain the decibel readings at a specific level, you’re going to succeed through the module. If you don’t, we keep the patient escalation going.

Dr. Glatter: There is a debrief built into this type of approach where, in other words, learning points are emphasized – where you could have done better and such.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. We are going to be able to get individualized data for each learner so that we can tailor the debrief to their own performance and be able to give them actionable items to work on. It’s a debrief that’s productive and individualized, and folks can walk away with something useful in the end.

Dr. Glatter: Are the data shared or confidential at present?

Dr. Salazar: At this very moment, the data are confidential. We are going to look at how to best use this. We’re hoping to eventually write this up and see how this information can be best used to train personnel.

Eventually, we may see that some of the advice that we’re giving is very common to most folks. Others may require some individualized type of feedback. That said, it remains to be seen, but right now, it’s confidential.

Dr. Glatter: Is this currently being implemented as part of your curriculum for emergency medicine residents?

Dr. Salazar: We’re going to study it first. We’re very excited to include our emergency medicine residents as one of our cohorts that’s going to be undergoing the module, and we’re going to be studying other forms of workplace violence mitigation strategies. We’re really excited about the possibility of this eventually becoming the standard of education for not only our emergency medicine residents, but also health care personnel all over the world.

Dr. Glatter: I’m glad you mentioned that, because obviously nurses, clerks in the department, and anyone who’s working in the department, for that matter, and who interfaces with patients really should undergo such training.

Dr. Salazar: Absolutely. The folks at intake, at check-in, and at kiosks. Do they go through a separate area for screening? You’re absolutely right. There are many folks who interface with patients and all of us are potential victims of workplace violence. We want to give our health care family the best opportunity to succeed in these situations.

Dr. Glatter:: Absolutely. Even EMS providers, being on the front lines and encountering patients in such situations, would benefit, in my opinion.

Dr. Salazar: Yes, absolutely. Behavioral health emergencies and organically induced altered mental status results in injury, both physical and mental, to EMS professionals as well, and there’s good evidence of that. I’ll be very glad to see this type of education make it out to our initial and continuing education efforts for EMS as well.

Dr. Glatter: I want to thank you. This has been very helpful. It’s such an important task that you’ve started to explore, and I look forward to follow-up on this. Again, thank you for your time.

Dr. Salazar: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
 

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, N.Y. He is an editorial adviser and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series on Medscape. He is also a medical contributor for Forbes. Dr. Salazar is a board-certified emergency physician and associate professor at UT Southwestern Medicine Center in Dallas. He is involved with the UTSW Emergency Medicine Education Program and serves as the medical director to teach both initial and continuing the emergency medicine education for emergency medical technicians and paramedics, which trains most of the Dallas Fire Rescue personnel and the vast majority for EMS providers in the Dallas County. In addition, he serves as an associate chief of service at Parkland’s emergency department, and liaison to surgical services. A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Today, we have Dr. Paul Pepe, an emergency physician and highly recognized expert in EMS, critical care, and resuscitation, along with Ryan Quinn, EMS chief for Edina Fire Department in Edina, Minn., joining us to discuss a significant advance in resuscitation for patients with nonshockable rhythms in cardiac arrest with a remarkable increase in neurologically intact survival. Welcome, gentlemen.

Dr. Pepe, I’d like to start off by thanking you for taking time to join us to discuss this novel concept of head-up or what you now refer to as a neuroprotective cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) bundle. Can you define what this entails and why it is referred to as a neuroprotective CPR bundle?

Paul E. Pepe, MD, MPH: CPR has been life saving for 60 years the way we’ve performed it, but probably only in a very small percentage of cases. That’s one of the problems. We have almost a thousand people a day who have sudden cardiac arrest out in the community alone and more in the hospital.

We know that early defibrillation and early CPR can contribute, but it’s still a small percentage of those. About 75%-85% of the cases that we go out to see will have nonshockable rhythms and flatlines. Some cases are what we call “pulseless electrical activity,” meaning that it looks like there is some kind of organized complex, but there is no pulse associated with it.

That’s why it’s a problem, because they don’t come back. Part of the reason why we see poor outcomes is not only that these cases tend to be people who, say, were in ventricular fibrillation and then just went on over time and were not witnessed or resuscitated or had a long response time. They basically either go into flatline or autoconvert into these bizarre rhythms.

The other issue is the way we perform CPR. CPR has been lifesaving, but it only generates about 20% and maybe 15% in some cases of normal blood flow, and particularly, cerebral perfusion pressure. We’ve looked at this nicely in the laboratory.

For example, during chest compressions, we’re hoping during the recoil phase to pull blood down and back into the right heart. The problem is that you’re not only setting a pressure rate up here to the arterial side but also, you’re setting back pressure wave on the venous side. Obviously, the arterial side always wins out, but it’s just not as efficient as it could be, at 20% or 30%.

What does this entail? It entails several independent mechanisms in terms of how they work, but they all do the same thing, which is they help to pull blood out of the brain and back into the right heart by basically manipulating intrathoracic pressure and creating more of a vacuum to get blood back there.

It’s so important that people do quality CPR. You have to have a good release and that helps us suck a little bit of blood and sucks the air in. As soon as the air rushes in, it neutralizes the pressure and there’s no more vacuum and nothing else is happening until the next squeeze.

What we have found is that we can cap the airway just for a second with a little pop-up valve. It acts like when you’re sucking a milkshake through a straw and it creates more of a vacuum in the chest. Just a little pop-up valve that pulls a little bit more blood out of the brain and the rest of the body and into the right heart.

We’ve shown in a human study that, for example, the systolic blood pressure almost doubles. It really goes from 40 mm Hg during standard CPR up to 80 mm Hg, and that would be sustained for 14-15 minutes. That was a nice little study that was done in Milwaukee a few years ago.

The other thing that happens is, if you add on something else, it’s like a toilet plunger. I think many people have seen it; it’s called “active compression-decompression.” It not only compresses, but it decompresses. Where it becomes even more effective is that if you had broken bones or stiff bones as you get older or whatever it may be, as you do the CPR, you’re still getting the push down and then you’re getting the pull out. It helps on several levels. More importantly, when you put the two together, they’re very synergistic.

We, have already done the clinical trial that is the proof of concept, and that was published in The Lancet about 10 years ago. In that study, we found that the combination of those two dramatically improved survival rates by 50%, with 1-year survival neurologically intact. That got us on the right track.

The interesting thing is that someone said, “Can we lift the head up a little bit?” We did a large amount of work in the laboratory over 10 years, fine tuning it. When do you first lift the head? How soon is too soon? It’s probably bad if you just go right to it.

We had to get the pump primed a little bit with these other things to get the flow going better, not only pulling blood out of the brain but now, you have a better flow this way. You have to prime at first for a couple of minutes, and we worked out the timing: Is it 3 or 4 minutes? It seems the timing is right at about 2 minutes, then you gradually elevate the head over about 2 minutes. We’re finding that seems to be the optimal way to do it. About 2 minutes of priming with those other two devices, the adjuncts, and then gradually elevate the head over 2 minutes.

When we do that in the laboratory, we’re getting normalized cerebral perfusion pressures. You’re normalizing the flow back again with that. We’re seeing profound differences in outcome as a result, even in these cases of the nonshockables.
 

Dr. Glatter: What you’re doing basically is resulting in an increase in cardiac output, essentially. That really is important, especially in these nonshockable rhythms, correct?

Dr. Pepe: Absolutely. As you’re doing this compression and you’re getting these intracranial pulse waves that are going up because they’re colliding up there. It could be even damaging in itself, but we’re seeing these intracranial raises. The intracranial pressure starts going up more and more over time. Also, peripherally in most people, you’re not getting good flow out there; then, your vasculature starts to relax. The arterials are starting to not get oxygen, so they don’t go out.

With this technique where we’re returning the pressure, we’re getting to 40% of normal now with the active compression-decompression CPR plus an impedance threshold device (ACD+ITD CPR) approach. Now, you add this, and you’re almost normalizing. In humans, even in these asystole patients, we’re seeing end-title CO₂s which are generally in the 15-20 range with standard CPR are now up with ACD+ITD CPR in the 30%-40% range, where we’re getting through 30 or 40 end-tidal CO₂s. Now, we’re seeing even the end-tidal CO₂s moving up into the 40s and 50s. We know there’s a surrogate marker telling us that we are generating much better flows not only to the rest of the body, but most importantly, to the brain.
 

Dr. Glatter: Ryan, could you tell us about the approach in terms of on scene, what you’re doing and how you use the device itself? Maybe you could talk about the backpack that you developed with your fire department?

Ryan P. Quinn, BS, EMS: Our approach has always been to get to the patient quickly, like everybody’s approach on a cardiac arrest when you’re responding. We are an advanced life-support paramedic ambulance service through the fire department – we’re all cross-trained firefighter paramedics. Our first vehicle from the fire department is typically the ambulance. It’s smaller and a little quicker than the fire engine. Two paramedics are going to jump out with two backpacks. One has the automated compressive device (we use the Lucas), and the other one is the sequential patient lifting device, the EleGARD.

Our two paramedics are quick to the patient’s side, and once they make contact with the patient to verify pulseless cardiac arrest, they will unpack. One person will go right to compressions if there’s nobody on compressions already. Sometimes we have a first responder police officer with an automated external defibrillator (AED). We go right to the patient’s side, concentrate on compressions, and within 90 seconds to 2 minutes, we have our bags unpacked, we’ve got the devices turned on, patient lifted up, slid under the device, and we have a supraglottic airway that is placed within 15 seconds already premade with the ITD on top. We have a sealed airway that we can continue to compress with Dr. Pepe’s original discussion of building on what’s previously been shown to work.

Dr. Pepe: Let me make a comment about this. This is so important, what Ryan is saying, because it’s something we found during the study. It’s really a true pit-crew approach. You’re not only getting these materials, which you think you need a medical Sherpa for, but you don’t. They set it up and then when they open it up, it’s all laid out just exactly as you need it. It’s not just how fast you get there; it’s how fast you get this done.

When we look at all cases combined against high-performance systems that had some of the highest survival rates around, when we compare it to those, we found that overall, even if you looked at the ones that had over 20-minute responses, the odds ratios were still three to four times higher. It was impressive.

If you looked at it under 15 minutes, which is really reasonable for most systems that get there by the way, the average time that people start CPR in any system in these studies has been about 8 minutes if you actually start this thing, which takes about 2 minutes more for this new bundle of care with this triad, it’s almost 12-14 times higher in terms of the odds ratio. I’ve never seen anything like that where the higher end is over 100 in terms of your confidence intervals.

Ryan’s system did really well and is one of those with even higher levels of outcomes, mostly because they got it on quickly. It’s like the AED for nonshockables but better because you have a wider range of efficacy where it will work.
 

Dr. Glatter: When the elapsed time was less than 11 minutes, that seemed to be an inflection point in the study, is that correct? You saw that 11-fold higher incidence in terms of neurologically intact survival, is that correct?

Dr. Pepe: We picked that number because that was the median time to get it on board. Half the people were getting it within that time period. The fact that you have a larger window, we’re talking about 13- almost 14-fold improvements in outcome if it was under 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter about the 11 or the 12. It’s the faster you get it on board, the better off you are.

Dr. Glatter: What’s the next step in the process of doing trials and having implementation on a larger scale based on your Annals of Emergency Medicine study? Where do you go from here?

Dr. Pepe: I’ve come to find out there are many confounding variables. What was the quality of CPR? How did people ventilate? Did they give the breath and hold it? Did they give a large enough breath so that blood can go across the transpulmonary system? There are many confounding variables. That’s why I think, in the future, it’s going to be more of looking at things like propensity score matching because we know all the variables that change outcomes. I think that’s going to be a way for me.

The other thing is that we were looking at only 380 cases here. When this doubles up in numbers, as we accrue more cases around the country of people who are implementing this, these numbers I just quoted are going to go up much higher. Unwitnessed asystole is considered futile, and you just don’t get them back. To be able to get these folks back now, even if it’s a small percentage, and the fact that we know that we’re producing this better flow, is pretty striking.

I’m really impressed, and the main thing is to make sure people are educated about it. Number two is that they understand that it has to be done right. It cannot be done wrong or you’re not going to see the differences. Getting it done right is not only following the procedures, the sequence, and how you do it, but it also has to do with getting there quickly, including assigning the right people to put it on and having well-trained people who know what they’re doing.
 

Dr. Glatter: In general, the lay public obviously should not attempt this in the field lifting someone’s head up in the sense of trying to do chest compressions. I think that message is important that you just said. It’s not ready for prime time yet in any way. It has to be done right.

Dr. Pepe: Bystanders have to learn CPR – they will buy us time and we’ll have better outcomes when they do that. That’s number one. Number two is that as more and more systems adopt this, you’re going to see more people coming back. If you think about what we’re doing now, if we only get back 5% of these nonshockable vs. less than 1%, it’s 5% of 800 people a day because a thousand people a day die. Several dozens of lives can be saved on a daily basis, coming back neurologically intact. That’s the key thing.

Dr. Glatter: Ryan, can you comment about your experience in the field? Is there anything in terms of your current approach that you think would be ideal to change at this point?

Mr. Quinn: We’ve established that this is the approach that we want to take and we’re just fine tuning it to be more efficient. Using the choreography of which person is going to do which role, we have clearly defined roles and clearly defined command of the scene so we’re not missing anything. Training is extremely important.

Dr. Glatter: Paul, I want to ask you about your anecdotal experience of people waking up quickly and talking after elevating their heads and going through this process. Having people talk about it and waking up is really fascinating. Maybe you can comment further on this.

Dr. Pepe: That’s a great point that you bring up because a 40- to 50-year-old guy who got saved with this approach, when he came around, he said he was hearing what people were saying. When he came out of it, he found out he had been getting CPR for about 25 minutes because he had persistent recurring ventricular fibrillation. He said, “How could I have survived that that long?”

When we told him about the new approach, he added, “Well, that’s like neuroprotective.” He’s right, because in the laboratory, we showed it was neuroprotective and we’re also getting better flows back there. It goes along with everything else, and so we’ve adopted the name because it is.

These are really high-powered systems we are comparing against, and we have the same level of return of spontaneous circulation. The major difference was when you started talking about the neurointact survival. We don’t have enough numbers yet, but next go around, we’re going to look at cerebral performance category (CPC) – CPC1 vs. the CPC2 – which were both considered intact, but CPC1 is actually better. We’re seeing many more of those, anecdotally.

I also wanted to mention that people do bring this up and say, “Well, let’s do a trial.” As far as we’re concerned, the trial’s been done in terms of The Lancet study 10 years ago that showed that the active compression-decompression had tremendously better outcomes. We show in the laboratories that you augment that a little bit. These are all [Food and Drug Administration] approved. You can go out and buy it tomorrow and get it done. I have no conflicts of interest, by the way, with any of this.

To have this device that’s going to have the potential of saving so many more lives is really an exciting breakthrough. More importantly, we’re understanding more now about the physiology of CPR and why it works. It could work much better with the approaches that we’ve been developing over the last 20 years or so.

Dr. Glatter: Absolutely. I want to thank both of you gentlemen. It’s been really an incredible experience to learn more about an advance in resuscitation that could truly be lifesaving. Thank you again for taking time to join us.

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician in the department of emergency medicine, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York. Dr. Pepe is professor, department of management, policy, and community health, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Houston. Mr. Quinn is EMS Chief, Edina (Minn.) Fire Department. No conflicts of interest were reported.

A version of this article first appeared Jan. 26 on Medscape.com.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Today, we have Dr. Paul Pepe, an emergency physician and highly recognized expert in EMS, critical care, and resuscitation, along with Ryan Quinn, EMS chief for Edina Fire Department in Edina, Minn., joining us to discuss a significant advance in resuscitation for patients with nonshockable rhythms in cardiac arrest with a remarkable increase in neurologically intact survival. Welcome, gentlemen.

Dr. Pepe, I’d like to start off by thanking you for taking time to join us to discuss this novel concept of head-up or what you now refer to as a neuroprotective cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) bundle. Can you define what this entails and why it is referred to as a neuroprotective CPR bundle?

Paul E. Pepe, MD, MPH: CPR has been life saving for 60 years the way we’ve performed it, but probably only in a very small percentage of cases. That’s one of the problems. We have almost a thousand people a day who have sudden cardiac arrest out in the community alone and more in the hospital.

We know that early defibrillation and early CPR can contribute, but it’s still a small percentage of those. About 75%-85% of the cases that we go out to see will have nonshockable rhythms and flatlines. Some cases are what we call “pulseless electrical activity,” meaning that it looks like there is some kind of organized complex, but there is no pulse associated with it.

That’s why it’s a problem, because they don’t come back. Part of the reason why we see poor outcomes is not only that these cases tend to be people who, say, were in ventricular fibrillation and then just went on over time and were not witnessed or resuscitated or had a long response time. They basically either go into flatline or autoconvert into these bizarre rhythms.

The other issue is the way we perform CPR. CPR has been lifesaving, but it only generates about 20% and maybe 15% in some cases of normal blood flow, and particularly, cerebral perfusion pressure. We’ve looked at this nicely in the laboratory.

For example, during chest compressions, we’re hoping during the recoil phase to pull blood down and back into the right heart. The problem is that you’re not only setting a pressure rate up here to the arterial side but also, you’re setting back pressure wave on the venous side. Obviously, the arterial side always wins out, but it’s just not as efficient as it could be, at 20% or 30%.

What does this entail? It entails several independent mechanisms in terms of how they work, but they all do the same thing, which is they help to pull blood out of the brain and back into the right heart by basically manipulating intrathoracic pressure and creating more of a vacuum to get blood back there.

It’s so important that people do quality CPR. You have to have a good release and that helps us suck a little bit of blood and sucks the air in. As soon as the air rushes in, it neutralizes the pressure and there’s no more vacuum and nothing else is happening until the next squeeze.

What we have found is that we can cap the airway just for a second with a little pop-up valve. It acts like when you’re sucking a milkshake through a straw and it creates more of a vacuum in the chest. Just a little pop-up valve that pulls a little bit more blood out of the brain and the rest of the body and into the right heart.

We’ve shown in a human study that, for example, the systolic blood pressure almost doubles. It really goes from 40 mm Hg during standard CPR up to 80 mm Hg, and that would be sustained for 14-15 minutes. That was a nice little study that was done in Milwaukee a few years ago.

The other thing that happens is, if you add on something else, it’s like a toilet plunger. I think many people have seen it; it’s called “active compression-decompression.” It not only compresses, but it decompresses. Where it becomes even more effective is that if you had broken bones or stiff bones as you get older or whatever it may be, as you do the CPR, you’re still getting the push down and then you’re getting the pull out. It helps on several levels. More importantly, when you put the two together, they’re very synergistic.

We, have already done the clinical trial that is the proof of concept, and that was published in The Lancet about 10 years ago. In that study, we found that the combination of those two dramatically improved survival rates by 50%, with 1-year survival neurologically intact. That got us on the right track.

The interesting thing is that someone said, “Can we lift the head up a little bit?” We did a large amount of work in the laboratory over 10 years, fine tuning it. When do you first lift the head? How soon is too soon? It’s probably bad if you just go right to it.

We had to get the pump primed a little bit with these other things to get the flow going better, not only pulling blood out of the brain but now, you have a better flow this way. You have to prime at first for a couple of minutes, and we worked out the timing: Is it 3 or 4 minutes? It seems the timing is right at about 2 minutes, then you gradually elevate the head over about 2 minutes. We’re finding that seems to be the optimal way to do it. About 2 minutes of priming with those other two devices, the adjuncts, and then gradually elevate the head over 2 minutes.

When we do that in the laboratory, we’re getting normalized cerebral perfusion pressures. You’re normalizing the flow back again with that. We’re seeing profound differences in outcome as a result, even in these cases of the nonshockables.
 

Dr. Glatter: What you’re doing basically is resulting in an increase in cardiac output, essentially. That really is important, especially in these nonshockable rhythms, correct?

Dr. Pepe: Absolutely. As you’re doing this compression and you’re getting these intracranial pulse waves that are going up because they’re colliding up there. It could be even damaging in itself, but we’re seeing these intracranial raises. The intracranial pressure starts going up more and more over time. Also, peripherally in most people, you’re not getting good flow out there; then, your vasculature starts to relax. The arterials are starting to not get oxygen, so they don’t go out.

With this technique where we’re returning the pressure, we’re getting to 40% of normal now with the active compression-decompression CPR plus an impedance threshold device (ACD+ITD CPR) approach. Now, you add this, and you’re almost normalizing. In humans, even in these asystole patients, we’re seeing end-title CO₂s which are generally in the 15-20 range with standard CPR are now up with ACD+ITD CPR in the 30%-40% range, where we’re getting through 30 or 40 end-tidal CO₂s. Now, we’re seeing even the end-tidal CO₂s moving up into the 40s and 50s. We know there’s a surrogate marker telling us that we are generating much better flows not only to the rest of the body, but most importantly, to the brain.
 

Dr. Glatter: Ryan, could you tell us about the approach in terms of on scene, what you’re doing and how you use the device itself? Maybe you could talk about the backpack that you developed with your fire department?

Ryan P. Quinn, BS, EMS: Our approach has always been to get to the patient quickly, like everybody’s approach on a cardiac arrest when you’re responding. We are an advanced life-support paramedic ambulance service through the fire department – we’re all cross-trained firefighter paramedics. Our first vehicle from the fire department is typically the ambulance. It’s smaller and a little quicker than the fire engine. Two paramedics are going to jump out with two backpacks. One has the automated compressive device (we use the Lucas), and the other one is the sequential patient lifting device, the EleGARD.

Our two paramedics are quick to the patient’s side, and once they make contact with the patient to verify pulseless cardiac arrest, they will unpack. One person will go right to compressions if there’s nobody on compressions already. Sometimes we have a first responder police officer with an automated external defibrillator (AED). We go right to the patient’s side, concentrate on compressions, and within 90 seconds to 2 minutes, we have our bags unpacked, we’ve got the devices turned on, patient lifted up, slid under the device, and we have a supraglottic airway that is placed within 15 seconds already premade with the ITD on top. We have a sealed airway that we can continue to compress with Dr. Pepe’s original discussion of building on what’s previously been shown to work.

Dr. Pepe: Let me make a comment about this. This is so important, what Ryan is saying, because it’s something we found during the study. It’s really a true pit-crew approach. You’re not only getting these materials, which you think you need a medical Sherpa for, but you don’t. They set it up and then when they open it up, it’s all laid out just exactly as you need it. It’s not just how fast you get there; it’s how fast you get this done.

When we look at all cases combined against high-performance systems that had some of the highest survival rates around, when we compare it to those, we found that overall, even if you looked at the ones that had over 20-minute responses, the odds ratios were still three to four times higher. It was impressive.

If you looked at it under 15 minutes, which is really reasonable for most systems that get there by the way, the average time that people start CPR in any system in these studies has been about 8 minutes if you actually start this thing, which takes about 2 minutes more for this new bundle of care with this triad, it’s almost 12-14 times higher in terms of the odds ratio. I’ve never seen anything like that where the higher end is over 100 in terms of your confidence intervals.

Ryan’s system did really well and is one of those with even higher levels of outcomes, mostly because they got it on quickly. It’s like the AED for nonshockables but better because you have a wider range of efficacy where it will work.
 

Dr. Glatter: When the elapsed time was less than 11 minutes, that seemed to be an inflection point in the study, is that correct? You saw that 11-fold higher incidence in terms of neurologically intact survival, is that correct?

Dr. Pepe: We picked that number because that was the median time to get it on board. Half the people were getting it within that time period. The fact that you have a larger window, we’re talking about 13- almost 14-fold improvements in outcome if it was under 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter about the 11 or the 12. It’s the faster you get it on board, the better off you are.

Dr. Glatter: What’s the next step in the process of doing trials and having implementation on a larger scale based on your Annals of Emergency Medicine study? Where do you go from here?

Dr. Pepe: I’ve come to find out there are many confounding variables. What was the quality of CPR? How did people ventilate? Did they give the breath and hold it? Did they give a large enough breath so that blood can go across the transpulmonary system? There are many confounding variables. That’s why I think, in the future, it’s going to be more of looking at things like propensity score matching because we know all the variables that change outcomes. I think that’s going to be a way for me.

The other thing is that we were looking at only 380 cases here. When this doubles up in numbers, as we accrue more cases around the country of people who are implementing this, these numbers I just quoted are going to go up much higher. Unwitnessed asystole is considered futile, and you just don’t get them back. To be able to get these folks back now, even if it’s a small percentage, and the fact that we know that we’re producing this better flow, is pretty striking.

I’m really impressed, and the main thing is to make sure people are educated about it. Number two is that they understand that it has to be done right. It cannot be done wrong or you’re not going to see the differences. Getting it done right is not only following the procedures, the sequence, and how you do it, but it also has to do with getting there quickly, including assigning the right people to put it on and having well-trained people who know what they’re doing.
 

Dr. Glatter: In general, the lay public obviously should not attempt this in the field lifting someone’s head up in the sense of trying to do chest compressions. I think that message is important that you just said. It’s not ready for prime time yet in any way. It has to be done right.

Dr. Pepe: Bystanders have to learn CPR – they will buy us time and we’ll have better outcomes when they do that. That’s number one. Number two is that as more and more systems adopt this, you’re going to see more people coming back. If you think about what we’re doing now, if we only get back 5% of these nonshockable vs. less than 1%, it’s 5% of 800 people a day because a thousand people a day die. Several dozens of lives can be saved on a daily basis, coming back neurologically intact. That’s the key thing.

Dr. Glatter: Ryan, can you comment about your experience in the field? Is there anything in terms of your current approach that you think would be ideal to change at this point?

Mr. Quinn: We’ve established that this is the approach that we want to take and we’re just fine tuning it to be more efficient. Using the choreography of which person is going to do which role, we have clearly defined roles and clearly defined command of the scene so we’re not missing anything. Training is extremely important.

Dr. Glatter: Paul, I want to ask you about your anecdotal experience of people waking up quickly and talking after elevating their heads and going through this process. Having people talk about it and waking up is really fascinating. Maybe you can comment further on this.

Dr. Pepe: That’s a great point that you bring up because a 40- to 50-year-old guy who got saved with this approach, when he came around, he said he was hearing what people were saying. When he came out of it, he found out he had been getting CPR for about 25 minutes because he had persistent recurring ventricular fibrillation. He said, “How could I have survived that that long?”

When we told him about the new approach, he added, “Well, that’s like neuroprotective.” He’s right, because in the laboratory, we showed it was neuroprotective and we’re also getting better flows back there. It goes along with everything else, and so we’ve adopted the name because it is.

These are really high-powered systems we are comparing against, and we have the same level of return of spontaneous circulation. The major difference was when you started talking about the neurointact survival. We don’t have enough numbers yet, but next go around, we’re going to look at cerebral performance category (CPC) – CPC1 vs. the CPC2 – which were both considered intact, but CPC1 is actually better. We’re seeing many more of those, anecdotally.

I also wanted to mention that people do bring this up and say, “Well, let’s do a trial.” As far as we’re concerned, the trial’s been done in terms of The Lancet study 10 years ago that showed that the active compression-decompression had tremendously better outcomes. We show in the laboratories that you augment that a little bit. These are all [Food and Drug Administration] approved. You can go out and buy it tomorrow and get it done. I have no conflicts of interest, by the way, with any of this.

To have this device that’s going to have the potential of saving so many more lives is really an exciting breakthrough. More importantly, we’re understanding more now about the physiology of CPR and why it works. It could work much better with the approaches that we’ve been developing over the last 20 years or so.

Dr. Glatter: Absolutely. I want to thank both of you gentlemen. It’s been really an incredible experience to learn more about an advance in resuscitation that could truly be lifesaving. Thank you again for taking time to join us.

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician in the department of emergency medicine, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York. Dr. Pepe is professor, department of management, policy, and community health, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Houston. Mr. Quinn is EMS Chief, Edina (Minn.) Fire Department. No conflicts of interest were reported.

A version of this article first appeared Jan. 26 on Medscape.com.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical adviser for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Today, we have Dr. Paul Pepe, an emergency physician and highly recognized expert in EMS, critical care, and resuscitation, along with Ryan Quinn, EMS chief for Edina Fire Department in Edina, Minn., joining us to discuss a significant advance in resuscitation for patients with nonshockable rhythms in cardiac arrest with a remarkable increase in neurologically intact survival. Welcome, gentlemen.

Dr. Pepe, I’d like to start off by thanking you for taking time to join us to discuss this novel concept of head-up or what you now refer to as a neuroprotective cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) bundle. Can you define what this entails and why it is referred to as a neuroprotective CPR bundle?

Paul E. Pepe, MD, MPH: CPR has been life saving for 60 years the way we’ve performed it, but probably only in a very small percentage of cases. That’s one of the problems. We have almost a thousand people a day who have sudden cardiac arrest out in the community alone and more in the hospital.

We know that early defibrillation and early CPR can contribute, but it’s still a small percentage of those. About 75%-85% of the cases that we go out to see will have nonshockable rhythms and flatlines. Some cases are what we call “pulseless electrical activity,” meaning that it looks like there is some kind of organized complex, but there is no pulse associated with it.

That’s why it’s a problem, because they don’t come back. Part of the reason why we see poor outcomes is not only that these cases tend to be people who, say, were in ventricular fibrillation and then just went on over time and were not witnessed or resuscitated or had a long response time. They basically either go into flatline or autoconvert into these bizarre rhythms.

The other issue is the way we perform CPR. CPR has been lifesaving, but it only generates about 20% and maybe 15% in some cases of normal blood flow, and particularly, cerebral perfusion pressure. We’ve looked at this nicely in the laboratory.

For example, during chest compressions, we’re hoping during the recoil phase to pull blood down and back into the right heart. The problem is that you’re not only setting a pressure rate up here to the arterial side but also, you’re setting back pressure wave on the venous side. Obviously, the arterial side always wins out, but it’s just not as efficient as it could be, at 20% or 30%.

What does this entail? It entails several independent mechanisms in terms of how they work, but they all do the same thing, which is they help to pull blood out of the brain and back into the right heart by basically manipulating intrathoracic pressure and creating more of a vacuum to get blood back there.

It’s so important that people do quality CPR. You have to have a good release and that helps us suck a little bit of blood and sucks the air in. As soon as the air rushes in, it neutralizes the pressure and there’s no more vacuum and nothing else is happening until the next squeeze.

What we have found is that we can cap the airway just for a second with a little pop-up valve. It acts like when you’re sucking a milkshake through a straw and it creates more of a vacuum in the chest. Just a little pop-up valve that pulls a little bit more blood out of the brain and the rest of the body and into the right heart.

We’ve shown in a human study that, for example, the systolic blood pressure almost doubles. It really goes from 40 mm Hg during standard CPR up to 80 mm Hg, and that would be sustained for 14-15 minutes. That was a nice little study that was done in Milwaukee a few years ago.

The other thing that happens is, if you add on something else, it’s like a toilet plunger. I think many people have seen it; it’s called “active compression-decompression.” It not only compresses, but it decompresses. Where it becomes even more effective is that if you had broken bones or stiff bones as you get older or whatever it may be, as you do the CPR, you’re still getting the push down and then you’re getting the pull out. It helps on several levels. More importantly, when you put the two together, they’re very synergistic.

We, have already done the clinical trial that is the proof of concept, and that was published in The Lancet about 10 years ago. In that study, we found that the combination of those two dramatically improved survival rates by 50%, with 1-year survival neurologically intact. That got us on the right track.

The interesting thing is that someone said, “Can we lift the head up a little bit?” We did a large amount of work in the laboratory over 10 years, fine tuning it. When do you first lift the head? How soon is too soon? It’s probably bad if you just go right to it.

We had to get the pump primed a little bit with these other things to get the flow going better, not only pulling blood out of the brain but now, you have a better flow this way. You have to prime at first for a couple of minutes, and we worked out the timing: Is it 3 or 4 minutes? It seems the timing is right at about 2 minutes, then you gradually elevate the head over about 2 minutes. We’re finding that seems to be the optimal way to do it. About 2 minutes of priming with those other two devices, the adjuncts, and then gradually elevate the head over 2 minutes.

When we do that in the laboratory, we’re getting normalized cerebral perfusion pressures. You’re normalizing the flow back again with that. We’re seeing profound differences in outcome as a result, even in these cases of the nonshockables.
 

Dr. Glatter: What you’re doing basically is resulting in an increase in cardiac output, essentially. That really is important, especially in these nonshockable rhythms, correct?

Dr. Pepe: Absolutely. As you’re doing this compression and you’re getting these intracranial pulse waves that are going up because they’re colliding up there. It could be even damaging in itself, but we’re seeing these intracranial raises. The intracranial pressure starts going up more and more over time. Also, peripherally in most people, you’re not getting good flow out there; then, your vasculature starts to relax. The arterials are starting to not get oxygen, so they don’t go out.

With this technique where we’re returning the pressure, we’re getting to 40% of normal now with the active compression-decompression CPR plus an impedance threshold device (ACD+ITD CPR) approach. Now, you add this, and you’re almost normalizing. In humans, even in these asystole patients, we’re seeing end-title CO₂s which are generally in the 15-20 range with standard CPR are now up with ACD+ITD CPR in the 30%-40% range, where we’re getting through 30 or 40 end-tidal CO₂s. Now, we’re seeing even the end-tidal CO₂s moving up into the 40s and 50s. We know there’s a surrogate marker telling us that we are generating much better flows not only to the rest of the body, but most importantly, to the brain.
 

Dr. Glatter: Ryan, could you tell us about the approach in terms of on scene, what you’re doing and how you use the device itself? Maybe you could talk about the backpack that you developed with your fire department?

Ryan P. Quinn, BS, EMS: Our approach has always been to get to the patient quickly, like everybody’s approach on a cardiac arrest when you’re responding. We are an advanced life-support paramedic ambulance service through the fire department – we’re all cross-trained firefighter paramedics. Our first vehicle from the fire department is typically the ambulance. It’s smaller and a little quicker than the fire engine. Two paramedics are going to jump out with two backpacks. One has the automated compressive device (we use the Lucas), and the other one is the sequential patient lifting device, the EleGARD.

Our two paramedics are quick to the patient’s side, and once they make contact with the patient to verify pulseless cardiac arrest, they will unpack. One person will go right to compressions if there’s nobody on compressions already. Sometimes we have a first responder police officer with an automated external defibrillator (AED). We go right to the patient’s side, concentrate on compressions, and within 90 seconds to 2 minutes, we have our bags unpacked, we’ve got the devices turned on, patient lifted up, slid under the device, and we have a supraglottic airway that is placed within 15 seconds already premade with the ITD on top. We have a sealed airway that we can continue to compress with Dr. Pepe’s original discussion of building on what’s previously been shown to work.

Dr. Pepe: Let me make a comment about this. This is so important, what Ryan is saying, because it’s something we found during the study. It’s really a true pit-crew approach. You’re not only getting these materials, which you think you need a medical Sherpa for, but you don’t. They set it up and then when they open it up, it’s all laid out just exactly as you need it. It’s not just how fast you get there; it’s how fast you get this done.

When we look at all cases combined against high-performance systems that had some of the highest survival rates around, when we compare it to those, we found that overall, even if you looked at the ones that had over 20-minute responses, the odds ratios were still three to four times higher. It was impressive.

If you looked at it under 15 minutes, which is really reasonable for most systems that get there by the way, the average time that people start CPR in any system in these studies has been about 8 minutes if you actually start this thing, which takes about 2 minutes more for this new bundle of care with this triad, it’s almost 12-14 times higher in terms of the odds ratio. I’ve never seen anything like that where the higher end is over 100 in terms of your confidence intervals.

Ryan’s system did really well and is one of those with even higher levels of outcomes, mostly because they got it on quickly. It’s like the AED for nonshockables but better because you have a wider range of efficacy where it will work.
 

Dr. Glatter: When the elapsed time was less than 11 minutes, that seemed to be an inflection point in the study, is that correct? You saw that 11-fold higher incidence in terms of neurologically intact survival, is that correct?

Dr. Pepe: We picked that number because that was the median time to get it on board. Half the people were getting it within that time period. The fact that you have a larger window, we’re talking about 13- almost 14-fold improvements in outcome if it was under 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter about the 11 or the 12. It’s the faster you get it on board, the better off you are.

Dr. Glatter: What’s the next step in the process of doing trials and having implementation on a larger scale based on your Annals of Emergency Medicine study? Where do you go from here?

Dr. Pepe: I’ve come to find out there are many confounding variables. What was the quality of CPR? How did people ventilate? Did they give the breath and hold it? Did they give a large enough breath so that blood can go across the transpulmonary system? There are many confounding variables. That’s why I think, in the future, it’s going to be more of looking at things like propensity score matching because we know all the variables that change outcomes. I think that’s going to be a way for me.

The other thing is that we were looking at only 380 cases here. When this doubles up in numbers, as we accrue more cases around the country of people who are implementing this, these numbers I just quoted are going to go up much higher. Unwitnessed asystole is considered futile, and you just don’t get them back. To be able to get these folks back now, even if it’s a small percentage, and the fact that we know that we’re producing this better flow, is pretty striking.

I’m really impressed, and the main thing is to make sure people are educated about it. Number two is that they understand that it has to be done right. It cannot be done wrong or you’re not going to see the differences. Getting it done right is not only following the procedures, the sequence, and how you do it, but it also has to do with getting there quickly, including assigning the right people to put it on and having well-trained people who know what they’re doing.
 

Dr. Glatter: In general, the lay public obviously should not attempt this in the field lifting someone’s head up in the sense of trying to do chest compressions. I think that message is important that you just said. It’s not ready for prime time yet in any way. It has to be done right.

Dr. Pepe: Bystanders have to learn CPR – they will buy us time and we’ll have better outcomes when they do that. That’s number one. Number two is that as more and more systems adopt this, you’re going to see more people coming back. If you think about what we’re doing now, if we only get back 5% of these nonshockable vs. less than 1%, it’s 5% of 800 people a day because a thousand people a day die. Several dozens of lives can be saved on a daily basis, coming back neurologically intact. That’s the key thing.

Dr. Glatter: Ryan, can you comment about your experience in the field? Is there anything in terms of your current approach that you think would be ideal to change at this point?

Mr. Quinn: We’ve established that this is the approach that we want to take and we’re just fine tuning it to be more efficient. Using the choreography of which person is going to do which role, we have clearly defined roles and clearly defined command of the scene so we’re not missing anything. Training is extremely important.

Dr. Glatter: Paul, I want to ask you about your anecdotal experience of people waking up quickly and talking after elevating their heads and going through this process. Having people talk about it and waking up is really fascinating. Maybe you can comment further on this.

Dr. Pepe: That’s a great point that you bring up because a 40- to 50-year-old guy who got saved with this approach, when he came around, he said he was hearing what people were saying. When he came out of it, he found out he had been getting CPR for about 25 minutes because he had persistent recurring ventricular fibrillation. He said, “How could I have survived that that long?”

When we told him about the new approach, he added, “Well, that’s like neuroprotective.” He’s right, because in the laboratory, we showed it was neuroprotective and we’re also getting better flows back there. It goes along with everything else, and so we’ve adopted the name because it is.

These are really high-powered systems we are comparing against, and we have the same level of return of spontaneous circulation. The major difference was when you started talking about the neurointact survival. We don’t have enough numbers yet, but next go around, we’re going to look at cerebral performance category (CPC) – CPC1 vs. the CPC2 – which were both considered intact, but CPC1 is actually better. We’re seeing many more of those, anecdotally.

I also wanted to mention that people do bring this up and say, “Well, let’s do a trial.” As far as we’re concerned, the trial’s been done in terms of The Lancet study 10 years ago that showed that the active compression-decompression had tremendously better outcomes. We show in the laboratories that you augment that a little bit. These are all [Food and Drug Administration] approved. You can go out and buy it tomorrow and get it done. I have no conflicts of interest, by the way, with any of this.

To have this device that’s going to have the potential of saving so many more lives is really an exciting breakthrough. More importantly, we’re understanding more now about the physiology of CPR and why it works. It could work much better with the approaches that we’ve been developing over the last 20 years or so.

Dr. Glatter: Absolutely. I want to thank both of you gentlemen. It’s been really an incredible experience to learn more about an advance in resuscitation that could truly be lifesaving. Thank you again for taking time to join us.

Dr. Glatter is an attending physician in the department of emergency medicine, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York. Dr. Pepe is professor, department of management, policy, and community health, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Houston. Mr. Quinn is EMS Chief, Edina (Minn.) Fire Department. No conflicts of interest were reported.

A version of this article first appeared Jan. 26 on Medscape.com.

This video transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome! I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Today we have a distinguished panel joining us to discuss an important legal decision resulting in a criminal conviction, involving a medical error due to administration of the wrong medication by a critical care nurse that led to a patient’s death.

Joining us to discuss this case is Dr. Megan Ranney, professor of emergency medicine and the academic dean at Brown University School of Public Health. Also joining us is Dr. Jane Barnsteiner, emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and an expert on patient safety, quality improvement, and system modeling. Welcome to both of you.

Jane Barnsteiner, PhD, RN: Thank you.

Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH: Thank you. It’s a joy to be with you.

Dr. Glatter: Let’s discuss this very tragic case involving RaDonda Vaught, who was an ICU nurse who was recently convicted in Tennessee of criminally negligent homicide and gross neglect of an impaired adult. She accidentally administered a paralytic medication, vecuronium, instead of a sedative, Versed, which was ordered to sedate a 75-year-old patient who had a brain bleed and TBI. She was scheduled to have a PET scan. After receiving the wrong medication and not really being monitored in any true way, just being in the care of an MRI tech, she suffered cardiac arrest and subsequently died.

Dr. Ranney, I want to begin with you. I saw on Twitter that you had written something that really stuck with me. I’ll quote you. “A culture of safety is one in which the system that allowed the mistake to happen is changed, not one in which the individual is scapegoated. And a culture of safety correlates with better patient outcomes that we know. This verdict is the opposite.”

I’ll let you explain from here. The system issue is the medication dispensing cabinet, in my mind, and there was a medication override. The question is, how was this override allowed to occur in the first place?

Dr. Ranney: My goodness, overrides happen every single day across this country, dozens of times a day in any particular shift. I would think of the system as being much bigger than just the Pyxis or that kind of automated dispensing cabinet, but around the larger system of the verbal orders, the time pressures that the nurse is under, the fact that the nurses are with a trainee, the fact that they’re being asked to operate outside of their normal environment by going down to MRI. There’s a series of issues.

Just as we thought about the Swiss cheese model for COVID-19, that model originated when we talked about patient safety and medical errors. It is a Swiss cheese of circumstances that allows this type of tragic error to occur.

Many of us have worked for years on trying to change the system from one of punishing people, changing it from that punitive system, to rather a system where we can do root-cause analysis, allow people to disclose errors, and allow us to inquire as to what are those series of Swiss cheese holes that allowed this mistake or any other to happen.

When you punish people, you lead them to hide their mistakes instead of allowing them to disclose them and allowing that important inquiry to happen. That’s why this is just so harmful to that culture of safety that so many of us are trying to create.

Dr. Glatter: It’s a chilling verdict in so many ways. I’m right on the same page with you, having worked for so long in the emergency department and seeing nurses that are overtaxed, overburdened, but also on patient floors. This goes to an ICU-type environment where this woman was having a nonemergent head scan and required some sedation.

The question I want to get to is how the system allowed the nurse to dispense this medication —though she was distracted, she’ll admit that. Jane, I want to get to you on this. How can we avoid this? What are the system checks that can be done in some fashion to make this safer and to avoid this tragic error?

Dr. Barnsteiner: First of all, I would say that you do not put in a major change, as they were doing with their EPIC system, as a big bank where you do the change through the entire organization. You do it in one area where you get the whole system smoothed out and all the errors taken care of so that you’re not having a problem like they had through their entire organization, which required overrides multiple times a day.

One of the things that’s been recommended is that these systems, like the Pyxis system, require the first five letters of a medication to be entered into the system so that when you have multiple medications where the first two letters are the same, the chances of pulling out the wrong medication are much smaller.

There’s a question of whether this medication, vecuronium, should have even been in this machine. You can have high-alert medications like this in baggies that have written on the front of the bag, “This is a high-alert medication. It requires two independent double checks.” These are all the things that will help alert the fatigued or distracted nurse or physician and will make things safer. There are many things that can be put into place.

Dr. Glatter: It’s almost like a hard stop. This is a different class of medication. Even if the nurse had a lapse and didn’t realize that, there should have been a hard stop asking whether you want this class. A sedative and a paralytic are two very different medications.

I’m not trying to assign any blame here. I’m just trying to look at mechanics of what happened and how we can put in place methods to avoid these types of errors where a system clearly is overtaxed and overburdened. Is it an artificial intelligence alert? Is it a pharmacy alert that goes out? Is it a Vocera message that gets triggered? It’s something to stop the nurse from doing something where they know better.

She’s used Versed before, apparently, and knows it’s a liquid and doesn’t have to be reconstituted. In my mind, as a practicing doctor for a long time, I see this and I see how it can happen. There are ways I think we can address it. Megan, I want to bring you into this and get your viewpoint.

Dr. Ranney: We’re working in an environment right now — and obviously, this happened pre-COVID — where medicines are constantly in short supply and we’re constantly dealing with substitutions of one for another. This has worsened during COVID, but it existed in the pre-COVID era as well. We’d have time periods where, like today, we’re out of D50 and we have to use D10, or we have a different formulation of a common antibiotic.

I could totally imagine that this nurse had been exposed to multiple medication substitution and so they were rushing; they thought, well, they just put one thing in instead of another and didn’t make that kind of cognitive connection.

What we know so well from our studies of human factors, engineering, and the way that systems work is that when someone is cognitively overloaded and constantly having to think outside the box and make decisions, particularly when they’re exposed to a new system for ordering medicine, there’s only so much that the brain can do at a time. This person was set up for this type of error.

Again, not to say that they didn’t do something wrong. That’s why we have a civil system. That’s why we have licensing. That’s why we have malpractice. To call this a criminal error when they were working within a system that had all these other problems where they were constantly having to make do for system failures, it’s almost inevitable that at some point something really horrible happened.

I’m sorry that it was this nurse, and how horrible for the patient and the family. I’m not excusing that. You can totally imagine, as a practicing physician, nurse, or anyone else in the healthcare system, how this happened.

Dr. Barnsteiner: The other part of it was that they did not have in place, at this time, the barcoding system in this particular patient area. What nurses are used to doing is when they have to pull a medication, they’re using the barcoding system to coordinate with what’s in the electronic health record, with the medication, and with the person’s ID band.

Those are all well-known safety checks that obviously were used to being used by this nurse in the critical care unit but that weren’t available in this MRI area. That is something that absolutely is a system failure. Those kinds of safety systems have to be available at any place in a health system where medications are being delivered.

Dr. Glatter: I think that’s an important point. Here, we have a technology that can supersede the ability of a human to make a mistake, and to have that in place is very critical. I want to go back to the idea of medical malpractice vs homicide charges.

Megan, you made a point of this. This nurse is now an example of someone who went to trial and was convicted, and it could have a chilling effect on healthcare providers. Pre-COVID, post-COVID, it is just chilling. It makes people want to leave the field. It causes PTSD. The psychiatric downstream effects of such an error are just immense.

I don’t know how the district attorney went for criminal charges here. I’m not an attorney and we don’t have a legal expert with us. For this to have happened is just setting precedent that it’s okay to have the effect of making so many people leave the field.

Dr. Ranney: I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve certainly been on the front lines, not only for the past 2 years during COVID but for almost 20 years prior to that. I will say that these types of errors are never-events that sit with our colleagues and friends for their entire career. No one goes into medicine intending to hurt someone. The system fails us and fails the patient.

There are certainly examples of intentional harm, and those people deserve to be prosecuted. This type of thing where a system let them down, again, should require an inquiry of the system. Don’t punish the individuals to the point of putting them in jail.

I think about my last few months working in the emergency department and what my nurses, in particular, have said to me. They worry that they’re going to lose their license and their ability to practice because of the horrific circumstances that we’ve been working in — the understaffing, the lack of access to standard medications, the long wait times, and on and on. They’re not able to take care of patients the way that they’ve been taught to do.

They’re worried already about the downstream effects on their sense of self, as well as on their ability to maintain their livelihood. When you put something like this on top of it, where again, an unintentional error that was potentiated by a somewhat broken system or by a series of Swiss cheese holes that just happened to line up, what message does that send to my nursing colleagues who have stayed on the front lines and who know that they have not been able to provide the standard of care that they’re used to?

Dr. Barnsteiner: On Friday, I did a program on fair and just culture with three health systems and a university school of nursing. Already, some of the faculty reported that students are talking about transferring to another major outside of the School of Nursing because of their worry about this particular guilty verdict.

The other thing is that we already have a tremendous shortage of nurses. We’ve seen many people leave the profession or retire in the past couple of years, and this is only going to compound it further. It is a sobering message that the public can’t afford to have, actually, because this will impact the quality of care and the safety of care that can be delivered to people and families as a result of not having sufficient numbers of professionals to deliver care.

Dr. Glatter: That’s such an important point. In any high-reliability organization, a culture of safety is key. There are tenets we try to adhere to. When we have people leaving the field after seeing a case like this, it’s chilling. We have to re-educate the public and we need to have a realignment of how errors are handled.

This is just the beginning. Her sentencing is going to be in about a month, and we’ll see what happens on reckless homicide charges and neglect. I think there’s going to be a follow-up to this and we’re going to need to discuss this more.

I just wanted to get a couple of takeaways for our audience to just really sear in the brain what we can learn from such an event.

Dr. Ranney: The big takeaway, to me, is the importance of us both continuing to use our voices and working across professional boundaries to help to create this culture of safety, one in which we all feel safe and supported in advocating for systems that work for us. We cannot ask nurses, respiratory technicians, radiology technicians, physicians, or anyone else within the healthcare system to work unsupported, and we have to recognize the degree to which we are all interdependent. My biggest takeaway is for us to use our voices together.

Dr. Barnsteiner: The takeaway that I would have from this, and what I’m working with a number of health systems on, is to have the chair of the board, the CEO of the hospital, the chief medical officer, and the chief nursing officer together promulgate a statement that is sent out to all employees to discuss this verdict and to say what they’re doing to promote a high-reliability organization and a fair and just culture. They should also ask for open conversation and for employees to let the top leadership know any concerns that they have about vulnerabilities in the system. It’s extremely important right now with this verdict that the leaders in healthcare settings, as well as in education settings, let people know what they’ll be doing to protect their employees.

Dr. Glatter: Jane and Megan, I want to thank you so much for such an important discussion that was very informative. I think there’s going to be a follow-up to this that’ll be very, very important. Thanks again.


Robert D. Glatter, MD, is assistant professor of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is an editorial advisor and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series on Medscape. He is also a medical contributor for Forbes. Dr. Glatter has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Megan Ranney, MD, MPH, is professor of emergency medicine and the academic dean at Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the director and founder of the Brown Emergency Digital Health Innovation (eDHI) program. She is also chief research officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, the country’s only nonprofit committed to reducing firearm injury through the public health approach, and a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org, dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment. Dr. Ranney has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships: Serve(d) as a speaker or a member of a speakers bureau for: Medscape; Merck.

Jane Barnsteiner, PhD, RN, is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and an expert on patient safety, quality improvement, and system modeling. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she was director of translational research at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Jane was one of the developers of the Quality and Safety in Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative and is co-editor of Quality and Safety in Nursing: A Competency Based Approach to Improving Outcomes, published by Wiley. She has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

This video transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome! I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Today we have a distinguished panel joining us to discuss an important legal decision resulting in a criminal conviction, involving a medical error due to administration of the wrong medication by a critical care nurse that led to a patient’s death.

Joining us to discuss this case is Dr. Megan Ranney, professor of emergency medicine and the academic dean at Brown University School of Public Health. Also joining us is Dr. Jane Barnsteiner, emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and an expert on patient safety, quality improvement, and system modeling. Welcome to both of you.

Jane Barnsteiner, PhD, RN: Thank you.

Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH: Thank you. It’s a joy to be with you.

Dr. Glatter: Let’s discuss this very tragic case involving RaDonda Vaught, who was an ICU nurse who was recently convicted in Tennessee of criminally negligent homicide and gross neglect of an impaired adult. She accidentally administered a paralytic medication, vecuronium, instead of a sedative, Versed, which was ordered to sedate a 75-year-old patient who had a brain bleed and TBI. She was scheduled to have a PET scan. After receiving the wrong medication and not really being monitored in any true way, just being in the care of an MRI tech, she suffered cardiac arrest and subsequently died.

Dr. Ranney, I want to begin with you. I saw on Twitter that you had written something that really stuck with me. I’ll quote you. “A culture of safety is one in which the system that allowed the mistake to happen is changed, not one in which the individual is scapegoated. And a culture of safety correlates with better patient outcomes that we know. This verdict is the opposite.”

I’ll let you explain from here. The system issue is the medication dispensing cabinet, in my mind, and there was a medication override. The question is, how was this override allowed to occur in the first place?

Dr. Ranney: My goodness, overrides happen every single day across this country, dozens of times a day in any particular shift. I would think of the system as being much bigger than just the Pyxis or that kind of automated dispensing cabinet, but around the larger system of the verbal orders, the time pressures that the nurse is under, the fact that the nurses are with a trainee, the fact that they’re being asked to operate outside of their normal environment by going down to MRI. There’s a series of issues.

Just as we thought about the Swiss cheese model for COVID-19, that model originated when we talked about patient safety and medical errors. It is a Swiss cheese of circumstances that allows this type of tragic error to occur.

Many of us have worked for years on trying to change the system from one of punishing people, changing it from that punitive system, to rather a system where we can do root-cause analysis, allow people to disclose errors, and allow us to inquire as to what are those series of Swiss cheese holes that allowed this mistake or any other to happen.

When you punish people, you lead them to hide their mistakes instead of allowing them to disclose them and allowing that important inquiry to happen. That’s why this is just so harmful to that culture of safety that so many of us are trying to create.

Dr. Glatter: It’s a chilling verdict in so many ways. I’m right on the same page with you, having worked for so long in the emergency department and seeing nurses that are overtaxed, overburdened, but also on patient floors. This goes to an ICU-type environment where this woman was having a nonemergent head scan and required some sedation.

The question I want to get to is how the system allowed the nurse to dispense this medication —though she was distracted, she’ll admit that. Jane, I want to get to you on this. How can we avoid this? What are the system checks that can be done in some fashion to make this safer and to avoid this tragic error?

Dr. Barnsteiner: First of all, I would say that you do not put in a major change, as they were doing with their EPIC system, as a big bank where you do the change through the entire organization. You do it in one area where you get the whole system smoothed out and all the errors taken care of so that you’re not having a problem like they had through their entire organization, which required overrides multiple times a day.

One of the things that’s been recommended is that these systems, like the Pyxis system, require the first five letters of a medication to be entered into the system so that when you have multiple medications where the first two letters are the same, the chances of pulling out the wrong medication are much smaller.

There’s a question of whether this medication, vecuronium, should have even been in this machine. You can have high-alert medications like this in baggies that have written on the front of the bag, “This is a high-alert medication. It requires two independent double checks.” These are all the things that will help alert the fatigued or distracted nurse or physician and will make things safer. There are many things that can be put into place.

Dr. Glatter: It’s almost like a hard stop. This is a different class of medication. Even if the nurse had a lapse and didn’t realize that, there should have been a hard stop asking whether you want this class. A sedative and a paralytic are two very different medications.

I’m not trying to assign any blame here. I’m just trying to look at mechanics of what happened and how we can put in place methods to avoid these types of errors where a system clearly is overtaxed and overburdened. Is it an artificial intelligence alert? Is it a pharmacy alert that goes out? Is it a Vocera message that gets triggered? It’s something to stop the nurse from doing something where they know better.

She’s used Versed before, apparently, and knows it’s a liquid and doesn’t have to be reconstituted. In my mind, as a practicing doctor for a long time, I see this and I see how it can happen. There are ways I think we can address it. Megan, I want to bring you into this and get your viewpoint.

Dr. Ranney: We’re working in an environment right now — and obviously, this happened pre-COVID — where medicines are constantly in short supply and we’re constantly dealing with substitutions of one for another. This has worsened during COVID, but it existed in the pre-COVID era as well. We’d have time periods where, like today, we’re out of D50 and we have to use D10, or we have a different formulation of a common antibiotic.

I could totally imagine that this nurse had been exposed to multiple medication substitution and so they were rushing; they thought, well, they just put one thing in instead of another and didn’t make that kind of cognitive connection.

What we know so well from our studies of human factors, engineering, and the way that systems work is that when someone is cognitively overloaded and constantly having to think outside the box and make decisions, particularly when they’re exposed to a new system for ordering medicine, there’s only so much that the brain can do at a time. This person was set up for this type of error.

Again, not to say that they didn’t do something wrong. That’s why we have a civil system. That’s why we have licensing. That’s why we have malpractice. To call this a criminal error when they were working within a system that had all these other problems where they were constantly having to make do for system failures, it’s almost inevitable that at some point something really horrible happened.

I’m sorry that it was this nurse, and how horrible for the patient and the family. I’m not excusing that. You can totally imagine, as a practicing physician, nurse, or anyone else in the healthcare system, how this happened.

Dr. Barnsteiner: The other part of it was that they did not have in place, at this time, the barcoding system in this particular patient area. What nurses are used to doing is when they have to pull a medication, they’re using the barcoding system to coordinate with what’s in the electronic health record, with the medication, and with the person’s ID band.

Those are all well-known safety checks that obviously were used to being used by this nurse in the critical care unit but that weren’t available in this MRI area. That is something that absolutely is a system failure. Those kinds of safety systems have to be available at any place in a health system where medications are being delivered.

Dr. Glatter: I think that’s an important point. Here, we have a technology that can supersede the ability of a human to make a mistake, and to have that in place is very critical. I want to go back to the idea of medical malpractice vs homicide charges.

Megan, you made a point of this. This nurse is now an example of someone who went to trial and was convicted, and it could have a chilling effect on healthcare providers. Pre-COVID, post-COVID, it is just chilling. It makes people want to leave the field. It causes PTSD. The psychiatric downstream effects of such an error are just immense.

I don’t know how the district attorney went for criminal charges here. I’m not an attorney and we don’t have a legal expert with us. For this to have happened is just setting precedent that it’s okay to have the effect of making so many people leave the field.

Dr. Ranney: I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve certainly been on the front lines, not only for the past 2 years during COVID but for almost 20 years prior to that. I will say that these types of errors are never-events that sit with our colleagues and friends for their entire career. No one goes into medicine intending to hurt someone. The system fails us and fails the patient.

There are certainly examples of intentional harm, and those people deserve to be prosecuted. This type of thing where a system let them down, again, should require an inquiry of the system. Don’t punish the individuals to the point of putting them in jail.

I think about my last few months working in the emergency department and what my nurses, in particular, have said to me. They worry that they’re going to lose their license and their ability to practice because of the horrific circumstances that we’ve been working in — the understaffing, the lack of access to standard medications, the long wait times, and on and on. They’re not able to take care of patients the way that they’ve been taught to do.

They’re worried already about the downstream effects on their sense of self, as well as on their ability to maintain their livelihood. When you put something like this on top of it, where again, an unintentional error that was potentiated by a somewhat broken system or by a series of Swiss cheese holes that just happened to line up, what message does that send to my nursing colleagues who have stayed on the front lines and who know that they have not been able to provide the standard of care that they’re used to?

Dr. Barnsteiner: On Friday, I did a program on fair and just culture with three health systems and a university school of nursing. Already, some of the faculty reported that students are talking about transferring to another major outside of the School of Nursing because of their worry about this particular guilty verdict.

The other thing is that we already have a tremendous shortage of nurses. We’ve seen many people leave the profession or retire in the past couple of years, and this is only going to compound it further. It is a sobering message that the public can’t afford to have, actually, because this will impact the quality of care and the safety of care that can be delivered to people and families as a result of not having sufficient numbers of professionals to deliver care.

Dr. Glatter: That’s such an important point. In any high-reliability organization, a culture of safety is key. There are tenets we try to adhere to. When we have people leaving the field after seeing a case like this, it’s chilling. We have to re-educate the public and we need to have a realignment of how errors are handled.

This is just the beginning. Her sentencing is going to be in about a month, and we’ll see what happens on reckless homicide charges and neglect. I think there’s going to be a follow-up to this and we’re going to need to discuss this more.

I just wanted to get a couple of takeaways for our audience to just really sear in the brain what we can learn from such an event.

Dr. Ranney: The big takeaway, to me, is the importance of us both continuing to use our voices and working across professional boundaries to help to create this culture of safety, one in which we all feel safe and supported in advocating for systems that work for us. We cannot ask nurses, respiratory technicians, radiology technicians, physicians, or anyone else within the healthcare system to work unsupported, and we have to recognize the degree to which we are all interdependent. My biggest takeaway is for us to use our voices together.

Dr. Barnsteiner: The takeaway that I would have from this, and what I’m working with a number of health systems on, is to have the chair of the board, the CEO of the hospital, the chief medical officer, and the chief nursing officer together promulgate a statement that is sent out to all employees to discuss this verdict and to say what they’re doing to promote a high-reliability organization and a fair and just culture. They should also ask for open conversation and for employees to let the top leadership know any concerns that they have about vulnerabilities in the system. It’s extremely important right now with this verdict that the leaders in healthcare settings, as well as in education settings, let people know what they’ll be doing to protect their employees.

Dr. Glatter: Jane and Megan, I want to thank you so much for such an important discussion that was very informative. I think there’s going to be a follow-up to this that’ll be very, very important. Thanks again.


Robert D. Glatter, MD, is assistant professor of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is an editorial advisor and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series on Medscape. He is also a medical contributor for Forbes. Dr. Glatter has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Megan Ranney, MD, MPH, is professor of emergency medicine and the academic dean at Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the director and founder of the Brown Emergency Digital Health Innovation (eDHI) program. She is also chief research officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, the country’s only nonprofit committed to reducing firearm injury through the public health approach, and a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org, dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment. Dr. Ranney has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships: Serve(d) as a speaker or a member of a speakers bureau for: Medscape; Merck.

Jane Barnsteiner, PhD, RN, is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and an expert on patient safety, quality improvement, and system modeling. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she was director of translational research at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Jane was one of the developers of the Quality and Safety in Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative and is co-editor of Quality and Safety in Nursing: A Competency Based Approach to Improving Outcomes, published by Wiley. She has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

This video transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome! I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Today we have a distinguished panel joining us to discuss an important legal decision resulting in a criminal conviction, involving a medical error due to administration of the wrong medication by a critical care nurse that led to a patient’s death.

Joining us to discuss this case is Dr. Megan Ranney, professor of emergency medicine and the academic dean at Brown University School of Public Health. Also joining us is Dr. Jane Barnsteiner, emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and an expert on patient safety, quality improvement, and system modeling. Welcome to both of you.

Jane Barnsteiner, PhD, RN: Thank you.

Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH: Thank you. It’s a joy to be with you.

Dr. Glatter: Let’s discuss this very tragic case involving RaDonda Vaught, who was an ICU nurse who was recently convicted in Tennessee of criminally negligent homicide and gross neglect of an impaired adult. She accidentally administered a paralytic medication, vecuronium, instead of a sedative, Versed, which was ordered to sedate a 75-year-old patient who had a brain bleed and TBI. She was scheduled to have a PET scan. After receiving the wrong medication and not really being monitored in any true way, just being in the care of an MRI tech, she suffered cardiac arrest and subsequently died.

Dr. Ranney, I want to begin with you. I saw on Twitter that you had written something that really stuck with me. I’ll quote you. “A culture of safety is one in which the system that allowed the mistake to happen is changed, not one in which the individual is scapegoated. And a culture of safety correlates with better patient outcomes that we know. This verdict is the opposite.”

I’ll let you explain from here. The system issue is the medication dispensing cabinet, in my mind, and there was a medication override. The question is, how was this override allowed to occur in the first place?

Dr. Ranney: My goodness, overrides happen every single day across this country, dozens of times a day in any particular shift. I would think of the system as being much bigger than just the Pyxis or that kind of automated dispensing cabinet, but around the larger system of the verbal orders, the time pressures that the nurse is under, the fact that the nurses are with a trainee, the fact that they’re being asked to operate outside of their normal environment by going down to MRI. There’s a series of issues.

Just as we thought about the Swiss cheese model for COVID-19, that model originated when we talked about patient safety and medical errors. It is a Swiss cheese of circumstances that allows this type of tragic error to occur.

Many of us have worked for years on trying to change the system from one of punishing people, changing it from that punitive system, to rather a system where we can do root-cause analysis, allow people to disclose errors, and allow us to inquire as to what are those series of Swiss cheese holes that allowed this mistake or any other to happen.

When you punish people, you lead them to hide their mistakes instead of allowing them to disclose them and allowing that important inquiry to happen. That’s why this is just so harmful to that culture of safety that so many of us are trying to create.

Dr. Glatter: It’s a chilling verdict in so many ways. I’m right on the same page with you, having worked for so long in the emergency department and seeing nurses that are overtaxed, overburdened, but also on patient floors. This goes to an ICU-type environment where this woman was having a nonemergent head scan and required some sedation.

The question I want to get to is how the system allowed the nurse to dispense this medication —though she was distracted, she’ll admit that. Jane, I want to get to you on this. How can we avoid this? What are the system checks that can be done in some fashion to make this safer and to avoid this tragic error?

Dr. Barnsteiner: First of all, I would say that you do not put in a major change, as they were doing with their EPIC system, as a big bank where you do the change through the entire organization. You do it in one area where you get the whole system smoothed out and all the errors taken care of so that you’re not having a problem like they had through their entire organization, which required overrides multiple times a day.

One of the things that’s been recommended is that these systems, like the Pyxis system, require the first five letters of a medication to be entered into the system so that when you have multiple medications where the first two letters are the same, the chances of pulling out the wrong medication are much smaller.

There’s a question of whether this medication, vecuronium, should have even been in this machine. You can have high-alert medications like this in baggies that have written on the front of the bag, “This is a high-alert medication. It requires two independent double checks.” These are all the things that will help alert the fatigued or distracted nurse or physician and will make things safer. There are many things that can be put into place.

Dr. Glatter: It’s almost like a hard stop. This is a different class of medication. Even if the nurse had a lapse and didn’t realize that, there should have been a hard stop asking whether you want this class. A sedative and a paralytic are two very different medications.

I’m not trying to assign any blame here. I’m just trying to look at mechanics of what happened and how we can put in place methods to avoid these types of errors where a system clearly is overtaxed and overburdened. Is it an artificial intelligence alert? Is it a pharmacy alert that goes out? Is it a Vocera message that gets triggered? It’s something to stop the nurse from doing something where they know better.

She’s used Versed before, apparently, and knows it’s a liquid and doesn’t have to be reconstituted. In my mind, as a practicing doctor for a long time, I see this and I see how it can happen. There are ways I think we can address it. Megan, I want to bring you into this and get your viewpoint.

Dr. Ranney: We’re working in an environment right now — and obviously, this happened pre-COVID — where medicines are constantly in short supply and we’re constantly dealing with substitutions of one for another. This has worsened during COVID, but it existed in the pre-COVID era as well. We’d have time periods where, like today, we’re out of D50 and we have to use D10, or we have a different formulation of a common antibiotic.

I could totally imagine that this nurse had been exposed to multiple medication substitution and so they were rushing; they thought, well, they just put one thing in instead of another and didn’t make that kind of cognitive connection.

What we know so well from our studies of human factors, engineering, and the way that systems work is that when someone is cognitively overloaded and constantly having to think outside the box and make decisions, particularly when they’re exposed to a new system for ordering medicine, there’s only so much that the brain can do at a time. This person was set up for this type of error.

Again, not to say that they didn’t do something wrong. That’s why we have a civil system. That’s why we have licensing. That’s why we have malpractice. To call this a criminal error when they were working within a system that had all these other problems where they were constantly having to make do for system failures, it’s almost inevitable that at some point something really horrible happened.

I’m sorry that it was this nurse, and how horrible for the patient and the family. I’m not excusing that. You can totally imagine, as a practicing physician, nurse, or anyone else in the healthcare system, how this happened.

Dr. Barnsteiner: The other part of it was that they did not have in place, at this time, the barcoding system in this particular patient area. What nurses are used to doing is when they have to pull a medication, they’re using the barcoding system to coordinate with what’s in the electronic health record, with the medication, and with the person’s ID band.

Those are all well-known safety checks that obviously were used to being used by this nurse in the critical care unit but that weren’t available in this MRI area. That is something that absolutely is a system failure. Those kinds of safety systems have to be available at any place in a health system where medications are being delivered.

Dr. Glatter: I think that’s an important point. Here, we have a technology that can supersede the ability of a human to make a mistake, and to have that in place is very critical. I want to go back to the idea of medical malpractice vs homicide charges.

Megan, you made a point of this. This nurse is now an example of someone who went to trial and was convicted, and it could have a chilling effect on healthcare providers. Pre-COVID, post-COVID, it is just chilling. It makes people want to leave the field. It causes PTSD. The psychiatric downstream effects of such an error are just immense.

I don’t know how the district attorney went for criminal charges here. I’m not an attorney and we don’t have a legal expert with us. For this to have happened is just setting precedent that it’s okay to have the effect of making so many people leave the field.

Dr. Ranney: I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve certainly been on the front lines, not only for the past 2 years during COVID but for almost 20 years prior to that. I will say that these types of errors are never-events that sit with our colleagues and friends for their entire career. No one goes into medicine intending to hurt someone. The system fails us and fails the patient.

There are certainly examples of intentional harm, and those people deserve to be prosecuted. This type of thing where a system let them down, again, should require an inquiry of the system. Don’t punish the individuals to the point of putting them in jail.

I think about my last few months working in the emergency department and what my nurses, in particular, have said to me. They worry that they’re going to lose their license and their ability to practice because of the horrific circumstances that we’ve been working in — the understaffing, the lack of access to standard medications, the long wait times, and on and on. They’re not able to take care of patients the way that they’ve been taught to do.

They’re worried already about the downstream effects on their sense of self, as well as on their ability to maintain their livelihood. When you put something like this on top of it, where again, an unintentional error that was potentiated by a somewhat broken system or by a series of Swiss cheese holes that just happened to line up, what message does that send to my nursing colleagues who have stayed on the front lines and who know that they have not been able to provide the standard of care that they’re used to?

Dr. Barnsteiner: On Friday, I did a program on fair and just culture with three health systems and a university school of nursing. Already, some of the faculty reported that students are talking about transferring to another major outside of the School of Nursing because of their worry about this particular guilty verdict.

The other thing is that we already have a tremendous shortage of nurses. We’ve seen many people leave the profession or retire in the past couple of years, and this is only going to compound it further. It is a sobering message that the public can’t afford to have, actually, because this will impact the quality of care and the safety of care that can be delivered to people and families as a result of not having sufficient numbers of professionals to deliver care.

Dr. Glatter: That’s such an important point. In any high-reliability organization, a culture of safety is key. There are tenets we try to adhere to. When we have people leaving the field after seeing a case like this, it’s chilling. We have to re-educate the public and we need to have a realignment of how errors are handled.

This is just the beginning. Her sentencing is going to be in about a month, and we’ll see what happens on reckless homicide charges and neglect. I think there’s going to be a follow-up to this and we’re going to need to discuss this more.

I just wanted to get a couple of takeaways for our audience to just really sear in the brain what we can learn from such an event.

Dr. Ranney: The big takeaway, to me, is the importance of us both continuing to use our voices and working across professional boundaries to help to create this culture of safety, one in which we all feel safe and supported in advocating for systems that work for us. We cannot ask nurses, respiratory technicians, radiology technicians, physicians, or anyone else within the healthcare system to work unsupported, and we have to recognize the degree to which we are all interdependent. My biggest takeaway is for us to use our voices together.

Dr. Barnsteiner: The takeaway that I would have from this, and what I’m working with a number of health systems on, is to have the chair of the board, the CEO of the hospital, the chief medical officer, and the chief nursing officer together promulgate a statement that is sent out to all employees to discuss this verdict and to say what they’re doing to promote a high-reliability organization and a fair and just culture. They should also ask for open conversation and for employees to let the top leadership know any concerns that they have about vulnerabilities in the system. It’s extremely important right now with this verdict that the leaders in healthcare settings, as well as in education settings, let people know what they’ll be doing to protect their employees.

Dr. Glatter: Jane and Megan, I want to thank you so much for such an important discussion that was very informative. I think there’s going to be a follow-up to this that’ll be very, very important. Thanks again.


Robert D. Glatter, MD, is assistant professor of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is an editorial advisor and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series on Medscape. He is also a medical contributor for Forbes. Dr. Glatter has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Megan Ranney, MD, MPH, is professor of emergency medicine and the academic dean at Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the director and founder of the Brown Emergency Digital Health Innovation (eDHI) program. She is also chief research officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, the country’s only nonprofit committed to reducing firearm injury through the public health approach, and a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org, dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment. Dr. Ranney has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships: Serve(d) as a speaker or a member of a speakers bureau for: Medscape; Merck.

Jane Barnsteiner, PhD, RN, is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and an expert on patient safety, quality improvement, and system modeling. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she was director of translational research at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Jane was one of the developers of the Quality and Safety in Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative and is co-editor of Quality and Safety in Nursing: A Competency Based Approach to Improving Outcomes, published by Wiley. She has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.