The health care labor force

[Greenbeard]

Interesting perspective last week in NEJM on Rethinking Health Care Labor:

Of the $2.6 trillion spent in 2010 on health care in the United States, 56% consisted of wages for health care workers. Labor is by far the largest category of expense: health care, as it is designed and delivered today, is very labor-intensive. The 16.4 million U.S. health care employees represented 11.8% of the total employed labor force in 2010. Yet unlike virtually all other sectors of the U.S. economy, health care has experienced no gains over the past 20 years in labor productivity, defined as output per worker (in health care, the “output” is the volume of activity — including all encounters, tests, treatments, and surgeries — per unit of cost). Although it is possible that some gains in quality have been achieved that are not reflected in productivity gains, it's striking that health care is not experiencing anything near the gains achieved in other sectors. At the same time, health care labor is becoming more expensive more quickly than other types of labor. Even through the recession, when wages fell in other sectors, health care wages grew at a compounded annual rate of 3.4% from 2005 to 2010.

Complicating this picture is the expansion of health insurance coverage to 34 million additional people over the next 10 years under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).1 This increase in the population of insured Americans will expand demand and the need for labor — potentially to the point where labor becomes scarce and therefore even more expensive. If we add these new beneficiaries to the health system and expand the workforce proportionally while retaining today's labor structure, total health care costs will increase by $112 billion, or 13%. Therefore, to be successful, any effort to slow the rate of growth of health care spending will require a change to the labor structure.

[...]

Improving the labor structure in health care can be achieved in three ways: reducing the number of workers, lowering wages, or increasing productivity. The first option is a crude approach generally reserved for recessions, though employment in the health care sector continued to increase during the most recent recession. Wages can be lowered by either reducing current wages or replacing current workers with lower-cost (less skilled or more narrowly skilled) workers who can produce the same output. The field of law has gone through such a transition, with the number of jobs for paralegals and legal assistants growing 2.5 times as quickly as that for attorneys in the 2000s.2

Yet it is the final, and realistically most viable, option that provides the greatest return. If the health care sector is to achieve even the average improvement in labor productivity seen in the overall U.S. economy, we will need to redesign the care delivery model much more fundamentally to use a different quantity and mix of workers engaging in a much higher value set of activities. (Although some activities, such as feeding patients and tending to their hygiene, may be impossible to accelerate, productivity is improved when these activities are performed by lower-cost but capable labor. Approaches that encourage delegation of tasks from physicians and nurses to other workers — for instance, transferring postsurgical care from surgeons to physician assistants — provide opportunities for additional savings and increased productivity.) This solution implies eliminating myriad time-wasting, low-value activities; increasing our use of technology, data, evidence, and teams; increasing standardization to avoid rework; and relying on evidence-based personalized care to avert complications.

We're seeing the start of a bit of that today:

Administration Seeks to Roll Back Hospital Rules

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved Tuesday to roll back a number of rules governing hospitals and other health care providers after concluding that the standards were obsolete or overly burdensome to the industry.

Among other things, the proposals would allow hospitals to save money by sometimes using qualified nurse practitioners and physician assistants in place of better-paid doctors, allowing doctors to focus more on patients and helping address “impending physician shortages.”

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the proposed changes would save providers nearly $1.1 billion a year without creating any “consequential risks for patients.”

The proposed rules would apply to more than 6,000 hospitals.

And, oddly enough, the Bipartisan Policy Center has some work out today on The Complexities of National Health Care Workforce Planning.

Lots of workforce attention this week.