Patient safety expert Pronovost is keynote speaker
Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at Johns Hopkins University and founder of the Quality and Safety Research Group, will be the keynote speaker at Health Journalism 2010. He will appear at the awards luncheon on Saturday, April 24.
Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D.
Pronovost specializes in improving patient safety through methods that are scientifically rigorous but feasible at the bedside. In his new book, “Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor’s Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out,” Pronovost tells of losing his father as the result of a medical error and his own journey from a researcher to an international leader in patient safety.
Pronovost joins a number of high-profile speakers. Conference participants will have the chance to attend newsmaker briefings featuring leaders from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration:
- Thomas Frieden, M.D., M.P.H., director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Kathleen Sebelius, M.P.A., secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- Jeffrey Shuren, director, Center for Devices and Radiological Health, Food and Drug Administration
A special track on assessing health reform is intended to help reporters understand the changes coming and better explain what’s ahead to their readers, viewers and listeners:
- Does comparative effectiveness research work?
- Outlook for the nation’s hospitals
- Is there a looming doctor shortage?
- What’s ahead for state and local governments
- The reporting challenge going forward
“Influenza! Lessons learned from a year of H1N1″ will feature experts on public health, infectious diseases, preparedness and vaccines:
- Jeffrey Levi, Ph.D., executive director, Trust for America’s Health
- Anne Schuchat, M.D., director, CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases
- Litjen Tan, Ph.D., director of medicine and public health, American Medical Association; co-chair, National Influenza Vaccine Summit
- Moderator: Maryn McKenna, independent journalist, Minneapolis
See the complete conference schedule.
Journal Sentinel creates overdose database
Tom Kertscher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analyzed 1,200 fatal overdoses that occurred in the greater Milwaukee area over the past eight years and discovered that the majority of them were prescription drug-related. Kertscher puts the statistics in the context of the high-profile death of a local teenager, one which drew significant media attention to prescription drug abuse in the area.
Of the 1,200 deaths, which do not include suicides, just more than half were caused by prescription drugs.
An additional 19% of the deaths were caused by a mix of pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs, such as heroin.
…The victims of the most potent prescription drugs range from urban teens using anti-anxiety medications to get high to middle-age suburbanites who get hooked on narcotic painkillers after being injured on the job. They include residents of all 19 Milwaukee County communities and suburban county residents from Belgium to Kewaskum to Mukwonago.
Kertscher’s overdose database is available online and can be sorted through a search tool or overlaid on a Google map. The map can be sorted by race, age, sex, year and drug type.
MSNBC tells of earthquake amputees, soldiers
In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, an MSNBC team has set out to cover, through a variety of media, an American prosthetic group working at a rural hospital to fit limbs to hundreds of earthquake amputees. At the same time, the team is sharing personal essays written by American soldiers who lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s an unusual post-disaster focus that has yielded some impressive stories.
Here are a few of the most notable dispatches:
- The natural ease with which young children adapt to prosthetics (And share with each other | While their families struggle to cope)
- An American helicopter pilot adapts after losing limbs in Afghanistan.
A housing community set up for prosthetics patients after the Haiti quake - Fitting prosthetics to Haitian patients whose limb loss dates back to long before the earthquake.
- Making and fitting a new limb
- The life of one of the doctors fitting all those prosthetics in Haiti
Tracking medical errors amid health tech push
Filed under: Government, Health policy, Hot Health Headline
Fred Schulte and Emma Schwartz are still hot on the trail of health information technology at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, now exploring the timeline and tactics involved in tracking medical errors as part of widespread stimulus-funded HIT adoption. Colleague Amanda Zamora’s companion graphic helps provide both an at-a-glance overview and in-depth understanding of how errors are tracked now and how they will be monitored in the future.
Schulte and Schwarz write that a federal panel hopes to create a national database of HIT-related errors, but that it won’t be functional until 2013, a date many experts fear is unnecessarily distant.
The draft proposal would require doctors and hospitals to report problems as a condition of receiving stimulus money, starting in 2013. The panel, which is expected to finalize the plan next month, also wants to require that manufacturers alert customers when software glitches are discovered and require all users of the systems to undergo safety training
…
But many early adopters, who often have spent a decade or more and tens of millions of dollars working out kinks, say that even additional oversight can’t stave off every potential hazard. And they are becoming increasingly vocal about the downside of rushing into buying the highly complex technology.
“There is a great fear among many people that we are asking organizations to go too far too fast,” said Justin Starren, who directs health technology at the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin. “It’s a foregone conclusion that with this many installations that some people will make some mistakes.”
Schulte will be taking part in a panel about “Tracking health-related stimulus money” at Health Journalism 2010. Joining him on the panel will be ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell and Phil Galewitz, a reporter for Kaiser Health News and member of AHCJ’s board of directors.
Lieberman to cover health care as CFAH fellow
Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor/columnist for Columbia Journalism Review, has been appointed a fellow at the Center for Advancing Health. Lieberman, AHCJ’s immediate past president, will contribute content to The Prepared Patient Forum, a Web site that will be launched next month to help consumers navigate the increasingly complex health care system.
Lieberman
Lieberman will focus on the topic of paying for health care, including Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, commercial insurance policies, and other private sector ways to pay for care. She will follow the implementation of health insurance reform activities and help people learn how to use and benefit from options created by the newly passed legislation.
Lieberman will continue her CJR duties, which include blogging about journalism coverage of health issues. She was most recently director of the health and medical reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism, City University of New York.
The Center for Advancing Health runs the Health Behavior News Service, intended to “translate complex scientific evidence into information that will ensure that each person can make good decisions about their health care.” CFAH is a independent nonprofit organization supported by a number of foundations.
Fluportal.org: Postmortem of a temporary resource
Fluportal.org, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded site built to help public media cover H1N1 and related issues, has completed its grant and will stop updating at the end of this month.
As a fitting capstone to a very well-executed and valuable resource, the staff has posted an exhaustive, honest review of what the site did, where things went right and where they went wrong. It’s a lengthy read, but one that gives insight into how best to organize and execute a health-related, issue-oriented Web resource.
Other resources on the site look into health reporting and how to communicate information about H1N1 to the public:
- Was H1N1 Info Communicated Well to the Public?
- How WBUR’s Sacha Pfeiffer Reports on H1N1
- Can Health Reporting Weather the Economic Storm
AHCJ members among national contest winners
It’s awards season and we’re happy to report that AHCJ members are winning a number of national awards. What’s listed below is a list of awards we’ve noticed. If you’ve recently won an award – or received a fellowship, published a book or changed jobs – please be sure to let us know (christy@healthjournalism.org) so we can share the news. And if you haven’t yet checked out the winners of AHCJ’s awards, be sure to do so.
National Headliner Awards
- John Fauber, Meg Kissinger and Suzanne Rust, Side Effects, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [Fauber wrote about this series for AHCJ]
- Sheri Fink, Stephen Engelberg, Ilena Silverman and Susan White, The Deadly Choices at Memorial, ProPublica [Fink wrote about reporting this story for AHCJ]
American Society of Journalists and Authors 2010 Writing Awards
- June Roth Award for Medical Journalism
Winner: “What’s Wrong with Cancer Tests?” by Shannon Brownlee (Reader’s Digest)
Honorable Mention: “Going After Las Vegas’ Medical Mafia” by Katherine Eban (Fortune) - Reporting on a Significant Topic
Winner: “Shots in the Dark” by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer (The Atlantic Monthly) - Service
Winner: “Is Your Doctor Our of Date?” by Meryl Davids (Reader’s Digest)
Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards
- Public service reporting
Finalist: Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, ProPublica/Los Angeles Times - Environmental Reporting
Charles Duhigg of The New York Times receives $10,000 and the Edward J. Meeman Award for the series “Toxic Waters,” an investigation of inadequacies in the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act that prompted wide-ranging overhauls in enforcement of the 1970s laws.
2009 National Awards for Education Reporting
- Small Media - Feature, News Feature or Issue Package
Special Citations Beth Slovic, Willamette Week, “Cheerless“
Four reporters share tips on covering health reform
Four journalists on the front lines of covering health care reform offer their advice and suggestions on what needs to be covered next and how to approach this complex topic.
Get tips from Laura Meckler, staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medicine reporting program at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism; Jim Landers, Washington correspondent for The Dallas Morning News; and Noam Levey, health policy reporter for the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau. We plan to add suggestions from more reporters as they come in.
Our resource page also includes links to source documents, news stories, a contact list of sources and background on the health care debate.
Calif. organization names AHCJ members to staff
The new California HealthCare Foundation’s Center for Health Reporting has announced its editorial staff. The Center, a grant-funded organization led by Michael Parks, has hired five AHCJ members:
- Editor-in-chief: David Westphal
- Managing editor: Richard Kipling
- Senior writer: Emily Bazar
- Senior writer: John Gonzales
- Senior writer: Deborah Schoch
The Center started as a pilot project in 2008 with “Sowing Hope,” a series in the Merced Sun-Star that Kipling and Schoch worked on. Since then, the organization has taken on several other projects.
Parks told me in 2008 that the California HealthCare Foundation decided to fund the pilot project because it believed coverage of health policy in the state was flagging. According to this week’s release, “The Center is funded by a three-year, $3.285 million grant from the California HealthCare Foundation, an Oakland-based independent, non-profit philanthropy whose mission is to improve the health and health care of all Californians.” Parks said he aims to complete at least 50 major projects during that period.
Earlier
- Calif. foundation backs new model; will be hiring
- Nonprofit, paper team up for project on med school
Data Mine reports on access to practitioner data
The Center for Public Integrity’s Data Mine focuses on the National Practitioner Databank and the lack of public access to information in the database, which contains information about loss of privileges for medical professionals, malpractice payments and license revocations.
The public can access and use statistical information from the database but it cannot find out information about specific professionals. The American Medical Association, opposes making information in the database public because it “is riddled with duplicate entries [and] inaccurate data,” according to the Data Mine’s report.
A report last year from Public Citizen revealed that hospitals take advantage of loopholes to avoid reporting disciplined physicians to the database.
AHCJ Resources
- Access to list of disciplined health workers in limbo
- A road map for covering your local hospital’s quality
- How well does your state oversee nurses?
- State oversight of health professionals
- Records show ‘dangerous doctors’ rarely face discipline
- Health reporting resources for reporters covering state and local government
- Investigating health care: Essential public records
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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
