ER scribes handle EMRs, free up doctors
St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Michele Munz has found that some emergency rooms are easing the transition to electronic medical records by hiring “scribes” to enter information into the system, thus freeing up the doctor to focus on the actual patient.
Photo by MC4 Army via Flickr
Munz reports that scribes are often young, well-trained, tech-savvy pre-med types who get $8 to $10 an hour and plenty of real-world clinical observation for their trouble. The use of one California-based company’s scribes has grown sevenfold in the past two years, expansion its CEO called “exponential.”
Munz’ story shows that the growth is driven by the desire to ameliorate productivity hits that many hospitals have faced in the wake of EMR adoption.
After the switch to computer records, emergency departments have reported a loss in productivity. At DePaul, patient wait times initially increased 28 percent and patient satisfaction declined 40 percent despite additional staffing, said Dr. Stephen Larson, director of the hospital’s emergency department. St. John’s Mercy also reported a peak in wait times.
While both hospitals have seen wait times drop as doctors get past the learning curve, the emergency physicians group at DePaul decided to begin the scribe program in December “to allow us to continue to add to our gains,” Larson said.
Food safety law boosts tracking technology sector
In The Washington Post, reporter Lyndsey Layton digs into the industry spawned by a requirement in last year’s food safety law that producers and processors be able to track food at every step of its journey from farm to supermarket. It applies to everything but meat, poultry and egg products.
Under the law, each business will need to know where the food came from and where it’s going, creating a chain of provenance that the FDA can use to more rapidly trace outbreaks of food-borne illness.
As the September deadline for the launch of the FDA’s first pilot projects looms, Layton writes, no single tracking technology yet predominates. After the pilots, the FDA will report to congress and issue specific rules by 2013.
According to Layton, some food industry segments (not farms or restaurants) have been required to track this data since 2005, “but according to a 2009 investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, most food facilities surveyed did not meet those requirements and 25 percent didn’t even know about the law.”
Layton’s story includes a profile of HarvestMark, a company whose barcode sticker is already catching on in some places (Kroger foods has adopted it for store-brand produce, for example). HarvestMark not only allows end consumers to scan their food with a smartphone and figure out where it came from, it also allows them to deliver their feedback to the farmer who produced it.
The health highlights of two years of Guardian data
Filed under: Europe, Health data, Health journalism, Public health, Public records, Tools
In two years, the Guardian’s data blog has published more than 600 data sets. I know this because, thanks to their nifty summary post, I just browsed the full list. In addition to more than a few UK analogues to the sort of stuff we see from AHRQ and NCHS, such as UK life expectancy, birth rates and aging populations and public spending, they’ve also got the sort of global health stuff that any journalist or blogger could pull out and use in a post tomorrow. I’ve collected some of my favorites and tried to strike a good balance between unique stuff and broad-spectrum, widely available global health data.
- Cancer rates: see how countries compare worldwide
- Assisted suicide statistics: the numbers Dignitas helps to die, by country
- What’s happened to measles immunisation - and how do we compare to the rest of the world?
- There’s more to life than GDP
- Hunger by numbers: How we are losing the battle against worldwide malnutrition
- The world in drugs use
- Condom use around the world
- Obesity around the world
And finally, for no particular reason, here’s the outcome of every freedom of information request ever filed by the BBC. Also in the category of “data for curious journalists/insiders”? Several years of UK libel cases.
Australian journal says no to pharma ads
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Emergency Medicine Australasia, an Australia-based medical journal, has declared that it will no longer accept paid advertisements from pharmaceutical companies.
Image by acediscovery via FlickrThe journal’s editors announced their decision in an editorial, and we learned about it from Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman. In the editorial, the editors say they’re drawing a line in the sand and all but dare other publications to join them. Here’s Silverman with the how-and-why:
The ban followed discussions with other emergency medicine specialists, who worried aloud that advertised drugs were supported by evidence that was neither “of reasonable quality, nor independent.” There were cases of “dubious and unethical” research practices by pharma, including ghostwriting. And academics may face pressure to withhold negative research, which could “inflate views of the efficacy” of heavily promoted drugs.
For more, refer to this AAP story. In this case, the acronym refers to the Australian Associated Press, not the physician group. In Australia, medical journals are one of the only places where pharmaceutical advertising is legal.
Rennie urges changes in science journalism
In the Guardian, former Scientific American editor in chief John Rennie adds his two cents to the meta discussion of science blogging that has grown out of ScienceOnline2011. Rennie’s hope is that the emergence of science blogs and readers’ access to press releases will force mainstream sources to fix their “systemic faults.”
By my reading, Rennie’s key peeve is the “new” part of “news.” As anybody who has attended a few AHCJ conference sessions could tell you, science is incremental. It doesn’t lend itself to big splashy one-time headlines. Yet, seduced by embargoes and journal publication cycles, science journalism doesn’t follow the same plodding path.
Rennie’ s column suggests that’s where the Internet comes in. With journal and university press releases already directly available to the lay audience online, science bloggers are forced to find ways to differentiate themselves from the news cycle. And those ways, Rennie hopes, include long-term reporting and follow-up stories. These days, identical stories and blog posts are just a click away, as the cliche goes, and publications can’t afford to crank out “interchangeable” content.
NIH, CMS chiefs to speak at Newsmaker Briefings
Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, and Donald M. Berwick, M.D., M.P.P., administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will speak in separate Newsmaker Briefings at Health Journalism 2011.
Collins and Berwick
Berwick, who oversees programs that provide care to nearly one in three Americans and formerly headed up the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, will speak at the conference’s official kickoff session on Thursday, April 14.
Collins, who oversees the 27 institutes and centers of NIH and who led the effort to successfully map the human genome, will speak Friday, April 15.
The annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists will take place April 14-17 in Philadelphia. Along with Newsmaker Briefings, it includes panels, workshops, field trips and networking opportunities for reporters interested in health and health care.
Unprecedented number of fellowships available: Journalists covering rural health, working beats other than health, those working for the ethnic media and journalists in California, Missouri, New York and Oregon can apply for fellowships to attend the conference. Deadline to apply: Feb. 23
45 nursing homes added to CMS program to improve care
On Jan. 20, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released the most recent list of nursing homes in its Special Focus Facility Initiative. These are homes that have a history of serious quality issues and are in a special program to improve their quality of care.
The initiative is intended to address nursing homes that cycle in and out of compliance. Homes in this program are visited by survey teams twice as frequently as other nursing homes. This list includes nursing homes added to the SFF initiative and updates the status of homes already in the program.
As far as we can tell, CMS only released the information as a PDF, making it more difficult to search, but AHCJ has posted the list as a series of web pages and has made them available to download as Excel spreadsheets.
The list of nursing homes recently added to the program includes 45 facilities in 24 states. You also can check on the status of homes that have been taking part in the program, including the 62 that have shown improvement, the 49 that have not, the 31 that recently graduated from the program and the four that are no longer participating in Medicare and Medicaid.
Slim guide:
Covering the Health of Local Nursing Homes
This reporting guide gives a head start to journalists who want to pursue stories about one of the most vulnerable populations – nursing home residents. It offers advice about Web sites, datasets, research and other resources. After reading this book, journalists can have more confidence in deciphering nursing home inspection reports, interviewing advocacy groups on all sides of an issue, locating key data, and more. The book includes story examples and ideas.
AHCJ publishes these reporting guides, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to help journalists understand and accurately report on specific subjects.
Other resources
- Aging Nation: Troublesome Health Care Issues
- Headlines an advocate for seniors would like to see
- The impact of aging upon health care
- Covering nursing homes and other issues of aging
- How will retiring boomers affect the national health agenda?
- You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide: Policy and Problems in Long-Term Care
- Biology of Aging: Sources and Resources
Research: Local television encourages fatalistic view of cancer
Writing for Miller-McCune magazine, Tom Jacobs puts together the results of two studies that conclude local television teaches viewers over-the-top cancer fatalism with their “Pretty much everything causes cancer, and there’s nothing you can do about it!” approach.
Jacobs found that “This belief, which can lead to health-threatening behaviors, seems to infect both well-educated and less-educated viewers.” Furthermore, researchers have found that local news viewing correlates with an increase in cancer fatalism a year down the road.
These findings applied specifically to local TV, and the same effect was not seen with national broadcasts or, researchers observed, with newspapers.
“Local TV news stories were more likely than newspaper stories to focus on and discuss causes of cancer, more likely to discuss scientific research findings, and less likely to include information that would allow viewers to follow up by seeking out additional resources, guidance or advice regarding the coverage they watched,” they write.
The increased fatalism brought on by the local TV approach is serious business, because it can influence real-world behavior.
… when it comes to cancer, beliefs matter. A 2007 study in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention reported that “Americans who hold fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention may be at greater risk of cancer because they are less likely to engage in various prevention behaviors,” including getting screened for cancer, eating fruits and vegetables, and exercising regularly.
The researchers concluded that “Researchers and public health officials might consider conducting educational or training sessions with local TV journalists.” Covering Health thinks tapping into AHCJ’s resources and training aimed at journalists would certainly help!
Picard honored for public policy journalism
Filed under: Health journalism, Health policy, Member news
André Picard, AHCJ member and longtime Globe and Mail health reporter, has earned this year’s Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism. The award is presented by the Public Policy Forum, an independent Canadian nonprofit. It comes on the heels of the 2010 National Newspaper Award that named Picard Canada’s best columnist.
Andre Picard
If Picard isn’t already a fixture in your RSS reader, you can add http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/andre-picard/?service=rss or bookmark his Globe and Mail landing page.
For more from one of Canada’s finest, check out Angilee Shah’s Picard interview over at Reporting on Health. My favorite response came when Shah asked Picard, who has won his share of praise from advocacy groups, about the line between journalism and advocacy.
I don’t see myself as an advocate. I think the reason I’ve gotten those awards is because I’m one of a few people who write about those issues in a broad way. I’m one of the few people who write about cancer not just as a multiplication of cells, but what happens to people when they have cancer and run out of money. I write a lot about the practical stuff — so I think that’s what attracts the attention of advocacy groups. I don’t see myself as an advocate for any particular illness or cause. But I see myself as an advocate for good health policy, and those necessarily overlap.
Some of these groups are shocked that I’ll write a lot of columns about cancer and then I’ll write one very critical of cancer groups. They’ll say, “I thought you were on my side.” And I say, no, I’m on the side of good public health. When consumer groups fail, that needs to be exposed as just much as when governments fail. Groups don’t always understand that – but that’s the life of a journalist.
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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
