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.
Florida keeps doctors’ arrests, convictions offline
Health News Florida’s Carol Gentry reports on health department disclosure of the arrest of medical professionals, writing “It’s the policy of Florida’s Department of Health not to post public information about arrests and convictions until a professional licensing board takes final action, no matter how long that takes.”
The department has a consumer-oriented site designed to notify Florida residents of disciplined physicians, but Gentry writes that it doesn’t even include already-public records and often fails to post issues until long after they have occurred. A representative told Gentry that their procedure was to not make information public while “due process is going on,” and added that if consumers wanted that information they were welcome to call the health department.
In a follow-up story, Gentry reports that attorneys who defend doctors in disciplinary matters think the Department of Health’s stance is “entirely appropriate.” But a consumer advocacy group says the public has a right to know about complaints. As Gentry points out, “It can take years to resolve pending cases, especially if the professional contests the case or if there is a backlog.”
Report looks at nonprofits’ health reporting
Maralee Schwartz, a Shorenstein Center Fellow at Harvard University, has written a report titled “Getting It for Free: When Foundations Provide the News on Health.” (35-page PDF)
She points out that using stories produced by nonprofit foundations “raises questions that go to the heart of the journalistic enterprise and its role in American democracy: Does the very availability of content about a pet issue of a particular foundation mean that coverage will be skewed? Does nonprofit journalism mean lower standards? How does a newspaper safeguard integrity and independence?”
The report also looks at the economic challenges that editors are facing, including the results of a survey AHCJ and the Kaiser Family Foundation did in March.
Schwartz, formerly a political reporter and editor at The Washington Post, takes a close look at Kaiser Health News. Schwartz also writes about efforts in various states to create nonprofit organizations to do health reporting, including the Center for California Health Care Journalism, which first partnered with the Merced Sun Star for a project. Other similar projects include the Kansas Health Institute News Service and Health News Florida.
The report includes interviews with reporters and editors at the nonprofit organizations and at newspapers that have used their work, including AHCJ board member Karl Stark.
Schwartz concludes that “Most of the experts interviewed expressed hope that this trend can be supported. They also agreed that objections about the dilution of independence and journalistic standards can be addressed by developing odes of conduct, for lack of a better phrase, so that both editors and readers can have confidence in the work produced by Kaiser or ProPublica, or a variety of other nonprofits.”
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