Indiana numbers show preventable errors down
The Indianapolis Star’s Daniel Lee reports that, according to the state’s newly released 2009 numbers, preventable medical errors are down in Indiana. There were 94 reported errors last year, down from 105 each in 2007 and 2008.
Part of the decline can be attributed to the health department’s Indiana Pressure Ulcer Initiative, which appears to have helped bring bed sore occurrences down 33 percent from 2008.
The initiative, which began in June 2008 and runs through September, focuses on improving hospitals’ systems for assessing risk factors for patients developing bed sores. Efforts have included in-person and online prevention training for hospital personnel.
The real story is the Indiana error numbers, which are wonderfully extensive. They’re broken down by condition (28 different serious errors), location and specific facility.
Related
- More on medical errors
- Record crowd hears from Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Edwards
- Tip sheet: A road map for covering your local hospital’s quality
Conference presentations
- Arrogance without accountability? Where is the media? [Peter Pronovost | Watch an excerpt of his keynote address]
- The National Healthcare Reports, Ernest Moy
- How a Hospital Failed a Boy Who Didn’t Have to Die, Helen Haskell
- Citizens for Patient Safety, Patty Skolnik
- MRSA Survivors Network, Jeanine Thomas
- Improving patient safety through health information technology
AHCJ articles
- Medical misconnections: Patient-safety problems [About the project | Contest questionnaire]
- Experts discuss benefits, dangers of telemedicine
- Hospital patient safety initiatives borrow from transportation industry
- Specialty hospitals, surgery centers call 911 in emergencies
- Reporter documents surgical errors through public records
CDC releases 2007 foodborne illness numbers
In the latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC has released the 2007 numbers on foodborne illness in the United States. Norovirus (39 percent) was the most common culprit, followed by Salmonella (27 percent). In terms of illnesses caused, poultry led the way, followed by beef and leafy greens. In the majority of the 1,097 reported outbreaks of foodborne illness, no agent was identified – a fact the CDC attributes to the small scale of many of those outbreaks. Here’s a breakdown of what investigators managed to find:
Those looking to dig a little bit deeper into the numbers should consult this four-page PDF, which breaks it all down by contaminant, food, number of outbreaks and number of illnesses caused.
Resources for covering food safety
Tip Sheets
- Lifting the shroud: Using multiple-cause-of-death data
- FDA Reform: The Time Has Come (Nancy Donley presentation)
- Why Is It So Difficult to Prevent Foodborne Illnesses? (Michael Doyle presentation)
- Reporting on the intersection of health and the environment
- Fatal Food: A study of illness outbreaks
Websites
- Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy
- Outbreak Alert! Database
- Center for Food Safety and Security Systems
- FoodRisk.org
Related
- Recent stories and studies on foodborne illnesses
- Video study finds risky food-safety behavior more common than thought
- Airlines delay testing of onboard water
- A selection of stories about a 2008 salmonella outbreak
- Private companies, not the FDA, increasingly perform food safety inspections
Forum offers stats on well-being of elderly
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism, Studies, Tools
AgingStats.gov is an often-overlooked federal clearinghouse of aging-related data from the Federal Interagency Forum on Age-Related Statistics. It focuses on summary reports.
Its latest effort, Older Americans 2010: Key Indicators of Well-Being (174-page PDF), summarizes 37 key indicators it believes are broadly relevant and easy to understand. By my count, 24 of those are explicitly health-related.
Everything is illustrated with an abundance of charts and maps, and an emphasis on bulleted summary and analysis helps keep things accessible. Those looking for a deeper dive into the summary numbers will want to head to the appendix.
As part of its health sections, the report contains seven “Health Status” indicators, including chronic health conditions, depressive symptoms, sensory impairments and oral health, and functional limitations.
One example:
It also includes eight “Health Risks and Behaviors” – things like diet, air quality, mammography and vaccinations – and nine “Health Care” indicators, including expenditures, prescription drugs and residential services.
The forum, which nobody seems to refer to by the acronym FIFARS, has been around since 1986. Participants include the Census Bureau, a number of Health and Human Services departments (AHRQ, CMS, NCHS and others), HUD, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the EPA, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Social Security Administration.
Thanks to AHCJ member Eileen Beal for suggesting this as a tool other members might find helpful.
Doctors certified to use strokebuster don’t
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s John Fauber used data from the Joint Commission to discover that a clot-busting drug that could help patients mid-stroke is not being used in between 30 percent and 60 percent of the situations in which it should be effective. It’s a meaty story package, rich in background and context. As always, Fauber did his homework.
The clot-dissolving agent, known as tissue plasminogen activator, or t-PA, is the only approved drug for treating a stroke by stopping it and significantly reducing the risk of disability.
Yet the number of patients who get t-PA has remained dismally low, about 5% of all stroke patients, ever since the drug was approved 14 years ago. Much of that is because patients fail to recognize their symptoms and get to the hospital within the 4 ½ -hour window during which the drug can be administered.
Fauber writes that part of physicians’ reluctance to deploy t-PA can be attributed to built-in financial disincentives. In a small number of cases it can cause bleeding that might attract malpractice lawsuits, and it’s reimbursed at as low as $200 a use.
As a weird offshoot from this incentivization, Fauber found that the “Primary Stroke Center” certification has enough cachet that physicians while go through the motions of t-PA certification just to get the fancy label, yet have no intention of really using the drug.
AHRQ releases ‘09 state data on health care quality
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Public health, Studies
The AHRQ has released the 2009 version of its state snapshots, which are particularly accessible versions of the National Healthcare Quality Report.
The state-by-state information includes, for the first time, data on health insurance, including data on health care quality categorized by source of payment, including private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid and those without insurance.
The snapshots also compare relative health care quality of each state, both overall and in specific areas such as preventive care and ambulatory care.
My favorite part is the 3.5 mb Excel file that has each state’s numbers for everything the snapshots measure. It allows relatively easy comparisons that go far beyond the simple health-o-meter snapshots themselves.
Related
- Intro to investigating health data using spreadsheets
- Finding patterns and trends in health data: Pivot tables in spreadsheets
New data on insurance coverage released
The first full-year 2009 numbers about health insurance coverage from the NCHS’ National Health Interview Survey have been released. The notable numbers:
- 58.5 million Americans were insured for at least part of the previous year
- 46.3 million were without insurance at the time they were interviewed
- 32.6 million had been uninsured for more than a year
The numbers are sliced and diced a number of ways. I’ve included a visualization of one of the livelier categories: The number of people getting their health coverage from public or private sources.
HHS shows off tools marrying health, data
Filed under: Health data, Public health, Public records, Tools
This morning’s HHS briefing about the new Community Health Data Initiative, part of the Open Government Initiative, covered a lot of ground, with a number of web application developers showing off what they’ve done with government health data. Among the highlights for me:
Microsoft has launched Bing Health Maps
It’s a little clunky to access now, but we’ll forgive Bing since the application was launched early this morning. Go to http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ and look for the “Map Apps” button at the bottom of the page. Click on that and, on the next screen, choose Bing Health Maps. From there, you can pick a state and then community health indicators. Those indicators include birth measures, death measures and health risk factors. An overlay on the map shows the results and you can click on specific areas to delve further into the numbers.
Visualizing the data may make it easier to spot some health disparities that might deserve a closer look and it’s an easy way to get numbers on some health measures for an area. I am disappointed that there doesn’t appear to be an option to embed the health maps.
TechCrunch points out that Bing Health Maps are similar to Google’s Flu Maps.
Google Fusion Tables make health data accessible
Not to be outdone, Google demonstrated how its Fusion Tables - “a database service in the cloud” - could be used with HHS data about hospitals. In the example, you can zoom in on a hospital and get stats on whether it is “heart friendly” and “people friendly.”
Tech helps asthma management
Another application gathers data on where and when people are when they suffer asthma symptoms. Asthmapolis showed how its product, the Spiroscout, uses GPS to track the time and geographic location of symptoms. The data can then be displayed and, presumably, patterns can be detected. Asthmapolis produced a video to explain a little more.
Analyze the U.S.
Palantir Technologies announced http://AnalyzeThe.US which uses tools to explore data released by the government as well as datasets compiled by nonprofits and policy centers, in areas that include federal spending, contracting, lobbying, and campaign finance.
And more …
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that HHS will release a Health Indicators Warehouse by the end of the year that will have “currently available and new HHS data on national, state, regional, and county health performance – on indicators such as rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes, access to healthy food, utilization of health care services, etc. – in an easy-to-use ‘one stop data shop.’”
According to the HHS press release, there were 16 applications presented at today’s forum. I’m hopeful that HHS will find a better way to present such things before future announcements. I spent much of my time during the webcast trying to find the web sites and applications that were being demonstrated, and thus missing parts of the discussion. Releasing a list of URLs in advance or providing them via Twitter during the webcast would have helped keep my attention on what was being presented.
In the end, the release of more data is always a good thing and making it accessible to as many people as possible is even better. But journalists will probably still want the underlying datasets so they can perform their own detailed analysis of the data.
For more about some of the applications demonstrated, see “Making community health information as useful as weather data” from Alex Howard.
GAO evaluates youth concussion databases
Filed under: Health data, Hot Health Headline, Public records, Studies
In a recent report, the Goverment Accountability Office reviewed national efforts to track concussions in youth sports (highlights). The report evaluates local and national laws designed to keep young athletes safe, but the most immediately useful component may be the identification and evaluation of three incomplete national databases now being maintained.
High School Reporting Information Online database
Provides national estimates of occurrence of concussion, it covers only 20 sports for high schools with certified athletic trainers. It may underestimate occurrence because some athletes may be reluctant to report symptoms of a possible concussion to avoid being removed from a game.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System
Provides national estimates only on concussions treated in an emergency room.
The National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research database
Provides information only on cases of concussion with serious complications and cannot provide national estimates of the occurrence of all concussions.
Related
- Last week, the House of Representatives’ Education and Labor Committee held a hearing to examine the prevalence of concussions among high school athletes and how the injury can impact academic achievement.
- Previous coverage of concussions
CDC: 12 percent of pools closed after inspection
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public health
The CDC’s focus on “recreational water venues,” which include swimming pools, interactive fountains, kiddie/wading pools, water slides and and therapy pools, is understandable given that about 314 million Americans visit them each year.
From 1997 to 2006, the CDC says, infections caused by norovirus, shigella and other bacteria caused almost a quarter of pool-related gastroenteritis outbreaks, despite the fact that they could have been kept at bay with proper maintenance and inspections.
To better understand those lapses, the CDC examined 121,020 pool inspections volunteered by 15 jurisdictions. The majority came from the states of Florida (52,752) and South Carolina (22,111). The numbers tell a pretty compelling story on their own:
Pool inspections are a common, yet overlooked source of community health data, and this CDC release should be easy to localize, especially if you live in one of the 15 areas that volunteered the data used in the report. See the full list after the jump.
Read more
Disciplined docs turn up on Pfizer payroll
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
New Scientist’s Peter Aldhous and Jim Giles created an interesting mash-up of two popular health stories, disciplined caregivers and conflicts of interest, by matching a set of Pfizer disclosures on payments to doctors and researchers in 2009 with discipline records from the FDA and the country’s most populous states. They found 26 matches on the state level and four from the feds, matches which accounted for about one in every 50 Pfizer-paid doctors in the states they’d investigated.
They assembled a number of anecdotes for the story, but the most telling related to a physician who was disciplined for faulty research related to a Pfizer drug, yet still paid by the company to lecture on it.
Other Pfizer experts ran into trouble during their research. Among them is Thomas Gazda of Scottsdale, Arizona, who was paid to lecture about Geodon after being reprimanded by the FDA over irregularities in his conduct of a trial of the same drug’s use in children and adolescents with bipolar disorder – one of whom was given more than the maximum allowable dose for five days. The FDA had earlier told Pfizer to exclude Gazda’s data from the results submitted by Pfizer during its efforts to win approval to use the drug for this purpose.
AHCJ has extensive resources for folks looking to do both sides of the mashup, with tips for investigating conflicts of interest from John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and recommendations for looking into disciplined caregivers from ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber.
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Spend a week at the CDC studying public health, meeting sources. Apply for the AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships today!
- Reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- Tip sheet: Covering cuts to Medicare reimbursements
- Briefing: Reporting on health reform between now and 2014
- Covering high-risk insurance pools: Tips for reporters
- Health care reform has passed: What's next?
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
