Dallas hospital CEO claims reporters have a vendetta
The chief executive officer of Dallas’ Parkland Hospital claims a “vendetta” held by the Dallas Morning News‘ investigative team is to blame for “chipping away” at the public’s trust in the hospital.
The newspaper used public records to extensively document billing fraud, poor supervision of residents, preferential treatment for VIPs and patient harm. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services inspected the hospital in July and, less than two weeks ago, the hospital responded by posting its plan to correct deficiencies as required by CMS.
The Morning News reported that the hospital delivered the plan “just ahead of a deadline for addressing the problems or losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal health care funding. If the agency, on reinspection, finds that the patient care deficiencies aren’t corrected, Parkland could lose nearly half its patient revenue.”
The hospital’s board decided yesterday to hire a consultant to “redefine [Dr. Ron] Anderson’s role with the system between now and the end of the year, when his five-year contract expires,” reports Bill Hethcock in the Dallas Business Journal.
Regardless, Anderson says the Morning News‘ coverage is “sincere, but sincerely wrong,” and raises the specter that people in the community will suffer because they won’t come to Parkland to seek care:
“They’ll suffer as much as anything that an investigative reporter thinks he’s doing or she’s doing for the benefit of the patients.”
In January, Maud Beelman, the DMN deputy managing editor who leads the investigative team, wrote about the project for Nieman Watchdog. She detailed some of the struggles they faced to do the project, including efforts to derail the investigation and the backlash from the hospital.
Back-to-the-beat resources on health reform
Since so many of us are in storm (or non-storm) what-are-we-going-to-do-with-all-these-batteries cleanup and back-to-school mode, I thought I’d bring some resources and interesting studies to your attention to help bring your focus back on the beat.
Confusion still reigns
You probably saw the Kaiser poll reminding us once again how confused people remain about the health reform law - including the very people who would be most helped by it, the uninsured. It got a lot of coverage but if you missed it, it’s a must read. It ties into the theme of massive national confusion – and the frustration I feel that the confusion persists despite a fair amount of good reporting – that I wrote about in the first post I did for Covering Health. I think a lot of the confusion stems from the mandate . People hear that they will “have” to buy insurance, and they panic or get angry because they can’t afford it. They don’t hear that they may well qualify for subsidies to make it affordable-and they don’t have to be dirt poor to get the subsidies; many middle class people will also benefit.
Click to enlarge this graph from the Kaiser Family Foundation Data Note found at http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/8217.cfm.
Most of the coverage of the KFF poll I heard or saw centered on the uninsured, but there is also a related data note looking at knowledge and expectations of people who have employer-sponsored health insurance. Asked what they would be willing to do to lower health care costs, the answer could be summed up as “not much.” They are OK with participating in a wellness program (although not necessarily actually getting “weller”) but didn’t like the idea of more generic drugs, more restrictive networks of doctors, or higher copays and deductibles.
Eating away at the doughnut hole
An AHCJ member found this report by EBRI, the Employee Benefit Research Institute, useful so I’m sharing. It’s about how the health reform law will slowly (over a decade) close the “donut hole” for Medicare drug coverage, and how repealing the health law would create a savings hole for older Americans who use a lot of prescription drugs. (The doughnut hole is the gap after you use up the basic drug benefit but haven’t hit the “catastrophic” level. Beneficiaries pay monthly premiums through the gap, but don’t get benefits until they burn through the gap. ) EBRI studies health care and retirement issues and does periodic issue briefs.
What questions do you have about health reform and how to cover it?
Joanne Kenen is AHCJ’s health reform topic leader. She is writing blog posts, tip sheets, articles and gathering resources to help our members cover the complex implementation of health reform. If you have questions or suggestions for future resources on the topic, please send them to joanne@healthjournalism.org.
Staff physicians on the rise
The Center for Health System Change has been tracking health care developments in 12 communities and found that hospitals are hiring more staff physicians. In policy circles, the talk has been that the staff-physician model is a tool in creating more clinical integration, care coordination, higher quality and lower cost – but this study found that the hospitals are in it primarily for market share. Physicians like it because it’s fewer hassles. It doesn’t necessarily bring down overall health care costs. Now, this is a snapshot in a fee-for-service world; new payment models being developed by private insurers, and Medicare and Medicaid may change the dynamic. But it’s an attention-worthy snapshot. The HSC Issue Brief, “Rising Hospital Employment of Physicians: Better Quality, Higher Costs?” is available online.
Who applied to be ACOs?
There was a lot of coverage a few months back about all the health systems that were not going to apply to become Medicare Accountable Care Organizations, at least not under the original shared savings model. We aren’t hearing as much about who is applying – worth checking in your community. Medicare also created an alternative, called the pioneer ACO, to attract more plans. We won’t know until around November how many applied to be pioneers, or who they are, but here’s the story of one plan that’s ready to go.
Behind the drug shortage
There was a lot of discussion on the AHCJ electronic discussion list recently about drug shortages, particularly chemotherapy shortages. I was out of town for a few days (helping care for a relative and learning, among other things, that Medicare pays for oxygen concentrators but not for the batteries) and I haven’t caught up with all of the messages, but this essay in the Sunday New York Times a few weeks ago by Ezekiel Emanuel taught me lots I didn’t know about generic chemo drugs, pricing and shortages, and proposed solutions.
Reporter finds the story behind food code violations
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
All the time that The Muskegon Chronicle’s Brian McVicar has been spending with his county health department’s inspection records has paid off with a slew of stories, with the most recent turning the spotlight on the thousands of food code violations area businesses have racked up in recent years.
Photo by bookgrl via FlickrFor this particular story, McVicar crunched the numbers on 22,000 violations, 37 percent of them critical, logged over a four-year period. Among the most salient, he writes, were “Raw chicken and crabmeat sitting out at room temperature, food kept past its expiration date, cockroaches, mice and fruit flies living in kitchens, employees not following proper hand washing procedures.”
In addition to the typical rogue restaurants, McVicar found that a wide range of local businesses were guilty of health code violations, including “Schools, hospitals, and food stands found in places such as Michigan’s Adventure Amusement Park.”
With his broad-based, data-oriented methodology, McVicar provides a model for other local reporters looking to move beyond the typical “cherrypick the cockroach horror stories” approach that is so often found in inspection-record stories.
Stories in the series:
- Food code violations rampant; food poisoning outbreaks rare
- Management is key to cleaning up food code violations
- Handwashing, temperature storage key to keeping foods safe
- Are some restaurants allowed to get too many health violations?
- Day in the life of a Muskegon County health inspector
- Food poisoning outbreaks rare, but serious
- Some states grade restaurants based on health inspections
- Food code violations: Public health risk or over-burdensome government regulation?
Media must understand, explain changes in European health services
One of the points that stood out for Spanish journalist Esther Paniagua at the first European conference on health journalism was from conference organizer John Lister. “Few journalists understand what [the] health care system’s reforms means,” Lister said during the Health in the Headlines conference at Coventry University in June.
Esther Paniagua
That assertion spells trouble not only for journalists who have to report on this but for all of society. These days, public health systems in Europe are up for debate; only few weeks ago Italy imposed a copayment requiring patients to pay 10 euros (almost $15) each time they visit a doctor and 25 euros (almost $36) if someone goes an emergency room. This may sound normal - even ridiculously low - for an American. However, Europeans are used to “free” and universal care at the point of service and they pay for their systems through diverse taxes. So in effect, copayments make patients pay twice for the same service.
Journalists need to understand the function of copayments and explain all the arguments, for and against. Read more …
Paper seeks redacted details from Vt. medical board
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public records
Burlington Free Press reporter Adam Silverman writes that his newspaper is seeking the release of certain details redacted from a medical board inquiry into what he calls “allegations that a Vermont doctor engaged in conduct that might have exposed the public to harm” related to a lawsuit filed by a former board director alleging that he was forced to resign his post in 2010 after authorizing two inquiries despite objections from state health officials.
The missing information includes the exact nature of two doctors’ “official” positions with the State of Vermont, as well as the dates of the cases in question. Silverman found that the attorney who filed the suit blacked out the information from the public version because he “didn’t want to risk improperly disclosing details of Medical Practice Board cases before the state became involved in defending the lawsuit.”
In court Monday, Assistant Attorney General David Groff told Toor that judges often have to balance the public’s right to know against competing private interests — in this case, that of doctors whose good names could be besmirched by “spurious” accusations. For the Wargo lawsuit, though, Groff added, state lawmakers already have charted the course: Information about Medical Practice Board inquiries becomes public only if an investigation results in formal accusations. Here, the investigation is ongoing, he said.
…
No one argued for releasing the records at Monday’s hearing, but the Free Press has written in letters to the court that the material should be unsealed because “there is an inherent public interest” in learning about a possible threat of harm to the public.
AHCJ welcomes more new members
Please welcome AHCJ’s newest members. All new AHCJ members are welcome to stop by this post’s comment section to introduce themselves.
- David Freedman, independent journalist, Needham, Mass. (@dhfreedman)
- Janice Frey, independent journalist, Iowa City, Iowa
- Brande Martin, senior editor, Medscape Medical News, Chicago
- Jaya Shreedhar, independent journalist, Chennai, India
If you haven’t joined yet, see what member benefits you’re missing out on: Access to more than 50 journals and databases, tip sheets and articles from your colleagues on how they’ve reported stories, conferences, workshops, online training, reporting guides and more. Join AHCJ today to get a wealth of support and tools to help you.
Data, AHCJ article lead reporter to story on possible cuts at local hospital
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Hospitals
St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Blythe Bernhard followed up on suggestions offered in Charles Ornstein’s recent AHCJ article about updated CMS data to produce an article about looming potential cuts in Medicare payments to St. Louis’ Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
The hospital’s problem? As Bernhard writes, Barnes-Jewish “is one of just three hospitals in the country to perform significantly worse than the national average in readmissions within 30 days for three conditions — heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia — for each of the last three years.”
Medicare … plans to penalize hospitals with higher-than-expected readmission rates. Under health care reform, Barnes-Jewish and other hospitals could face up to a 3 percent reduction in Medicare payments, meaning millions of dollars, starting next year.
Reducing readmissions nationwide could save $26 billion over a decade, the government estimates.
Congrats to 2011 class of AHCJ-National Library of Medicine fellows
Six journalists have been named to this year’s class of AHCJ-National Library of Medicine fellows. The fellowship program was created to increase reporters’ access and understanding of the considerable resources available at NLM and the National Institutes of Health. 
The journalists chosen to take part this year are:
- Chelsea Conaboy, health reporter, The Boston Globe (@cconaboy)
- Tim Darragh, senior writer, The (Allentown, Pa.) Morning Call (@timdarragh)
- Jason Kane, reporter/producer - health unit, PBS NewsHour
- Janice Lloyd, health and behavior reporter, USA Today (@janicenlloyd)
- Elizabeth Simpson, health reporter, The Virginian-Pilot
- Thomas Watkins, news editor, CNN
Their visit to the NIH campus, scheduled for Oct. 2-6, will include hands-on workshops about how to use and get the most from several government research databases, such as PubMed, MedlinePlus, ClinicalTrials.gov and ToxNet. Fellows also will meet with senior NLM and NIH researchers and officials for exclusive informational sessions.
The fellows were selected from dozens of qualified applicants.
“This is a great class of fellows interested in putting some new resources to use in their news reports,” said AHCJ Executive Director Len Bruzzese. “And, because of our past fellowships, the professionals at the Library of Medicine are excited to share these tools with journalists.”
AHCJ is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. With more than 1,100 members, its mission is to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health care reporting, writing and editing. The association and its Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism are based at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Welcome to AHCJ’s newest members
Please welcome AHCJ’s newest members. All new AHCJ members are welcome to stop by this post’s comment section to introduce themselves, and you’ll also find many of them waiting on Twitter! Take a minute to follow a few of your new colleagues and find out what they’re adding to the conversation.
- Julie Andsager, professor, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
- Heather Gilligan, assistant editor, healthycal.org, Oakland, Calif.
- Whitney Howell, independent journalist, Durham, N.C. (@HlthReporter)
- Kirk Johannesen, special projects editor, The Republic, Columbus, Ind.
- Lindsey McCormack, independent journalist, Jackson Heights, N.Y. (@lindenchariot)
- Mac McLean, staff writer, Bristol Herald Courier, Bristol, Va.
- Alice O’Flynn, independent journalist, Dublin, Ireland
- Leslie Pepper, independent journalist, Merrick, N.Y. (@lesliepepper)
How do you advise people who want to be health journalists?
Covering Health needs some help from its readers today. Felice Freyer, a medical writer at The Providence (R.I.) Journal and an AHCJ board member, is looking for advice to give people who want to go into health journalism.
Felice Freyer
Surely many of you have found yourselves in her position; so what is your advice? We’d like to hear from you in the comments below and we may feature the suggestions in an upcoming tip sheet. So here’s Freyer’s dilemma:
Every now and then, I hear from a young person who wants advice on how to start a career as a health journalist, and I’m never able to help. It’s embarrassing. Though I’ve been at this for a frightfully long time, I went the usual newspaper route of covering cops and zoning boards until the medical writer’s job opened up (thanks, Irene!). I don’t know if that’s even an option today.
But in any case, that route wouldn’t appeal to these people who come to me with rarefied credentials (such as one who contacted me recently, with a degree in public health and experience covering health issues in Third World countries). They are often clueless about today’s journalism world, but then, I realize, so am I.
What’s out there for beginners? Where would you advise someone to start looking? It is necessary to start as a freelancer or blogger, or are there actual jobs?
Update: We’re curious – how did you get into health journalism?
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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
