Data analysis reveals wide variation in use of heart procedures
Filed under: Health data, Health policy, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline
One town’s high rate of elective angioplasties has drawn the attention of the California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Tricuspid valve in a model heart. (Photo by robswatski via Flickr)
Emily Bazar reports that people in Clearlake, Calif., have undergone the procedure at 15 times the rate of people in nearby Sonoma County and more than five times the rate of San Franciscans and Californians. Clearlake residents had elective angiography at nearly six times the state rate.
The project includes a downloadable spreadsheet of heart surgical procedures for 208 geographic areas in California.
The analysis was done by Stanford health research and policy Professor Laurence Baker and was commissioned by “the Campaign for Effective Patient Care, an interest group that promoted the involvement of patients in making medical decisions. Formed during the health reform debate, the group recently disbanded.”
The financial and health implications of extreme variation are enormous, raising the prospect that billions of dollars are wasted each year on unnecessary and potentially dangerous treatments. About 600,000 angioplasties alone are performed nationwide annually at a price tag of more than $12 billion, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The analysis finds the heart procedures were performed frequently in other parts of California as well. While one hospital says the disparity is because its rural community suffers from overlapping health situations, comparing it to the Third World, the research shows that above-average use of the procedures was found in urban areas as well.
Yet long-standing research suggests that something else usually causes large geographic variation in medical procedures: striking disparities in how doctors treat diseases.
“You just have a group of physicians that tend to order more angiograms or (angioplasties). That’s how they think and do things. They’ve never been told not to. They’ve never been told they’re the outliers,” said Eric Hammelman, a vice president at Avalere Health, a health care consulting firm in Washington, D.C.
The project includes a consumer’s guide to heart procedures, graphics and an explanation of Baker’s methodology.
Learn how to use this data
In a webinar next week, Hiding in plain sight: California hospital data, Charles Ornstein, senior reporter at ProPublica and president of AHCJ’s board of directors, will guide attendees through using the data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development to determine rates of variation for types of treatments.
Ornstein calls the data set a “gold mine” that can answer questions such as:
- Does your local hospital place more cardiac stents than others?
- Do more of its patients leave the emergency room without being seen?
- Does it have a high level of C-section births?
It doesn’t matter if your hospital is public, nonprofit or for-profit, data on its patients and services are available online. Join us on Sept. 13 to learn how to use this data. California journalists will find this particularly useful, but it also introduces data sets that journalists can request in other states.
Find health data at Childstats.gov, a clearinghouse for kid numbers
Filed under: Children, Government, Health data, Health journalism, Public records, Tools
Time to add another link to your “federal data clearinghouses” folder, if you haven’t already. Childstats.gov, published by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, synthesizes data from the CDC, NCHS, National Children’s Survey, AHRQ, Census and other specialized programs.
Photo by nasa hq photo via FlickrThe site is anchored by its annual report, “America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being,” and the easy-to-navigate nature of its databases seems to have already inspired some discussion on Twitter, particularly in relation to child homelessness.
Many of the data tools are simply links to general surveys (like AHRQ’s National Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project) that just happen to contain child-related information, but there are some more specifically relevant data sources, the best of which I’ve listed below.
- Data Resource Center for Child & Adolescent Health
- The National Children’s Study
- The National Center for Education Statistics
- Find Youth Info (findyouthinfo.gov)
- Census Child Care data
Health journalists poised for strong showing at 2011 ONA Awards
The 2011 finalists for the Online Journalism Awards were announced this week, and regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that health care journalists have made a strong showing. Health stories, sites and journalists are vying for honors in myriad categories, and that’s even before you start counting the health-heavy sites that are up for general awards. I’ve rounded up some of the most notable nominees below, as well as a few accounts to which you’re invited to direct your congratulatory tweets! The awards will be announced on Sept. 24, during ONA’s annual conference.
Knight Award for Public Service
Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism, Small Site
- Dialysis – ProPublica (@fieldsrobin)
- Dollars for Doctors – ProPublica (@charlesornstein, @tracyweber, @dancow)
- Lifesaving Drugs, Deadly Consequences — InvestigateWest (@invw)
Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism, Large Site
Multimedia Feature Presentation, Large Site
- Quieting Dylan’s Brain – Los Angeles Times (@mollyhf)
- Traumatic Brain Injury: Coming Home a Different Person – The Washington Post
Online Topical Reporting/Blogging, Small Site
- Doctors Behaving Badly: Shedding Light on Poor Doctor Oversight by Medical Boards – William Heisel, ReportingonHealth.org (@wheisel)
CPI investigation details health information technology sector’s lobbying efforts
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Government, Health care reform, Health data, Public records
Writing for The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News, Josh Israel reports that, with billions of stimulus dollars still at stake, the number of health information technology lobbyists taking advantage of the lucrative “revolving door” between Capitol Hill and the private sector is sky-high, even by D.C. standards.
The Obama administration is still working to iron out the details of the “meaningful use” mandate expressed in the recovery act, and the big players in health IT are pulling out all the stops to ensure the rules are written to their advantage.
Healthcare Informatics magazine publishes an annual ranking of the 100 largest health IT companies by annual revenue. According to the Senate Office of Public Records, 15 of the companies in the 2010 ranking — most of them ranked in the top third by revenue — reported health IT-related lobbying activity in the first quarter of 2011 or the last quarter of 2010. Of the 90 lobbyists listed as having done health IT lobbying for those firms, at least 63 were former Congressional and/or executive branch staffers, many of whom worked for health-related agencies or committees.
For those interested in additional details on HIT’s lobbying efforts, Israel also included two sidebars:
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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
