Hospital association official confuses news reporting with lobbying
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Hospitals
Blythe Bernhard and Jeremy Kohler have been writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about Missouri hospitals’ unwillingness to publicly disclose medical errors.
So, when the St. Louis Metropolitan Hospital Council released a statement opposing public reporting of medical errors at hospitals, the reporters sent the statement to Missouri legislators and asked them for their comments.
I can only imagine the surprise Bernhard and Kohler felt when Daniel Landon, senior vice president of governmental relations for the Missouri Hospital Association, sent an e-mail to health professionals that characterized the reporters’ actions as coming “close to the definition of what constitutes lobbying, which is defined by the Missouri Ethics Commission and requires lobbyist registration.”
Landon said hospital association staff members planned to raise these concerns with legislators and had considered a complaint with the ethics commission.
“We think it is useful to put the Post-Dispatch on notice that someone is watching their actions in this regard,” Landon’s e-mail said. “Otherwise, the reporters will continue to push the envelope between reporting and promoting public policy changes to support their editorial positions.”
Another representative of the association later said the message was “regrettable.”
A Post-Dispatch editorial about the incident made clear to readers the difference between the editorial page and the news department, explaining that it “maintains strict church-state separation between the editorial page and the news department.”
When newspaper reporters or editorial writers communicate with legislators, we do so as journalists, acting in what we believe is the public interest. And regardless of whether public reporting of medical errors would serve hospitals’ interests, it clearly would serve the public interest.
Related
Kohler wrote an article for AHCJ about how he and Bernhard investigated medical errors and the lack of public information available to help consumers choose their health care providers: Public handicapped by lack of information on medical errors.
AHCJ asks FDA to re-evaluate embargo policy
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Public records
The Association of Health Care Journalists has sent a letter to FDA officials asking them to re-examine a policy that prohibits reporters from sharing embargoed materials with sources before the embargo lifts for the purpose of obtaining outside comment and context. 
As AHCJ notes, this highly unusual policy severely limits the ability of reporters to give readers the full story of a federal agency.
From the letter:
The restriction imposed on the medical-device announcement rewrote a longstanding compact between reporters and various public and scientific organizations. It also hampered or delayed reporters’ ability to fully inform the public about what the FDA is doing with taxpayers’ money. The early reports on the medical device approval process were brief and uninformative as a result.
We will be sure to update readers if AHCJ receives a response from the FDA.
Schwitzer’s year-end thoughts on health journalism
Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication, posted “10 trends in health care journalism going into 2010.” He looks back at the good, the bad, the ugly and the data, as well as looking toward the future and offering a few words of advice for health journalists.
Improving reporting on medical studies (#ahcj09)
“It is possible for good health journalists to provide spectacular stories on health,” said David Henry, CEO of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.
During the afternoon panel on “Statistics, Conclusions, Limitations: Reporting on Medical Studies” at the annual Association of Health Care Journalists meeting in Seattle both Henry and moderator Gary Schwitzer, concurred that most health and medical reporting is inaccurate, imbalanced and incomplete. “After three years and 750 stories reviewed there is still a ‘kid-in-the-candy-store projection of health’ in most health news,”Schwitzer said shortly before he launched into a dissection of several news stories.
Independent journalist Christy Fricks writes about the panel - links to the speakers’ presenations are included.
Do audiences understand health stories? (#ahcj09)
Health journalists understand some of the key elements audiences need to better understand health stories, but they also misunderstand the impact statistical information has on audience comprehension, according to a University of Missouri researcher.
Speaking at the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference, assistant professor Amanda Hinnant, Ph.D., said the results of a survey she and colleagues conducted showed that health journalists realize audiences will be more likely to understand health stories that include a human element, use graphics to illustrate important information and employ a conversational tone.
Kim Walsh-Childers, Ph.D., of the University of Florida writes about the panel - includes a link to Hinnant’s presenation.
Jobs’ letter too vague for meaningful reporting
Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed on Monday that he has a “hormone imbalance” that has caused his weight loss, something Apple followers have been discussing for some time. Jobs did not identify what caused the imbalance or give any further information about his diagnosis. He did say he is being treated and that the “remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward.” Jobs had surgery in the past to treat a an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor in the pancreas.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2007. Photo by acaben via Flickr.
Despite the dearth of information about Jobs’ condition, a number of news reports have speculated about the diagnosis, what could have caused it and more.
The Los Angeles Times spoke to medical experts who did not have access to Jobs’ health records. They said “a hormone imbalance in a pancreatic cancer survivor raises red flags about a possible recurrence.” They also theorized that his earlier surgery could have “left Jobs with a pancreas too small to produce the necessary enzymes.”
U.S. News & World Report quotes a neuroendocrinologist who says “the key elements in his statement … do not clearly point to a single diagnosis.” The medical experts in the article say his statement could refer to an endocrine disorder, that his condition could be an aftereffect of his pancreatic surgery or that it could be a new tumor.
The New York Times focuses mostly on the announcement’s effect on Apple’s stock price and future, though it does include speculation from a doctor who has no personal knowledge of Jobs’ medical history who also posits that his condition could be related to the pancreatic cancer surgery.
Bloomberg offers some details about the specific kind of pancreatic tumor Jobs had. It also says that, according to a doctor, the usual treatment is a Whipple procedure that “can lead to a digestive condition known as dumping syndrome, which causes people to lose weight.”
Scientific American talked to medical experts who agree that Jobs’ description of his condition is too vague to lead to a diagnosis. One professor did point out that it suggests a problem with the endocrine system but that “endocrine disorders are not generally considered to be ‘nutritional problems.’”
Similarly, Wired quotes several doctors who conclude Jobs has not released enough information for anyone to diagnose the problem. One doctor refused to comment and another said “armchair diagnoses” are not reasonable or productive.
In The Wall Street Journal, Clay Semenkovich, an endocrinologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who isn’t involved in Jobs’s treatment, said, “To an endocrinologist, the most vague statement you can ever make is the term ‘hormone imbalance.’”
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