Medicare Pain Questions Being Dropped in 2017

By Pat Anson, Editor

Hospital patients will no longer be asked about the quality of their pain care under new rules released this week by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for 2017.

Medicare uses a funding formula that rewards hospitals that provide good care and are rated highly in patient satisfaction surveys. Critics claimed that three questions in the survey asking patients about the quality of the pain care created a financial incentive for doctors to prescribe opioid pain medication to boost their hospital’s scores.

The three questions being dropped, which don’t even mention opioids, are as follows:

During this hospital stay, did you need medicine for pain?

During this hospital stay, how often was your pain well controlled?

During this hospital stay, how often did the hospital staff do everything they could to help you with your pain?

CMS said it was still developing and field testing alternative pain questions to replace the ones being eliminated.

“Today’s final rule would address physicians’ and other health care providers’ concerns that patient survey questions about pain management in the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program unduly influence prescribing practices," CMS said in a statement.

"While there is no empirical evidence of such an effect, we are finalizing the removal of the pain management dimension of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) Survey… to eliminate any financial pressure clinicians may feel to overprescribe medications.”

The American Medical Association (AMA), one of the groups that lobbied CMS to drop the pain questions, applauded the move.

"CMS understands that these policies effect how physicians practice medicine and how patients receive treatment," said AMA President Andrew Gurman, MD, in a statement. "By listening to our concerns, CMS made clear that patient care was the top priority. We look forward to continuing to work with CMS to improve patient health and enhance access to affordable quality care."

CMS was under intense political pressure to drop the pain questions. Twenty-six U.S. senators sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell claiming “physicians may feel compelled to prescribe opioid pain relievers in order to improve hospital performance."

Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), an anti-opioid activist group,also said the patient survey "fosters dangerous pain control practices."

But a top Medicare official disputed those claims in an article published in JAMA, saying “nothing in the survey suggests that opioids are a preferred way to control pain.”

Pain patients have long complained about the poor quality of their treatment in hospitals. In a survey of over 1,250 patients by Pain News Network and the International Pain Foundation, nine out of ten said patients should be asked about their pain care in hospital satisfaction surveys. Over half rated the quality of their pain treatment in hospitals as poor or very poor, and over 80 percent said hospital staffs are not adequately trained in pain management. 

PROP Leads New Effort to Silence Pain Patients

By Pat Anson, Editor

Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP) has joined in the lobbying effort to stop asking hospital patients about the quality of their pain care.

In a petition to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), PROP founder and Executive Director Andrew Kolodny calls on the agency to stop requiring hospitals to survey patients about their pain care because it encourages “aggressive opioid use.” PROP is funded and operated by Phoenix House, which runs a chain of addiction treatment centers, and Kolodny is its chief medical officer.

“Medication is not the only way to manage pain and should not be over-emphasized. Setting unrealistic expectations for pain relief can lead to dissatisfaction with care even when best efforts have been made to resolve pain. Aggressive management of pain should not be equated with quality healthcare,” Kolodny wrote in the petition on PROP stationary, which is co-signed by dozens of addiction treatment specialists, healthcare officials, consumer advocates and PROP board members.

The same group signed a letter, also on PROP stationary, to The Joint Commission (TJC) that accredits hospitals and healthcare organizations, asking it to change its pain management standards.

“The Pain Management Standards foster dangerous pain control practices, the endpoint of which is often the inappropriate provision of opioids with disastrous adverse consequences for individuals, families and communities. To help stem the opioid addiction epidemic, we request that TJC reexamine these Standards immediately,” the letter states.

Medicare has a funding formula that requires hospitals to prove they provide good care through a patient satisfaction survey known as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS).  The formula rewards hospitals that are rated highly by patients, while penalizing those that are not. 

The petition asks that these three questions be removed from the survey:

During this hospital stay, did you need medicine for pain?

During this hospital stay, how often was your pain well controlled?

During this hospital stay, how often did the hospital staff do everything they could to help you with your pain?

As Pain News Network has reported, 26 U.S. senators and the Americans College of Emergency Physicians have sent similar letters to Medicare asking that the pain questions by dropped from the survey. A recently introduced bill in the U.S. Senate called the PROP Act of 2016 would also amend the Social Security Act to remove "any assessments" of pain in hospitalized patients.

The PROP-led petition cites a 2013 study that found opioid pain medication was prescribed to over half of the non-surgical patients admitted to nearly 300 U.S. hospitals.

“Pain management is obviously an important part of patient care and we’ve always acknowledged that. But the problem here is that one should not have financial incentives and that’s essentially what happens through the CMS survey,” said Dr. Michael Carome of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, who co-signed the petition.

“The way the CMS survey and Joint Commission standards have driven the focus on pain has overemphasized its importance. We’re not saying don’t assess it at all, we’re saying the survey and standards have done more harm than good,” Carome told Pain News Network.

A top Medicare official recently wrote an article in JAMA defending the CMS survey.

"It has been alleged that, in pursuit of better patient responses and higher reimbursement, HCAHPS compels clinicians to prescribe prescription opioids. However, there is no empirical evidence that failing to prescribe opioids lowers a hospital’s HCAHPS scores," wrote Lemeneh Tefera, MD, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “Nothing in the survey suggests that opioids are a preferred way to control pain.”

Before joining Phoenix House in 2013, Kolodny was Chairman of Psychiatry at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, a hospital that was given a one-star rating by patients in the CMS survey.   Only 61 percent of the patients said their pain was "always" well controlled at Maimonides and 11 percent said their pain was "sometimes" or "never" controlled. Only 59% of the patients said they would recommend Maimonides, compared to a national average for hospitals of 71 percent.

PROP has long been active in lobbying federal agencies to rein in the prescribing of opioids. It recently had some major successes in achieving its goals.

Five PROP board members helped draft the opioid prescribing guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which discourage primary care physicians from prescribing opioids for chronic pain. 

The Obama administration also recently asked Congress for over a billion dollars in additional funding to fight opioid abuse, with most of the money earmarked for addiction treatment programs such as those offered by Phoenix House, which operates a chain of addiction treatment clinics. A proposed rule would also double the number of patients that physicians can treat with buprenorphine, an addiction treatment drug. 

According to OpenSecrets, Phoenix House spent over a million dollars on lobbying from 2006-2012.  PROP calls itself “a program of the Phoenix House Foundation” on its website.     

PNN and the International Pain Foundation recently conducted a survey of over 1,250 pain patients and found that over half rated the quality of their pain treatment in hospitals as poor or very poor. Over 80 percent said hospital staffs are not adequately trained in pain management. Nine out of ten patients also said they should be asked about their pain care in hospital satisfaction surveys.

Hospitals Accountable for Joint Replacement Surgeries

By Pat Anson, Editor

Hospitals will be held accountable for the cost and quality of care given to Medicare patients who undergo hip and knee replacement surgery under a pilot program by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Hip and knee replacements are the most common inpatient surgery for Medicare beneficiaries. In 2014, there were more than 400,000 such procedures, costing Medicare more than $7 billion for hospitalizations alone. Post-surgery complications such as pain and infection often lead to hospital readmissions and extended recovery periods.

Under the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) model, the hospital where the surgery takes place will be accountable for all services from the time of the surgery through 90 days after hospital discharge. This “bundling” of payments for hospitals, physicians, physical therapists and other health providers is meant to encourage them to work together to deliver more effective and efficient care.

Depending on the hospital’s quality and cost performance, the hospital will either earn a financial reward or be required to refund Medicare for a portion of the cost.

The quality and cost of care for hip and knee replacement surgeries can vary greatly. Currently the average Medicare expenditure for surgery, hospitalization, and recovery ranges from $16,500 to $33,000 across geographic areas. The rate of complications from infections or implant failures can be more than three times higher at some facilities than others.

“Incentives to coordinate the whole episode of care – from surgery to recovery – are not strong enough, and a patient’s health may suffer as a result,” CMS said in a statement. “When approaching care without seeing the big picture, there is a risk of missing crucial information or not coordinating across different care settings. This approach leads to more complications after surgery, higher readmission rates, protracted rehabilitative care, and variable costs. These are not the health outcomes patients want.”

The CJR model is being tested in 67 metropolitan areas throughout the country, and nearly all hospitals in those areas are required to participate. Patients will still be able to choose their doctor, hospital, nursing facility, home health service, and other providers. A list of all 67 areas can be found here.

The aging of the U.S. population is causing a surge in hip and knee replacement surgeries. Over a million joint replacement surgeries are currently performed annually – a number expected to surpass four million by 2030. 

Joint replacement surgery is generally conducted on the elderly to relieve pain from osteoarthritis, a painful and disabling condition caused by a loss of cartilage and the degradation of joints. Twenty-seven million Americans suffer from osteoarthritis.

Recent studies have questioned whether many of the surgeries are appropriate. A five year study of 175 knee replacement patients by the National Institutes of Health found that over a third of the surgeries were inappropriate, according to researchers who found that many patients had pain and other symptoms that were too mild to justify having their knees replaced.  Less than half (44%) of the knee replacement surgeries were classified as appropriate, with 22% rated inconclusive and 34% deemed inappropriate.