Hensley joins NPR’s expanding health team
AHCJ member Scott Hensley, founding editor of and former contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog, joins National Public Radio on Monday as part of its expanded health coverage.
Vikki Valentine, NPR’s supervising science editor for digital news, says Hensley is one of two additions to the Web health staff. The other is producer Kathleen Masterson, who will develop and coordinate special projects.
Hensley will blog about the news of the day and develop a tone and strategy for NPR’s health blog, as well as build a following. Eventually he will work on longer format stories for use on the site and on the air. Valentine says she expects the rest of the health staff will contribute more to the blog.
Scott Hensley (Photo by Duncan Moore)
“I think once Scott comes aboard, you can expect to see more contributions to the blog from Richard Knox, Julie Rovner and health editors Joe Neel and April Fulton. And we’ll continue to have the wonderful Deborah Franklin file blog posts for us, too. She’s been running the blog for the past two months - in between editing and reporting stints here. She gives the blog such a warm and thoughtful touch, and that is definitely a goal we aspire to in our health coverage.”
The blog, which was started in April during the beginning of the H1N1 outbreak and was known as the Flu Blog, is getting a new name. “‘Shots: News For What Ails You’ is the current working name, but we’re still waiting for final approval from NPR’s legal department. We hope to launch the new look and feel for the blog, as well as Scott’s role in it, around mid-August,” Valentine says.
Hensley, who has been contributing to Covering Health since the end of April, is looking forward to starting his new job.
“I’m really enthusiastic about the chance to be part of NPR’s expansion of health coverage online. The journalistic standards that the organization brings are unparalleled,” Hensley says. “The mark that the folks there have made in covering health is tremendous, and there’s a real enthusiasm for using NPR’s considerable resources online in a way that I think will be valuable and really appealing to people interested in health.”
Valentine calls Hensley “a stand out in health journalism” and says “His experience at the Wall Street Journal in reporting, editing, blogging and social media make him a rare talent.” She says they have deliberately waited to fully develop a strategy for the blog to allow Hensley to make changes and bring his ideas to bear.
“And while I value his exceptional background, what really struck me during our interviews was how much he thinks about blogging and blog strategy. He’s really passionate about it, and really interested in constantly pushing this digital world forward. He’s definitely not the type to start a project, give it shape, and then sit back and say, ‘Well, that’s good enough for now.’ He’s always thinking about how to tweak it, so that it’s constantly evolving, staying fresh and taking advantage of all the new digital tools out there.”
Hensley joined The Wall Street Journal in 2000 and covered health care and the pharmaceutical industry for seven years as reporter. After two years as a news editor in the New York health and science bureau, he left the paper in March 2009. Previously, he wrote for Modern Healthcare and American Banker. Before becoming a journalist, he worked in regulatory affairs at the medical devices unit of Siemens AG. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/scotthensley.
Former CDC boss now ABC health/medical editor
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Richard Besser, M.D., the acting director of the CDC during the first six months of 2009 (CDC bio), will become ABC’s senior health and medical editor, Shelia M. Poole reports in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Besser
Besser’s regular press conferences at the beginning of the H1N1 outbreak first put him in the national media spotlight, and now he’ll be leaving his post as head of the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response to work on the media side full-time.
Besser, who did some TV health reporting in San Diego in the ’90s, has been praised for his media savvy but was passed over in favor of former New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Freiden when the long-term hire for the CDC’s top spot was announced in May.
At ABC, Besser plans to tackle issues like “obesity, health disparities and HIV” as well as coverage of this fall’s upcoming H1N1 season, Poole reports.
NIH on Wikipedia: If you can’t beat ‘em…
The Washington Post’s Ibby Caputo reports that the National Institutes of Health, upon realizing that more folks are looking for health information online and that many of those folks are ending up on Wikipedia, has started to teach its scientists how to create and edit Wikipedia entries.
Rather than trying to compete with the free online encyclopedia, NIH seems to have chosen to embrace the inevitability that users will turn to Wikipedia for health advice. If they’re going to go there anyway, then NIH is at least going to try to make sure they’re getting the best possible information.
To this end, the NIH and the Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit which publishes the encyclopedia) hosted a workshop attended by about 100 NIH scientists this month in which they learned how to edit and even create Wikipedia entries.
Reporter finds voices of prescription drug abuse
In an ongoing series, reporter Elaine Grant of New Hampshire Public Radio has worked to inform the public about prescription drug abuse in the state and to put personal faces on all facets of the epidemic, from addict to dealer to physician. She also addresses possible solutions, noting that New Hampshire is one of 11 states that don’t have a prescription monitoring program, a fact Grant attributes to lobbying by the state pharmacy board and privacy advocates (who also oppose a collection program for unwanted prescriptions).
The first four stories in the series have already been filed:
- Prescription Drug Abuse a Serious, Growing Problem
- Addicts in the ER
- Pharmacy Board Stalls Drug Abuse Prevention Efforts, Advocates Say
- Rx Drugs: From the Medicine Cabinet to the Street
While there is no shortage of solid reporting on the scope and impact of the problem, the real stars of the series are Grant’s anecdotal sources: a recovered addict who ran away from home at age 15 and for years easily swiped prescription drugs and anything and everything else that could make her high, a young mother who deals a few pills to make ends meet, a 70-year-old man who sold his entire prescription every month because he needed the money even more than he needed the pain relief, a college kid who fed his opiate addiction by going from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital and a doctor who prescribes to suspected addicts because he fears them.
Senate idea: Tax plastic surgery to pay for reform
Peter Cohn of NationalJournal.com reports that the Senate Finance Committee has discussed, among other things, a 10 percent tax on the sort of cosmetic surgery that has no compelling medical reason.
The tax would build on a 1990 law that keeps folks from getting itemized deductions for cosmetic surgery “unless the surgery or procedure is necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or a disfiguring disease.”
It also mentions that, while several states have tried to tax cosmetic surgery, on New Jersey has succeeded. However, Malcolm Roth, vice president for health policy and advocacy at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, asserts that the “New Jersey tax has only brought in about 25 percent of anticipated revenue since it was enacted in 2004.”
Cohn’s report also includes some arguments against the tax, including the assertion that it would discriminate against the women who make up an overwhelming majority of plastic surgery patients.
Government a ‘game changer’ in health IT
In the knowledge management magazine KM World, Nancy Davis Kho evaluates the Obama administration’s push for health information technology, focusing on the impact this new market will have on information technology businesses.
The stimulus package signed by Obama during his first month in office includes $19.2 billion for HIT and established the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology within the Health and Human Services Department. The government involvement is a “total game changer,” said the president and CEO of the country’s largest health care association focused on information technology.
Veteran and new businesses alike are looking at how to use technology to improve health care delivery outcomes and lower costs.
Kho’s report takes stock of the HIT industry and specifically how the major players, from GE Healthcare to Google, are positioning themselves to take advantage of the billions in stimulus money poised to flow into the industry. It discusses electronic health records, social media tools, the use of mobile devices to deliver information to doctors and decision support tools.
Health care news coverage on the rise
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at how the U.S. news media covered health issues for the first six months of this year. The study finds that news about health and health care made up about five percent of all news content from the first half of 2009.
Other key findings:
- Health policy and the state of the U.S. health care system was the most covered health-related topic: 40 percent of all health news coverage in the first half of the year. The bulk of that coverage was in June, when health legislation started making its way through Congress.
- After health policy/the health care system (40 percent), public health (36 percent) was the second most covered topic, dominated by news of the swine flu outbreak.
- About a quarter of health news focused on specific diseases or conditions. This reflects a substantial shift in the nature of health coverage from the previous study, when news concerning specific diseases dominated coverage of health with roughly 42 percent, followed by public health at 31 percent and finally health policy and the U.S. health care system at 27 percent.
Latest numbers
The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s weekly News Coverage Index reveals that July 20-26, 25 percent of media coverage was related to health care and debate over reform. It’s the highest share for health care since the project started keeping track of the numbers in 2007, more than doubling the previous peak for health care coverage, which was earlier this month. The next most heavily covered issues were the Henry Louis Gates arrest and the economic crisis.
Health coverage was heaviest on cable television (38 percent) and radio (35 percent), while online and newspaper coverage both came in below 20 percent. All those numbers are a far cry from 2007 and 2008, when a single percentage point of coverage was above average.
The News Coverage Index, released weekly by the PEJ, consists of 55 outlets and about 1,300 stories each week.
Press not explaining how plan will affect consumers
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
AHCJ president Trudy Lieberman recently appeared on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, with Marcia Angell, M.D., a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University Medical School, to discuss health care reform. [Transcript]
Trudy Lieberman
Lieberman, director of the Health and Medicine Reporting Program in the Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York, makes the point that Obama and his administration have been deliberately vague about the details. She says the American people do not know what’s in the bill: an individual mandate that will cost a lot of money for most people. “I think this is going to come up as a big surprise to people to realize they’re going to have to buy insurance from private insurance companies or face a tax penalty.”
Angell says that “Delivers to the private insurance industry a captive market.”
The plan, Lieberman says, will be a “bonanza” for the health insurance and industries, as well as for the doctors.
The guests also discuss the health care industry’s public stance (volunteering to cut costs) versus what it is doing behind the scenes (lobbying against the public plan and cuts in fees). Rationing comes up, with Lieberman saying that the current system rations treatment based on income.
Lieberman also expresses her frustration about trying to explain such vague proposals to the American people.
“And as a journalist, whose job it is to explain to the average person on the street what all of this means to them – that’s not happening. And as a journalist, that troubles me. The press has not dealt with the issue of how this is going to affect the auto mechanic on Main Street. Or the babysitter.”
Why Canada’s system does and doesn’t work
Filed under: Health care reform, Hot Health Headline
Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times explored Canada’s universal health care system, seeking to dispel rumors and misconceptions and explain the good (cheap, efficient) and bad (waiting lists) of a much-debated but rarely explained system. Each Canadian province has its own system, and rates are set through negotiations between medical organizations and local physicians.
The example of Dr. Diane Normandin, in particular, showed the stark contrast in efficiency between the American system and the Canadian one.
She moved to Clearwater, Fla., in 1994 because she thought U.S. doctors had more freedom. But she spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tell whether a patient’s insurance covered visits to a particular lab or specialist.
“You had maybe five minutes with the patient but 20 minutes of paperwork and the ridiculous sorting out of where the patient could go,” said Normandin, who needed six employees to handle the workload. “It was crazy.”
She returned to Canada in 2003 and opened a family practice near Montreal. She now has one employee.
Taylor Martin also tackles the word “socialist” and explains the other factors that go into Canada’s much-maligned waiting lists, as well as attempts being made to decrease those delays.
A sidebar focuses on a Canadian cardiologist who joined a practice in Orlando, Fla., because he thought U.S. doctors had more freedom. He also eventually returned to Canada and is now critical of the U.S. system. Among his criticisms: “He found that American doctors tend to order more testing, partly for fear of being sued but also because ‘patients demand it and doctors and hospitals want to do it because it’s more money.’”
Other stories in the project:
- Part Three: Canada keeps malpractice cost in check
(Hat tip to Investigate West)
Trib’s Triage blog ends, Graham goes investigative
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
The Chicago Tribune’s Triage blog has closed its doors and Judy Graham – the face of the blog for the past year – has moved on to the paper’s investigative and watchdog team.
Graham will still find time twice a month to write the sort of stories Triage writers have come to know; fans will be able to find them in the pages of the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday section and in other Tribune papers.
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Awards for Excellence in Health Care JournalismDeadline: Feb. 3
- How I did it: Falsified charts in nursing homes linked to patient care
- Access Denied: Looking at a lack of health care availability
- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
- Focus on freelancing: Tips for buying liability insurance
- Why do some patients get stuck in hospitals for weeks, months?
- Investigate health professionals and the boards that regulate them
- Presidents of AHCJ, SPJ call for more openness from Obama administration
