Sean Khozin, MD, MPH

I would be worried if I were one of those thinly-veiled opportunist entities seeking fame and fortune at the expense of American physicians. Doctors are ready to fight for their rights and their patients’ wellbeing and they are hundreds of thousands of brilliant minds strong.

Yesterday, I announced the formation of a seven-member volunteer writing committee on Sermo. This committee, which represents members of seven different medical specialties, is going to incorporate all the messages that the Sermo physician community has been discussing for weeks and incorporate them into an open letter to the people of the United States. The committee will only include the messages on which the Sermo physician community has shown consensus to ensure a board range of representation. These messages communicate the campaign’s objectives to the American public and deal with issues that have increased healthcare costs by weakening the doctor-patient relationship, promoting the practice of defensive medicine, and diminishing physicians’ ability to deliver appropriate care.

If you are a physician, please click on the image above to enlarge and print it. You can give it as a flier to your colleagues and leave it in the doctors’ lounge, cafeteria, and your office. For more information about this campaign please see my related posts and visit here.

The open letter campaign on Sermo is building exponential momentum and has entered its second phase. I have written about this campaign previously on this blog. Today, I sent the following message, with a link to the posting about the campaign, to a group of physicians on Sermo:

Dear Colleague:

I would like bring your attention to a very important campaign currently underway on Sermo. The Sermo physician community is working on drafting an “open letter to the people of the United States” reflecting our concerns and frustrations about the current trends in healthcare. Our goal is to get thousands of signatures on this letter and distribute it widely via the internet, national newspapers, and downloadable educational tools to be handed out to patients. Sermo has pledged significant support to facilitate the process.

We are now drafting the key messages of the letter in the posting I’m sending you. On 2/22, we will start writing the letter. Sermo members are participating in the entire process and so far we have been able to make lot of progress.

This is a unique opportunity for us to tell our side of the story to the public. We have been silent for too long and it’s time to speak out. This is a grassroots effort that can serve as a nidus for unity among physicians and pave the way for our direct involvement in a new wave of healthcare reform. Please take the time to check out the posting and start contributing by sharing your ideas with the physician community on Sermo. You may also want to reach out to your colleagues to join Sermo so they can participate in this important campaign.

The response to the above message has been very strong and empowering. Sermo has over 50,000 licensed physicians as members, all of whom can directly participate in writing the letter. It appears that physicians are now ready more than ever to challenge the status quo, which has been behaving somewhat maliciously towards patients and physicians for a very long time.

Regardless of the outcome of the open letter campaign, it is clear that those who have been diverting the patients’ dollars into profits, and away from physicians to deliver appropriate care, can no longer continue their pursuits with the same level of comfort to which they are accustomed.

Yesterday, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. A panel of 18 thought leaders, representing a diverse range of expertise, spent over a year trying to identify factors that can lead to improving life on our planet. The panel produced a list of 14 “grand challenges,” all of which can have important public health and economic implications. Three of the identified challenges are directly related to healthcare (in bold). Here’s what the panel came up with:

1. Make solar energy affordable
2. Provide energy from fusion
3. Develop carbon sequestration methods
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle
5. Provide access to clean water
6. Restore and improve urban infrastructure
7. Advance health informatics
8. Engineer better medicines
9. Reverse-engineer the brain
10. Prevent nuclear terror
11. Secure cyberspace
12. Enhance virtual reality
13. Advance personalized learning
14. Engineer the tools for scientific discovery

More information: NAE

Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration Chair at the Harvard Business School. She is widely recognized for her research on consumer-driven healthcare and has been dubbed by Money as the “Godmother” of the movement. A consumer-driven healthcare model enables patients to control more of their healthcare dollars. This requires accurate information on the cost of services charged by providers. Once patients are given this information, they can “shop around” for providers that deliver high-quality services at reasonable prices.

Made by the Manhattan Institute, the following is a video in support of Herzlinger’s latest book “Who Killed Health Care?” This book has already become a classic among many physicians and advocates of a market-driven healthcare system.

A US congressional committee is investigating whether the makers of Vytorin knew about the negative results of a key study showing that their expensive drug is no more effective than a cheaper generic.

Vtyorin, a cholesterol drug made by Merck and Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals is a combination of ezetimibe (Zetia) and the generic drug simvastatin. The results of the ENHANCE trial, announced last month, showed no benefit of the combination of these two drugs over simvastatin alone. The ENHANCE trial was dogged with controversy for several months prior to the release of its results. The controversy surrounded allegations on delayed reporting of results and issues about the design of the study.

The congressional committee’s investigation was sparked by anonymous entries in an online forum designed for pharmaceutical representatives called Cafepharma. According to lawmakers, one March 2007 anonymous entry on Cafepharma said “have a buddy at (Schering-Plough Research Institute). He says that the study is a bust. Adding Zetia to already maxed out statin is useless.” Another from June 2007 said “heard it crashed and burned!” These entries, in addition to several others like them, were posted on Cafepharma months before the results of the ENHANCE trial were released. Cafepharma has told investigators that they do not collect information on anonymous users and that none of the comments in question came from registered members.

Regardless of the outcome of the congressional investigation, this story highlights the need for pharmaceutical companies to maintain transparency regarding the results of their trials. Today, it’s become very difficult to control the flow of information. Honesty is, therefore, the best policy.

More information: ENHANCE trial, Cafepharma

Sermo, an online community of licensed US physicians with 50,000 members and growing rapidly, has become the platform for a potentially formidable campaign, allowing doctors to speak out and tell their side of the story about the broken healthcare system.

How the campaign started

I recently wrote a posting on Sermo entitled “Open letter to the people of the United States,” which dealt with drafting an open letter reflecting the frustrations of US physicians and publishing it in a national newspaper. This posting sparked an outpouring of powerful responses, making it clear that the physician community holds strong feelings about the current trends in healthcare and has coalesced as a significant force on Sermo to tackle some difficult issues.

The open letter initiative represents a grassroots effort to build consensus among physicians and communicate their concerns to the public. The objective of this letter has been loosely defined as “raising public awareness on how increasing healthcare costs are related to a system that disregards the doctor-patient relationship, promotes the practice of defensive medicine, and restricts the ability of physicians to deliver appropriate care.” All 50,000 Sermo members can contribute to the content of the letter and the campaign is building momentum.

If you are a physician, I urge you to join Sermo to participate in the development of the open letter. This is a real opportunity that can serve as a nidus for unity among physicians, enabling them to lead the next wave of healthcare reform.