My Patient Needed to Be Delivered

The following anecdote is by Alexander Friedman, MD, a fellow in maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

My patient needed to be delivered. She had just developed eclampsia, a potentially fatal disease that afflicts women in the second half of pregnancy. She had suffered a seizure and dangerously high blood pressure, and was at risk for far worse, including a stroke. No one knows why this condition arises, but delivery sure clears it up in a hurry.

So we gave medication to start labor, and the nurses placed a fetal heart monitor.

Worn like a belt, but higher on the abdomen, the ultrasound monitor would play a crucial role in the hours to come. It prints a read-out strip of the baby's heart rate, and the pattern would guide us in determining whether the delivery would be natural or through cesarean section.

As I suspected, the baby's heart-rate strip showed worrisome changes soon after labor began, and I knew it would get worse as labor progressed. We would fight through the night to have a natural delivery. But ultimately that single heart-rate test, which is surprisingly unreliable, would be a key factor in whether my patient would get a C-section or not.

Nearly all American mothers are monitored during labor, and bad fetal heart strips are an important cause of high cesarean section rates. A recent report detailed the dizzying increases: Almost one in three babies was delivered by cesarean in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available. That rate has grown by more than 50 percent in a decade.

I have performed hundreds of cesarean sections during residency, and many were the result of bad heart-rate strips.

A jagged pattern indicating increases in the heart rate reassures us that the baby's brain is awake and alert, and that labor could continue. But a flat line or decreases in the heart rate after contractions make us think the baby is not getting enough oxygen and pushes us to do a C-section - delivering the baby through incisions in the abdominal wall and the uterus.

For the worst readings, we believed every second counted and rushed the surgery: If the baby wasn't delivered one minute from the first incision into the skin, we had moved too slowly.

The complication we feared most was hypoxia, the baby not getting enough oxygen during labor. Going too long without adequate oxygen could result in a serious permanent injury, such as cerebral palsy, or even death.

No test is perfect. But almost every time we whisked a mother back to the operating room, and I cut through skin, fat, fascia, and finally the muscle of the uterus, expecting a blue, floppy baby, the child I delivered emerged pink, healthy, and a little bit angry.

Were we saving lives and averting disaster? Or were we performing unnecessary surgery?

Fetal heart-rate monitoring is a screening test. Good tests get several things right; they are cheap, detect a possible problem when there is still time to act, and minimize unnecessary follow-up tests.

Fetal heart monitoring is an appallingly poor test. The test misses the majority of babies with cerebral palsy, the condition researchers hoped it would prevent. It causes increased rates of a painful and expensive surgery: cesarean section. Even worse, almost all women undergo continuous heart monitoring during labor, not just those at highest risk.

Why do doctors cling to continuous fetal heart monitoring? An obstetrician will likely point to the fear of being sued, but the complete answer is more complex. Our medical culture prizes technology and tests, even if they don't work and can cause harm. "It's our bias that anything that can be quantified is an improvement," said H. Gilbert Welch, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School whose research focuses on harm caused by screening and over-diagnosis.

"I think we get in trouble when we start promising things to . . . well [patients]," Welch said in an interview. "It is not that hard to make them worse."

Throughout the night, I struggled with my patient's bad fetal heart strip. I wanted her to avoid a cesarean section. To improve the strip, the nurses and I tried giving her oxygen, changing her position in the bed, even rubbing the baby's head through the cervix to wake it up.

Finally, at 3 a.m., I felt compelled to recommend cesarean. The strip continued to look bad, and my patient's labor progressed slowly.

We went to the operating room, and delivered the baby by cesarean. My patient's child greeted the world pink and well-oxygenated.

The test was wrong again.

Cost-awareness anecdote: Three Ultrasounds (contest finalist)

The following story is from Tarcia Edmunds-Jehu, a nurse-midwife from Boston, MA

Sitting in an exam room I am watching my patient struggling to ask a difficult question that she clearly does not want to ask. After several attempts at starting and a few half finished sentences she finally manages to mumble a request for help with obtaining food for herself and her two daughters. She is a 41-year-old woman, 32 weeks pregnant with her third child, and working a full time job as a CNA in a local nursing home. Her husband is also working full time as a janitor. At her initial visit she denied any issues obtaining food for herself and her family, and declined any referral to social services.

“Has the work situation changed for you or your husband?” No. “Have you always had difficulty getting food and did not want to ask?” No. “Is there some reason you need more food than you needed before?” No.

“Is there some new expense that is taking money that you used to be spending on food?”
Tears begin to flow and she starts to talk. She tells me that she had been in this country for 5 years and never had public assistance of any kind. She talks about her long hours working 2 and sometimes 3 jobs in order to have enough money to keep her family afloat. She talks about putting herself through school to become a CNA while still working to pay her bills. Until last year she was doing this alone, making not only money to provide for her family, but also the money needed to bring her husband here. She had never asked for help or let her children go without. But now she is unable to pay her bills and buy food. What is the tipping point for her ability to provide for her family?

Three ultrasound bills from this pregnancy.

She is 41 and had opted for an early screening test at 12 weeks that combines ultrasound and blood tests to give an estimated risk for Down Syndrome. She made this decision after a visit with a genetic counselor and had the test despite the fact that the results would have no effect on the outcome of her pregnancy.

At 18 weeks she had a fetal survey ultrasound that patients have routinely to check the anatomy of the baby and rule out anomalies.

At 30 weeks she had an ultrasound to check the growth of her baby because she was over age 40. This is following hospital protocol; despite the fact that there was no clinical indication her baby was anything but well grown.

This patient had private insurance through her job. Very few of my patients have private insurance, and at that time I worried less about a patient with a full time job who had private insurance meeting her needs than I did about a patient on welfare with state insurance. It didn't occur to me to ask a patient if her medical bills were paid in full, or if she was responsible for paying a percentage or had a deductible.

The patient had insurance that would pay 80% of procedures, including ultrasound. Her insurance had deemed her 18-week fetal survey as necessary and were paying 80%, the other 2 ultrasounds were not considered necessary. She had a bill for close to $1400 that she had been paying off weekly for three months.

It could just have easily ended up that I would never have known about these bills, and in fact that may have been the case in the past with other patients.

We almost never think about what a test costs or whether it is paid for. Trying to find out the cost of a test is sometimes almost impossible. We almost never stop to think if a test is really indicated, or if the results will change the course of their treatment.

As providers we order tests because they are there, or because it’s easy, or because everyone gets them, or because we are scared if we don’t we’ll be sued, or because of arbitrary protocols. Sometimes we order tests because it’s the best thing for a patient.

No one orders tests thinking we might be taking food out of the mouths of our patients and their families, but sometimes that is exactly what we are doing.