Google charts health data from CDC, World Bank
Google has removed another step between people and information with the release of its new Public Data Explorer. It’s a service through which Google links neat, tidy and reputable sets of data with a beefed-up version of its chart programs.
Right now it’s limited to 13 data sets, though Google implies that it will continue to expand those offerings based on demand. Those data sets include three that are powered by the CDC’s WONDER data delivery platform.
Data from the World Bank includes international numbers on things such as fertility rates, births attended by skilled health staff, rates of immunization against measles, prevalence of HIV, life expectancy and more. You also can find statistics on the U.S. population from the Census Bureau.
At present, the limited selection mean that it probably won’t be useful for more than a handful of stories, but it’s something to keep an eye on as Google continues to add data and customization options.
Here’s a quick example mapping U.S. cancer rates (circle color) and number of cases (circle size) by state.
NOTE: If you can’t see the visualization, you’ll probably need to upgrade your browser.
Reporters use county rankings for analysis
Filed under: Health data, Public health, Public records, Studies, Tools
On Feb. 17, rankings of the relative health of counties in each American state were released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin. The rankings used data from 13 distinct (mostly federal) sources, including the National Center for Health Statistics, the Census Bureau and the Dartmouth Atlas. With that data, researchers computed eight separate composite scores, which were then weighted to produce one overall score. The ratings are navigated by clicking through a national map to the state and county level. Enough clicks will even bring you to the raw data itself. The state only compares counties, not states, because data collection varies from state to state and isn’t always standardized.
It’s a combination of data, analysis and an intuitive interface, and journalists have been quick to localize the story. Many reporters reached beyond the easy numbers (”our county is 67th!”) to use the system for deeper stories.
For example, Robin Erb of the Detroit Free Press dissected the ratings process and how individual factors and disparities played into them before launching into the standard state breakdown.
Writing for Health News Florida, David Gulliver took a broader state view and considered how various socioeconomic factors played into the rankings of Florida counties. Gulliver’s analysis:
The strong-performing coastal counties, like Collier, St. John’s Sarasota, Charlotte, Palm Beach and Broward, all benefit from having heavy concentrations of retirees who have guaranteed health care access via Medicare. …
[Dr. Kevin Sherin, director of public health for Orange County] said that in Florida’s tourism and service industries, workers tend to be transient and less likely to have insurance or consistent primary care.
He noted the low-ranked counties were some of the poorest in Florida, like Union and Bradford in the rural north, and Glades and Okeechobee, with heavy populations of migrant workers. Those counties also tend to have more people who speak only Spanish, Creole or other languages.
Gulliver localized the story on a county level for his Sarasota Health News site.
In USA Today, Mary Brophy Marcus took the national view and looked for broad trends and generalizations. Marcus’ story was accompanied by a map by Frank Pompa highlighting each state’s healthiest and least healthy counties.
New federal caregiver database full of holes
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Public records, Tools
Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein are still working with databases of disciplined caregivers, this time exposing gaping holes in the federal database released to hospitals on March 1 (LA Times version | ProPublica version). Weber and Ornstein trace the holes to a lack of reporting by state agencies, and mention California, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Alabama, Delaware, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana as states whose database entries were demonstrably incomplete. Some states don’t even have a single disciplined caregiver showing up in the federal database even though scores of offenders are listed on those states’ own sites.
The omissions took federal health officials by surprise. Only last month, a spokesman for the agency that oversees the database told reporters that “no data is missing.” Another official said the agency had been “constantly” checking its data against state licensing board websites.
But Friday, the head of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) acknowledged that records were missing. She said her agency had launched a “full and complete” review to determine what is wrong and how to fix it.
The Department of Health and Human Services has reacted swiftly, Ornstein and Weber report. HHS boss Kathleen Sebelius sent U.S. governors a letter requesting that they identify and correct any holes in the federal database by June 1, at which point any states whose entries were not updated will be named and shamed in an HSS report. HHS will train state staff in compliance and audit the database to make sure everybody’s following the rules. States have, as of yet, not faced any penalties for failing to update the list over the preceding two decades.
Report measures health factors at county level
Filed under: Health data, Health policy, Public health, Studies, Tools
A county-by-county collection of reports set to be released tomorrow could be a good source for local data on a number of health factors. The County Health Rankings, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, is the first of what is expected to be an annual look at health within each state.
The rankings will “show how counties measure up within each state in terms of how healthy people are, how long they live, and how important factors affect their health, such as tobacco use, obesity, access to healthcare, education, community safety, and air quality,” according to a press release.
A Feb. 17 briefing will include experts representing public health, health policy, education, and business who are expected to discuss the rankings and ways that communities can become healthier. The briefing, which starts at 9:30 a.m. EST, will be webcast. You can RSVP for this event online and a link will be sent to those who RSVP as soon as it’s available. For those in Washington, D.C, the briefing will be at the Columbus Club at Union Station, 50 Massachusetts Ave. NE - you also will need to RSVP.
Speakers are expected to include:
- Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., President and CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- David R. Williams, M.P.H., Ph.D., Norman Professor of Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health
- Patrick Remington, M.D, M.P.H., Associate Dean for Public Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
- Andrew Webber, President and CEO, National Business Coalition on Health
- Judith A. Monroe, M.D., FAAFP, State Health Commissioner, Indiana State Department of Health
- Donald Shell, M.D., M.A., Health Officer, Prince George’s County Health Department
(Full disclosure: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is one of a number of organizations supporting AHCJ’s educational efforts.)
Update
See how many news organizations have covered the rankings.
‘Gold mine’ of workplace toxicity data released
Filed under: Health data, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
After a long FOIA battle that ended with a federal lawsuit, Adam Finkel, former OSHA director of health standards programs for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (bio and contact information), has “acquired data on some three million samples, taken at about 75,000 locations from 1979 to 2009,” the Center for Public Integrity reports as part of its “Data Mine” series.
The air and “wipe” samples in question were taken to determine workplace exposure to toxic substances. Finkel plans to analyze this data “gold mine” and make it available to the public in an easily digestible format (a project for which he has already secured grant money). At some point, OSHA itself may do the same.
Asked if OSHA plans to make the sampling data public, agency spokeswoman Diana Petterson responded in an e-mail that “it is under consideration and must address certain concerns including the data integrity and the completeness of the data.” Finkel, who left OSHA after accusing the agency of failing to test its own inspectors for dangerous levels of beryllium, is skeptical. “They made it as hard as they possibly could,” he said. “This database is up to 30 years old, and they’ve shown no interest in making it accessible or doing anything useful with it internally.”
The Data Mine series, a collaboration between The Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation, will highlight inaccessible or poorly presented information from the federal government.
From the CIA to the CDC, we’ll be looking at data that needs to be public, with regular posts on the Center’s and Sunlight’s websites. We’ll describe each data set, as well as officials’ plans for putting it online – or not.
AAMC’s annual workforce report packed with data
The American Association of Medical Colleges has released its annual workforce report for 2009, and it’s full of enough state-by-state information to answer many common questions about physician supply. The report includes state rankings on physician supply, medical school enrollment, graduate medical education, and the retention of physicians, each explained through a variety of maps, tables and graphs.
For example, here’s a map detailing the U.S. supply of primary care physicians broken down on a per-capita basis:
Access to list of disciplined health workers in limbo
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism, Nursing, Public health, Public records, Tools
NPR’s Joseph Shapiro looked into the status of the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank, a database of nurses, nurse aides, pharmacists and pharmacy assistants who have been disciplined by state boards.
The 22-year-old database was supposed to be open to hospitals and nursing homes for background check purposes, but has been tied up in layers of bureaucracy. A policy for opening it up was written during the later years of the Bush administration, but the president decided to defer the decision to his successor.
Shapiro writes that the plan for opening the database is now under review by the Obama administration: “A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services says things are on track. And that maybe by early next year, the department will open the registry of disciplined nurses, aides and pharmacists.”
Related
Public Citizen has posted an open letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius requesting that the proposals to open the database be put into effect “immediately.” The letter explains why the database is important, and details the consequences of keeping it under wraps.
Glitch kept data out of Nursing Home Compare
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism
Duane Schrag of the Salina (Kan.) Journal reports on problems he found in the data behind Nursing Home Compare, the federal government’s online tool to help guide consumers in judging the quality of nursing homes.
Schrag says that an area nursing home announced it was shutting down because it couldn’t comply with a state fire marshal’s requirement to replace its sprinkler system. But a check of the Nursing Home Compare data found no fire safety violations for the facility for 2007 or 2008, despite the fact that it had been cited for several fire code violations in both years.
When the Salina Journal pushed officials to explain why the deficiencies were not showing up, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services discovered a software problem:
But a glitch in the software used by the federal government kept the reports from showing up in Nursing Home Compare. The software blocked more than 1,000 fire code violation reports involving Kansas nursing homes in 2006, a similar number in 2007 and almost 800 in the first six months of 2008.
Nationally, about 21,600 reports were blocked during that same period.
Officials at CMS say the software was fixed on July 23.
Schrag talked to nursing home administrators and found that most of them dispute the rankings that Nursing Home Compare assigns to them; the exception was a nursing home that had a five-star rating.
Why health costs in McAllen, Texas, resonate
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Health policy
Let’s just say right from the start that Atul Gawande’s recent story in The New Yorker about runaway health costs in McAllen, Texas, is a tour de force of explanatory journalism.
There is, thankfully, still a lot of good journalism being committed in this country. So what made Gawande’s article spread like wildfire? Kaiser Health News rounds up some insights on the power of the piece and tips for reporters who’d like to do the same thing.
Make the abstract real. Gawande’s article cites lots of facts and figures but leads the reader through the health-cost thicket with concrete examples and personal stories. Gawande’s article makes “it so real that people who are elected public figures can talk about this issue to anyone they meet,” says Robert Blendon, a Harvard health policy prof.
Mine the data. University of Minnesota’s Gary Schwitzer says you can do it, too. “No matter where you live in this country, there is a story in the Dartmouth Atlas data” showing variations in health spending. The story “didn’t require breaking news, a new study or new data” to be powerful, Schwitzer says. “Health reporters spend too much time thinking about breakthroughs, cures and new stuff, and not enough on access, disparities and variations in policy.”
Remember balance. The Kaiser roundup also includes criticism of the article. “Even though a lot of what he said was true, there’s a lot that he didn’t say that would actually balance the story,” says E. Linda Villarreal, past president of the Hidalgo-Starr County Medical Society.
Dr. Atul Gawande, from Center for American Progress via flickr
Databases, search engine help with research
The Resource Shelf Web site has posted a list of some health and safety databases, plus a search tool that sends queries to PubMed, Harrison’s Online, MerckManual and TRIPDatabase.
Resource Shelf offers descriptions and links to the following:
- Emergency Response Safety and Health Database
- United Network for Organ Sharing Database
- Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool
- Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System
- National Electronic Injury Surveillance System
- Vivisimo Bio MetaCluster
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Health Journalism 2010, AHCJ's annual conference, features a world-class program with story ideas, sources, stronger reporting skills, chances to meet newsmakers and network with other journalists.
- 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
- Shortened Lives: How location, lifestyle affect health
- Covering a complex story for the long haul
- Aging in the 21st Century: Presentations and tip sheets
- AHCJ calls for better information from Joint Commission Web site
