41 additional journals make the Medline cut
Looking for the latest edition of Advanced Emergency Nursing Journal, the Journal of Patient Safety or the Saudi Journal of Gastroenterology, the official journal of the Saudi Gastroenterology Association? You’re in luck! They are among 41 publications to recently be accepted by the National Library of Medicine for inclusion in the Medline database.
Three times a year, the National Library of Medicine’s Literature Selection Technical Review Committee meets to review Medline’s roster of about 5,000 journals. At each meeting, the committee considers about 140 new journals, evaluating each based on their scientific merit and upon where they fit in the NLM’s ideal literature mix. To be included, journals need to produce high-quality, medical-related content with high editorial and production standards. It also helps if the abstracts, at least, are in English.
Related
AHCJ Tip sheet: Mining NLM databases: PubMed, Medline and more
Levine discusses friendship on Today show
Longtime AHCJ member Irene S. Levine, Ph.D., appeared on the Today show this morning to talk about ending friendships. Levine is the author of “Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with your Best Friend.”
Recent examples show need for critical evaluation
Using parenting Web sites as examples, the Boston Globe’s Joanna Weiss writes about how many sites, which live or die based on their traffic numbers, seem to forget that “there’s something to be said for headline-writing care, and for editorial judgment.” While she mentions the furor over bisphenol A and other stories, the immediate inspiration for Weiss’ timely rant/reminder was an UrbanBaby.com blog post headlined “If You Went to College, Will Your Daughter Develop an Eating Disorder?“.
She interviewed Ivan Oransky, M.D., AHCJ’s treasurer and executive editor of Reuters Health, who reminds us that epidemiological studies are conducted in the real world, not a carefully controlled lab, so they’re often open to misinterpretation.
Weiss’ piece reminds us to take care in how critically we look at studies and to be careful of oversimplifications.
AHCJ members awarded fellowships, grants
AHCJ members Stephanie Innes, Peter Korn, Viji Sundaram and Megha Satyanarayana are among the 15 National Health Journalism Fellows and five Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism grantees who will attend the National Health Journalism seminar next week.
The six-day seminar will give the fellows and grantees a chance to learn more about health reporting and discuss their in-depth projects.
Innes, with Arizona Daily Star colleague Mariana Alvarado, will look at the link between obesity and socioeconomic standing.
Korn, of the Portland Tribune, is looking into a little-known and largely ignored Oregon law concerning written patient notification of “serious adverse events” in hospitals.
Sundaram, of New America Media, will look at how cultural practices can transcend borders and how enterprising businesses are building a market around these mores, with a focus on the growing number of fertility clinics that cater to many Asian cultures’ preference for a son.
Satyanarayana writes about consumer health, public health and poverty for the Detroit Free Press.
Evaluation of nonprofits’ charity care continues
If you’re keeping a list of issues that have been rejuvenated through inclusion in the Baucus bill, you can safely add Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s crusade to keep nonprofit hospitals accountable for the provision of adequate amounts of charity care. According to the Chicago Tribune’s Bruce Japsen, the proposed bill includes Grassley’s provision to “improve the community service, transparency and billing practices of nonprofit hospitals.”
From Japsen’s story:
“For now, there’s no minimum percentage requirement for charity care and community benefit,” Grassley said in a statement on Baucus’ proposal. But Grassley is not ruling out a required level in the future, saying it needs “more study.”
“I agree with groups that take their charitable mission seriously … that a percentage payout requirement would become a ceiling, not a floor, like the private foundation payout of generally five percent,” Grassley said in a memo Thursday. “Instead, we need a formula that would maximize expenditures for charitable purposes.”
The Washington Post’s Kathleen Day, meanwhile, reported on the results of a Grassley-backed Senate investigation into the charity care provided by nonprofit hospitals:
The investigators found that while federal law requires charity care in exchange for tax-exempt status, a 37-year-old IRS rule implementing the law is so vague that nonprofit hospitals have been able to exploit it by offering some free services but often little aid to the poorest people in their communities.
Nonprofits frequently charged higher prices to poorer people with no health insurance than they did to better-off patients who had coverage, researchers found. At the same time, many of the hospitals’ top executives enjoyed generous perks such as paid country club memberships and stays at expensive hotels.
IoM: We need clear guidelines for disaster triage
AHCJ president Charles Ornstein, with Sheri Fink, M.D., writes for ProPublica about the report of an Institute of Medicine committee indicating “urgent and clear need” for consistent national guidelines for care during catastrophes, “particularly on such thorny questions as which patients should receive scarce treatments or equipment and which should go without.”
The report calls for ethical guidance and specifically notes that such decisions should not be made on the basis of “Do Not Resuscitate” orders, as Fink showed they were in Memorial Hospital in New Orleans in the days after Katrina. The panel was less clear when it came to naming exactly which tools should be relied on to make touch decisions after disasters, saying that further research was necessary.
11 Calif. hospitals fined for preventable mistakes
Cheryl Clark writes for HealthLeaders Media that 11 California Hospitals were fined $25,000 each by the state for mistakes that put patients in immediate jeopardy or, in a few cases, even injured or killed them. Among the most egregious mistakes were a “man undergoing a leg amputation for cancer he never had,” a patient being set on fire during an eyelid-related procedure and a laundry list of equipment forgotten inside of patients.
This naming and shaming of errant hospitals has become a regular ritual in California, Clark reports:
Kathleen Billingsley, deputy director for the California Department of Public Health, said the 11 new fines bring the total of 115 monetary penalties against 80 hospitals to $2.87 million under a law that took effect Jan. 1, 2007. She has made public announcements about other batches of fines seven times previously, most recently Sept. 3.
According to the Web site’s “About Us” page, “HealthLeaders Media is a leading multi-platform media company dedicated to meeting the business information needs of healthcare executives and professionals.”
Criminals at work in Fla. nursing homes
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
Sally Kestin, Peter Franceschina and John Maines of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel found that thousands of convicted criminals were working in Florida nursing homes, either through special exemptions or through failures of regulation and enforcement.
More than 3,500 people with criminal records — including rape, robbery and murder — have been allowed to work with the elderly, disabled and infirm through exemptions granted by the state the past two decades, a Sun-Sentinel investigation found. Hundreds more slipped through because employers failed to check their backgrounds or kept them on the job despite their criminal past.
The investigation finds that Florida has “patchwork of controls for checking caregivers” backgrounds, putting the state’s most vulnerable people at risk. The reporters pinpoint the systemic failures that allowed criminals to slip through the cracks and documented the damage a few of them had done once employed in nursing homes.
The project includes profiles of selected caregivers, surveillance video, and searchable databases.
Related
A new report from the Government Accountability Office report estimates that 580, or 4 percent, of America’s approximately 16,000 nursing homes are troubled enough to qualify for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “Special Focus Facility” designation. Because of CMS’ limited resources, only 136 are.
AHCJ workshop
Over the next 20 years, the 65-plus population is projected to grow four to six times as fast as the population as a whole.
What’s ahead in research on chronic conditions, Alzheimer’s and genetics? What’s evolving in technology? What will be expected of caregivers? What kind of medical coverage will these seniors need? How do changing ethnic populations impact aging issues?
Learn about the hot-button issues in our aging society and what you need to be reporting on now.
Member evaluates stories for Tracker site
Paul Raeburn, author and Fathers and Families blogger, has started tracking health and medicine stories for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT. He says he will be searching for material to praise and stories “that don’t make the grade” so he can critique them.
Reinhardt breaks down income statements
Filed under: Health data, Public records, Studies
Princeton economist – and Health Journalism 2009 keynote speaker – Uwe Reinhardt’s latest post on The New York Times’ Economix Blog provides a clear primer on how to read an insurance company’s income statement.
Uwe Reinhardt at Health Journalism 2009
In the post, Reinhardt systematically runs through insurance heavyweight WellPoint’s income statement and, not only explains exactly how major insurers earn their money, but also teaches the reader how to deduce all of this from a publicly available income statement.
Reinhardt promises another blog posting this week that will “explore how the add-ons for marketing, administration and profits on top of expected outlays for health care to set the insurance premiums can be astonishingly high for individually sold policies. Up to half the premium can go for these non-medical items.”
Related
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Spend a week at the CDC studying public health, meeting sources. Apply for the AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships today!
- Reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- Tip sheet: Covering cuts to Medicare reimbursements
- Briefing: Reporting on health reform between now and 2014
- Covering high-risk insurance pools: Tips for reporters
- Health care reform has passed: What's next?
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
