Ohio’s hospital transparency law under fire
Filed under: Aging, Conflicts of interest, Europe, Government, Health care reform, Health data, Health journalism, Health policy, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Member news, Public records, Studies, Tools
Thanks are due to blogger and one-time hospital executive Paul Levy for drawing our attention to the Ohio hospital industry’s recent push to overturn much of the state’s recently passed transparency legislation.
The law required hospitals to post performance data, such as infection rates and patient satisfaction, on the Ohio Hospital Compare site.
According to Brandon Glenn’s report in the MedCity News, the hospital industry opposes the site, online since Jan. 1, 2010, because it serves the same purpose as the federal Hospital Compare site.
The OHA supports the new legislation… because it wants to remove “duplicative” reporting requirements on the state’s hospitals. Ohio hospitals already report the same data to a federal Hospital Compare website maintained for the public by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said OHA spokeswoman Tiffany Himmelreich.
The new legislation “doesn’t reduce reporting. It just eliminates reporting the same information to two different places,” she said. “We don’t want the public to feel that this is taking a step backwards in terms of data availability.”
For their part, consumer advocates say website maintenance is not an onerous burden, and that the hospital association’s push is part of a larger, statewide antitransparency trend.
As an interesting side note, Glenn found the Ohio Hospital Compare site to be rendered inoperable by apparent bugs on an initial visit but discovered that, after his inquiries to the state health department, the site was put into working order.
Journalist-turned-doctor combats high lab prices
On CNN’s Health page, Jim Kavanagh profiled Dr. Doug Lefton, a man who has gone from newspaper reporter to physician to entrepreneur on the front lines of the war against high medical bills.
Frustrated that high costs were keeping his patients from following through with basic blood tests, Lefton brought attention to the issue with the help of the Akron Beacon Journal, then teamed up with online marketer called PrePaidLab, a lab test provider named LabCorp and other physicians to create a cheap, national source of lab tests. Thanks to the site, a lipid panel that might cost a patient $148 at a hospital can be had for $18 online. Patients take their sample to a local outlet, then often get the results in less than 24 hours.
LabCorp agreed to accept the lower charges in exchange for the increased volume it expected to gain, PrePaid’s Patton said.
“The only subsidy is out of our end,” he said. “We just gave them a lower fee schedule. Believe me, the margins are very, very low. But it’s for a good cause.”
Lefton was adamant that the program be set up strictly for the benefit of patients.
“Doug’s kind of a different guy,” Patton said. “He made it a point this was going to be his program, no doctors were going to make any money off of it, and that’s it.”
NLM workshop in Ohio tests waters for possible chapter
Filed under: Health journalism, Member news, Tools
This post was contributed by AHCJ member Eileen Beal.
On Oct. 9, health care journalists, a couple of journalism professors, a couple of local medical librarians – a total of 15 – turned out for the free National Library of Medicine Workshop that NLM senior staffer Robert Logan presented at the Cleveland Heights Library on Cleveland’s east side. Logan was formerly a journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Missouri-Colombia. Currently, he is with NLM’ s Office of Communications and Public Liaison and chair of NLM’s Consumer Health Informatics Research Interest Group.
The 2 ½-hour workshop accomplished two goals. It taught attendees how to access several of the National Library of Medicine’s on-line databases (PubMed, Clinical Trials.gov, and Medline Plus) and it provided hands-on training on how use the MeSH feature on NLM’s website to better-target research and databases searches. Feedback indicated that the workshop was, as one person put it, “well worth giving up a sunny Saturday morning for.” (A few copies of the workshop handout are still available.)
In addition, the workshop tested the waters in the health-writer-rich Cleveland-Akron area (home to several large newspapers, Advanstar Communications, Penton Media, Inc., MedCity News and a host of health care institutions) about interest in forming a local chapter of AHCJ to provide opportunities for more education/training events and networking.
Feedback on this was also good, so, if you live in Northeast Ohio, contact AHCJ member Eileen Beal (eojb@visn.net) for more information about forming a local chapter.
Ohio, other states cut HIV/AIDS drug subsidies
Filed under: Government, Health policy, Hot Health Headline
The Plain Dealer’s Diane Suchetka says that rising medication costs and demand driven by the swelling ranks of the jobless have forced an Ohio state program to stop providing free HIV/AIDS medication to about 1,000 of its 5,000 customers.
Folks earning between 300 percent and 500 percent of the federal poverty line will be cut outright, and even those who remain with the program will find it more difficult to get secondary services such as dental coverage, rent subsidies and certain medical conditions. Their all-important antiretroviral drugs, however, will still be free.
The cutbacks will hit new applicants as well, as the state will now consider both the income and the medical condition of the patient. In the past, all that was needed was a qualifying income and, presumably, a positive diagnosis. “New clients who don’t qualify for medical reasons will be placed on a waiting list,” Suchetka writes.
Ohio isn’t the only state making these cuts. Others — including Arkansas, North Dakota, Utah and Washington — have trimmed their programs, too, according to the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS directors. And, as of July 1, more than 2,000 people in 11 states were on waiting lists for medication assistance, according to the nonprofit agency.
Barriers in 5 Midwest states chill public access
A study from the the Citizen Advocacy Center finds that open government laws in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota have systemic barriers that chill public participation and access to government.
The Center analyzed each state’s Freedom of Information and Open Meetings Acts and found striking similarities between all states, including:
- Open government laws are sporadically enforced, which means public bodies are more likely to be unresponsive to records requests and employ exemptions to keep meetings closed.
- No state surveyed has a government office with statutory authority specifically created to oversee and enforce sunshine laws.
- State employees are not adequately trained to carry out open government policies and may be unintentionally violating the laws.
- Citizens may be able to attend meetings, but there are very few opportunities to participate.
The Midwest Open Goverment Project is a comprehensive study of the Freedom of Information and Open Meetings Acts in those five states, under the auspices of the Citizen Advocacy Center.
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