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.
FOI request for H1N1 documents still pending
Filed under: Health journalism, Public health, Public records
Eleven months after she filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for documents related to H1N1, CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson reports that she has finally received a response from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It states that it has a certain document responsive to my FOI request. The letter says HHS will try really hard to provide the document soon, but that the folks there are very busy so it may take awhile. It says that if I want expedited processing - something I had already applied for a year ago - I should let them know. A phone number was provided in case I had any questions.
Of course the investigative report I was working on is long over, as the bureaucrats must have known it would be by now.
Attkisson says she called the number provided in the letter and left a message several weeks ago and has yet to hear back. Her initial request was prompted by the CDC’s decision to stop testing and tracking H1N1, something her sources told her was hasty and more about influencing the public’s perception of the illness than it was about public health.
Earlier: Freedom of Information: Stalled at CDC and D.C. Government (Oct. 27, 2009)
Related
- Health journalists cite uneven disclosure of H1N1 deaths across country
- AHCJ calls on new administration to improve access to federal experts
Reporter’s dumpster diving led to HIPAA deal
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
With a $1 million settlement, HHS and Rite Aid have closed the book on a HIPAA privacy case that began with a journalist’s investigative reporting in 2006. In a nut shell, Rite Aid employees across the country were tossing prescriptions and pill bottles out without taking measures to secure the sensitive information they held.
They were exposed by Bob Segall, Jim Hall and Bill Ditton of WTHR-Indianapolis. For the story, Segall eventually checked dumpsters in 12 cities nationwide and found unsecured information in all of them. Segall told the tale of how he broke the story, and how other reporters could do the same, in this article for AHCJ members.
For those unfamiliar with the case’s background, NPR’s April Fulton can get you up to speed. CVS settled with HHS last year, and NPR’s Fulton reports that Walgreens will be next.
Healthcare.gov coming July 1
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health journalism
KHN’s Phil Galewitz previews the July 1 launch of a federal website he says “will give consumers a list of all private and government health care plans for individuals and small businesses in their areas,” a service required by the reform bill, and one that has never before been part of the modern system.
The initial site will just provide basic information on each plan, but a planned October upgrade will include what Galewitz called “detailed cost and benefits information,” the precise nature of which is still being negotiated. Insurance groups, predictably, say that sharing all the information HHS plans to provide will just lead to confusion and higher costs. Consumer groups disagree.
Insurers including UnitedHealthcare and Aetna say HHS is going too far in planning to list certain data, such as the percent of claims that health plans deny, the rate at which they cancel policies after customers get sick and the number of times patients appeal coverage decisions. They say the data would mislead potential customers.
…
The site can “be the great equalizer so consumers can have equal access to information and be on the same playing field as insurance companies,” says Elisabeth Benjamin, co-founder of Health Care for All New York, a consumer health care coalition. “The government needs to make the information as open as possible.”
Until 2014, when stricter provisions of the reform bill go into effect and such practices are no longer permitted, the site will list only the “sticker prices” of the plans, and insurers will still be allowed to charge sicker patients more.
Tell us about your access to federal officials
Have you recently tried to get information from the federal government or arrange an interview with a federal official?
AHCJ’s Right-to-Know Committee is calling on journalists to report their experiences, as part of a continuing effort to pry open the doors of the federal government. We’re looking for recent anecdotes about journalists’ experiences with public information officers, especially at the Department of Health and Human Services and any of the agencies that are part of it (e.g., CDC, FDA, CMS etc.).
Freyer
Please write to Felice J. Freyer, Right-to-Know Committee chair, at felice.freyer@cox.net, about problems you have encountered, including mandates to clear interviews with the press office, slow responses, refused interviews, burdensome requirements (such as written questions and answers only), extreme time limitations on interviews, PIOs listening in on your conversations, or anything else that made it hard for you to get the information and quotes that you needed in time. Additionally, do you know whether your requests have been sent to HHS or the White House? What effect did that have?
For background on the committee’s work so far, see these links:
- Major journalism groups demand agency end newsgathering constraints
- AHCJ calls on new administration to improve access to federal experts
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.
Feds: We’re doing well against health fraud
Filed under: Government, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Public records, Studies
Calling health care “a convoluted system that’s easy to game,” Kaiser Health News’ Andrew Villegas writes that despite recent federal proclamations of success in cracking down on Medicare fraud, CMS still needs a systematic claims review system instead of their current “ad-hoc” methods. For evidence, Villegas draws on an interview with Lou Saccoccio, executive director of the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association.
What’s the one thing Saccoccio would like to see changed right away?
Let the the federal government share Medicare claims information with states and private insurers. “If you take all of that claims data that they have between Medicaid and Medicare and start analyzing it,” he said, “You [could] identify where problem areas are.”
The government does some of it now, he said, but strictly on an ad hoc basis. A change in that policy could allow real-time fraud identification to “stop that money before it goes out the door,” Saccoccio said.
The report mentioned above, a 72-page annual assessment of the government’s efforts to stop medical fraud conducted by the HHS Office of Inspector General, declares that about $2.5 billion came to the Medicare Trust Fund in 2009, most of it from anti-fraud work. That included $620 million from criminal fines, $482 million for “penalties and mulitple damages,” and more than a billion from “restitution/compensatory damages.” But my favorite part of the report isn’t the big ticket items, it’s the avalanche of anecdotes that comes afterward.
It’s a lot to sort through (pages 8 through 56, by my reckoning) so I’ve made the whole thing searchable here. Plug in your state or a specific pet topic (wheelchairs are particularly popular among the fraudulent claimers) and you’re likely to come up with at least one story of swashbuckling government fraud busting. Or at least what passes for “swashbuckling” in OIG-speak.
#AHCJ2010 early coverage roundup
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Health journalism, Health policy, Hot Health Headline, Member news
Apart from the announcement of the FDA’s infusion pump regulation push, the biggest appearances out of Health Journalism 2010 in Chicago this week have been U.S. Department of of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Landon Hall, of The Orange County Register, covered the Sebelius and Frieden appearances for AHCJ.
At Health Journalism 2010, Kathleen Sebelius talked about implementing health care reform. (Photo: Pia Christensen)Reuters’ Debra Sherman also covered both presentations.
Sebelius focused on insurers, especially those who deny coverage to those with a legal write to it, Sherman wrote. According to Sherman, “Sebelius… said to expect ‘hand-to-hand combat’ if insurers try to ‘drive patients out of plans.’”
Working from a broader perspective, New America Foundation’s Joanne Kenen wrote about how insurance fit into Sebelius’ larger task of implementing recently passed health care reform measures.
In his presentation, Frieden focused on smoking, which he called the leading preventable cause of death. Reuter’s Sherman again:
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that after years of steady declines in the nation’s smoking rates, progress has stalled over the last few years and that the agency was renewing its focus.
He said government stimulus funds would be used to increase anti-smoking efforts. He said the CDC would encourage states to implement anti-smoking strategies, such as education and media campaigns, smoke-free laws and higher cigarette prices.
In other AHCJ 2010 news, Dallas Morning News reporter Robert Garrett wrote that a “siege mentality was very much on display when a trio of hospital executives spoke this morning at an Association of Health Care Journalists conflab in Chicago.”
“We’re all scared to death by health care reform,” said Advocate Health Care president and CEO Jim Skogsbergh, who runs 13 hospitals in Illinois. “We know we’re going to get paid less.”
CDC health overview: Diagnostic scans tripled
Filed under: Health data, Hot Health Headline, Studies
The CDC has released the 2009 version of Health, United States, their annual summary of health numbers and trends. It’s an epic heap of data; get the full PDF here.
For a 574-page, 10.22 MB government document, it’s surprisingly easy to navigate. There’s a table of contents, links and a nifty little feature which allows you to pull up a spreadsheet of the data from any chart or graph. In addition to the lead story on medical technology and scanning, the report includes 150 data tables. That’s a bit too much to summarize here, so we’ll settle for the CDC’s version of the highlights:
- … the rate of magnetic resonance imaging, known as MRI, and computed and positron emission tomography or CT/PET scans, ordered or provided, tripled between 1996 and 2007.
- The rate of adults aged 45 and over discharged from the hospital after receiving at least one knee replacement procedure increased 70 percent from 1996 to 2006 (26.5 per 10,000 population in 1996 to 45.2 per 10,000 in 2006).
- From 1988-1994 to 2003-2006, use of antidiabetic drugs among adults aged 45 years and over increased about 50 percent, and the use of statin drugs to lower cholesterol among this age group increased almost tenfold.
- The number of new organ transplantations per 1 million people increased 31 percent for kidney transplants (43.7 per 1 million in 1997 vs. 57.2 in 2006) and 42 percent for liver transplants between 1997 and 2006 (15.6 per 1 million in 1997 vs. 22.2 in 2006).
- Life expectancy at birth increased more for the black than for the white population between 1990 and 2007, thereby narrowing the gap in life expectancy between these two racial groups. Overall U.S. life expectancy in 2007 was 77.9 years.
- In 2007, 20 percent of U.S. adults were current cigarette smokers, a slight decrease from 21 percent in the previous three years. Men were more likely to be current cigarette smokers than women (22 percent vs. 17 percent).
- In 2005-2006, 30 percent of adults often or almost always had trouble sleeping in the past month.
- In 2007, 20 percent of adults 18 years and over had at least one emergency department visit in the past year, and 7 percent had two or more visits.
- The percentage of the population taking at least one prescription drug during the previous month increased from 38 percent in 1988-1994 to 47 percent in 2003-2006, and the percentage taking three or more prescription drugs increased from 11 percent to 21 percent.
Agency releases latest ‘Profile of Older Americans”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration on Aging has released the 2009 version of “A Profile of Older Americans” (PDF), a summary of data taken from the Census and NCHS. 
This year’s version focuses heavily on the demographic’s growth, but includes something for everyone.
Skip to page 3 if you’re just looking for the ever-popular list of interesting numbers related to the 65-and-over set, or check the following page for the narrative version. Highlights include a map marking states based on “Persons 65+ as a percentage of total population” (it’s lowest in Alaska and Utah and increasing rapidly throughout the Mountain West), state-by-state 65+ population numbers, and health insurance coverage numbers.
You’ll even find numbers on poverty, caregivers and breakdowns of the numbers of elderly Americans who are limited in walking, eating, bathing, dressing, etc.
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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
