Inspired by NHS, Lieberman calls for reporters to spotlight patient safety improvements
Filed under: Europe, Government, Health data, Health journalism, Public health
Fresh off a trip to powwow with health journalists, academics and officials in England as a Fulbright Senior Specialist, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman writes on CJR.org about what American health systems can learn from the British National Health Service when it comes to patient safety.
In particular, Lieberman looks at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, which has pushed a few simple changes that have lead to measurable and marked improvements in several key safety measures and are, she writes, embraced by “almost all U.K. hospitals.”
Since 2007 the Institute has fostered nurse-led innovations to improve care in such areas as patient hygiene, nursing procedures, meals, medicines, and ward rounds that frees up more time to be with patients. Now almost all UK hospitals embrace some of these practices. Positive stats from this “Releasing Time to Care” project show a thirteen percentage point increase in the median time spent on direct care; a seven percentage point increase in median patient satisfaction scores, and a twenty-three percentage point increase in median patient observations.
The innovations include little tricks like nurses donning red pinafores to signal “don’t interrupt me, I’m dispensing medication” and charting patient falls with red dots on a hospital floor plan, so that problem areas can be easily spotted.
According to Lieberman, simple changes like these don’t get the attention or widespread adoption they deserve. Thus, she ends her piece with a call to arms for health journalists, asking them to tell the stories of the sort of simple, easy-to-relate-to steps that are saving lives on both sides of the pond (Oregon, in particular, has been quick to follow the NHS lead in these areas).
So where does the press fit into all this? Media outlets in the UK and the US have something in common—they aren’t much interested in reporting good news and what works. It’s in our journalistic DNA to ferret out the evil, bad, and ugly with the hope that press exposure will change practice. But my visit to the NHS showed that positive change does happen and should be reported. Taylor told me she tried to interest British journos in some of the Institute’s achievements but got “not a sniff.”
“Journalists don’t celebrate success,” she said, “but innovation is to be shared.” Nor has there been any interest from U.S. reporters. CareOregon hasn’t sent out any press releases partly because the results are just coming in and because officials fear that the U.S. stereotype of the NHS is so powerful the program might die a-borning. If I were still a local consumer reporter, I would forget about all that ambiguous, hard-to-interpret data about hospital quality and look for concrete improvements patients and families can relate to, like red pinafores and scorecards for reducing falls. Then I would make a how-to comparison chart showing which hospitals were embracing some of the simple technologies that appear to work.
Lieberman: Election is evidence media got reform coverage wrong
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
In her column on CJRorg, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman writes that this week’s elections showed just how thoroughly the media missed the mark on health care reform coverage.
After the economy (62 percent), health care (19 percent) was the second most important issue to voters. And while the media (and the administration) trumpeted the benefits of health reform and “glossed over” the drawbacks, public opinion soured. The biggest oversight, Lieberman writes, was the national insurance mandate, a policy that was more Republican than Democrat.
Lieberman says it best:
If the media failed to discuss in detail the law’s less attractive points, it also missed one of the campaign’s biggest ironies. Republicans, with their repeal and replace slogans, stirred up discontent about a law that was basically built with Republican and conservative ideas. That irony escaped the media.
She doesn’t explicitly frame it as such, but Lieberman’s column leaves me with the distinct impression that with the health care debate reignited by a Republican landslide, journalists are being given a second chance to provide the public with a clear understanding of what’s going on in Washington, an impression that’s cemented with her final sentence:
Whatever happens, the U.S. health system is still its dysfunctional, fragmented, costly self, in need of repair or wholesale reform. Going forward, this is the story the media need to tell.
‘Main Street’ informed, skeptical on health reform
In her blog on CJR.org, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman updates what is becoming an annual franchise: Her summer man-on-the-street column gauging popular opinion on health reform. Just like last year, Lieberman found her subjects on the streets of Columbia, Mo., a town that’s about as close to the (population) center of the United States as you can get.
The common thread? Missourians were pretty sure health care reform wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, but still weren’t willing to vote “yes” in the state’s referendum on opting out of the individual mandate.
Lieberman added a concrete dimension to her main street opinions by prying details on income and expenses from her sources, numbers and ideas which she then used to link their stories to the larger themes surrounding reform implementation.
Keep an eye out for part two of the column, which should be coming soon.
Reform may worsen ER crowding
Filed under: Health care reform, Health data, Health journalism, Health policy, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Member news, Studies
Associated Press medical reporter Carla K. Johnson has found that, contrary to common assumptions, emergency rooms could become even more crowded with the passage and implementation of health care reform. Popular wisdom has it that, with more access to insurance thus to primary care, folks will be less likely to go to the emergency room for minor complaints or to allow illness to progress to the point where an emergency visit is necessary. Johnson, an AHCJ board member, gives three big reasons why it’s not that simple:
- There are not (will not) be enough primary care physicians in America to deliver that preventative care.
- At present, the uninsured are no more likely to use the ER than patients with insurance coverage.
- “The biggest users of emergency rooms by far are Medicaid recipients,” Johnson writes. “And the new health insurance law will increase their ranks by about 16 million.”
ERs are crowded, Johnson writes, not only because of a lack of insurance but also because of obstacles inherent in their structure and mission, such as an aging population, more people with chronic illnesses, the closures of many ERs in the 1990s and the demand for beds for both emergency patients and patients scheduled for elective surgeries that bring more money.
AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman praised Johnson’s story and linked it to reporting by The Boston Globe on the impact of that state’s reform law upon emergency room use. So far, events in Massachusetts reinforce Johnson’s predictions.
The Boston Globe revisited Massachusetts’s ER conundrum last week, and reported pretty much what it did last year—that despite the state’s reform law, which mandated everyone have coverage beginning in July 2007, emergency room use is rising. Last year, the state’s Division of Health Care Finance and Policy cautioned that it was too early to draw any conclusions from the seven percent rise in ER visits between 2005 and 2007. Now the agency is saying that expanded coverage may be one reason for the 9 percent rise from 2004 to 2008. According to commissioner David Morales, many studies have shown that expanding coverage does not reduce emergency room visits. That’s because the uninsured “are not really responsible for significant ER use,” he told the Globe.
Deconstructing a NYT op-ed in three acts
On April 17, New York Times‘ op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a column about globalization, international competition and entrepreneurship. Here, as anyone who has even held a newspaper with his column in it will know, he’s on all too familiar territory. It’s not until he steps over into uncritical praise of a medical device maker that Friedman starts stepping on land mines.
He profiles EndoStim, a company working on an implant to treat acid reflux. Friedman admits that he has “no idea if the product will succeed in the marketplace,” then the cheerleading begins.
EndoStim was inspired by Cuban and Indian immigrants to America and funded by St. Louis venture capitalists. Its prototype is being manufactured in Uruguay, with the help of Israeli engineers and constant feedback from doctors in India and Chile. Oh, and the C.E.O. is a South African, who was educated at the Sorbonne, but lives in Missouri and California, and his head office is basically a BlackBerry. While rescuing General Motors will save some old jobs, only by spawning thousands of EndoStims — thousands — will we generate the kind of good new jobs to keep raising our standard of living.
Journalist Merrill Goozner, of GoozNews fame, picked up on the story the next day and asked the world “Why Is Tom Friedman Championing Higher Health Care Costs?” Goozner effortlessly chronicles the marketing-driven history of acid reflux treatments, from Pepto-Bismol to Zantac to Prilosec to Nexium, each conveniently emerging as the patent to their predecessor expired, then puts EndoStim in its place at the end of the chain.
… instead of finally being out from beneath the wasted billions now being spent on brand name acid indigestion pills like Nexium, the health care system will be lined up to move onto the next chapter in the lengthening medical text for treating what for most people is a relatively minor and passing phenomenon.
In his final paragraph, Goozner gets to the heart of what Friedman’s vision of “thousands of EndoStims” really means for the U.S. economy.
Friedman is right. Endostim’s success will create “the best jobs - top management, marketing, design” at company headquarters. But let’s not forget that to create those jobs, the entire society through its collective health care system will have to pay an unnecessary tax, which burdens every other industry and shifts scarce societal resources away from potentially more useful activities.
Finally, Trudy Lieberman, AHCJ immediate past president, catches Goozner’s post and wades into the fray in her own column on cjr.org, writing that Friedman’s column was “essentially a puff piece for EndoStim.” Lieberman ties Goozner’s observations on EndoStim into his previous writings as well as her own, writing “there’s nothing in the new law that limits the use of the device only to patients with chronic disease who don’t respond to other, less costly treatments.”
I can see hospitals advertising: “Hey acid reflux sufferers come to us. Our surgeons know how to get that thing down your gut. They are the best in the world, and by the way, insurance will pay.”
Cohn’s reform-minded blog comes to an end
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, an AHCJ member, announced Monday that he’s closing up shop at The Treatment, the “crusading” pro-health-care-reform blog he’s run since 2006. Cohn will keep blogging and writing for the magazine, but seems ready to close the reform chapter of his health care reporting and hang a big “mission accomplished” banner across the widely read blog.
Cohn used the occasion of this semi-farewell to reflect on the course journalism has taken during the reform debate, and to contrast it with prior experiences, most pointedly Clinton’s push for health care reform and his own magazine’s notorious role in the debate. In particular, Cohn considers the changes brought on by “new online media” and bloggers like himself and The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, with whom Cohn says he collaborated as much as he competed.
In addition to The New York Times and CNN, there was the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. The change didn’t fully register with me until the night the House passed the Senate health care bill, clearing reform for presidential signature. Sitting up in the House media gallery, next to Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown, I looked around at my colleagues—and realized how few of them would have been there last time around.
Was this a change for the better? I’m biased, obviously, but with some important caveats I think the answer is “yes.” We (i.e., the new online media) could generally channel policy expertise more quickly. And we could, in some cases, dispense with conventions of even-handedness—conventions that cynics had long ago learned to exploit for their own purposes.
Writing for CJR.org, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman praised Cohn’s blog, but took the opportunity to remind journalists that, while a reform bill may have passed, that doesn’t mean there aren’t myriad issues related to its implementation that will need intense coverage and scrutiny in the coming years. She also talked to Cohn and found that he isn’t leaving the game entirely.
Cohn told me that when health reform was the political story of the day, the magazine “could afford to let me write on that subject exclusively and dedicate an entire blog to it. Now that it’s no longer topic A, it makes sense for me to write about some other things.” He said he will be doing just that. While the magazine is officially retiring The Treatment as a blog exclusively devoted to health care, Cohn and The New Republic are talking about creating a new blog that will include health care coverage.
Lieberman: Pollack wrong, reform coverage lacking
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
Last week, Harold Pollack (bio), a University of Chicago professor who has been contributing to The New Republic’s The Treatment blog, recently referred to health care reform reporting as “the most careful, most thorough, and most effective reporting of any major story, ever.”
AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman took issue with that in a post on CJR.org.
Better coverage than the Vietnam War; the civil rights movement; the consumer movement? Really? In the case of the civil rights struggle, the press helped change the discourse; Americans began to view race in a new way, which led to the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act. During the Vietnam War, the media effectively changed the public dialogue from a war we couldn’t lose to one we could not win. In the early days of the consumer movement, media coverage of Ralph Nader led Congress to enact significant consumer protections. Coverage of health reform has hardly risen to that level.
Lieberman writes that health care reform coverage failed because the public was inadequately educated on the finer points of reform efforts. Her evidence? That public opinion was roughly split on reform. Had reporting been better, Lieberman writes, public support levels would have been higher. She then brings up a number of issues she says were undercovered and uses examples to back them up.
For advice from Lieberman and three other journalists on the front lines on what needs to be covered next and how to approach this complex topic, see this special tip sheet.
Are insurers to blame for rising costs?
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Lochhead and Victoria Colliver use the recent furor over insurer Anthem’s rate hikes to explore just how much of the blame for rising health care costs should be shouldered by insurers. The reporters find that, in the end, insurers are just another one of the cartels (others include device makers and providers) and operate inside the opaque world of medical pricing and snag hefty cuts for themselves. Lochead and Colliver put it thus:
While the Anthem case has raised a political storm, the underlying surge in costs gets far less scrutiny. But each sector of the health industry points fingers at the other for driving up prices, and all are raking in money.
Insurers blame hospitals and doctors, doctors blame insurers, and hospitals blame doctors and medical devicemakers in what academics call an inscrutable medical-industrial complex that rivals anything the defense industry ever invented. All these groups are combining into what many experts describe as cartels.
The reporters write that, despite their best efforts, they weren’t able to get many folks on the record. When they did find someone who was willing to talk, it was often a source we’ve seen before in other cost stories. It’s a tough theme to get quotes on, as nobody wants to burn bridges with their professional suppliers and everybody’s got some sort of skin in the game. They did, however, manage to find a local source who offered an original and illuminating anecdote:
Christina Bernstein, a medical-device engineer and independent sales representative based in San Francisco, sells disposable surgical tools made mostly out of plastic that she estimates are manufactured for about $40 each. These are marked up and sold to hospitals for as much as $350, she said, for a single use in a surgery on a patient.
“But if you were to get a detailed bill of what the hospital was charging the insurance company for the insured patient, those things get marked up to something like $1,200,” Bernstein said. “It’s ridiculous. There’s no open competition.”
(Hat tip to AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman, who wrote a column on CJR.org praising the Chronicle’s story.)
Lieberman: Media bought into heart docs’ fight
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Using one-sided sentences published by newspapers nationwide as evidence, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman takes her media peers to task on CJR.com for blindly advancing the agenda of the American College of Cardiology in their push against Medicare reimbursement cuts.
The ACC aggressively fought what Lieberman describes as “a new Medicare rule, which took effect January 1, that cut projected total revenues for cardiologists by 13 percent on average over four years while increasing the revenue of internists, family doctors, and general practitioners.” Lieberman writes that the rule change will effectively put more money toward much-needed primary care specializations and that it was widely mischaracterized in the press, thanks to ACC’s machinations. Lieberman:
… for the most part (news articles) passed along the cardiologists’ complaints, threats, and warnings without any hint that there was another side to the story. Between the slanted newspaper articles and audio news releases from the ACC, millions of Americans learned that the incomes of heart doctors, which can be upwards of $400,000, could take a hit.
Lieberman: Work got better with blogging
Heath Meriwether of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Write Stuff blog interviewed AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman about her transition from print outlets (including the Detroit Free Press and Consumer Reports) to blogging on cjr.org.
Lieberman
Lieberman said that once she made the jump to blogs and embraced the new format, her “work only got better.” She let loose and relied on her experience and reporting skills to “cut through the BS and be totally honest.”
The discussion includes a number of technical writing tips for bloggers, as well as a stern reminder that blog posts must be reported just as exhaustively as any other sort of journalism.
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