Felice Freyer, veteran medical writer at the Providence Journal and Association of Health Care Journalists board member, is surveying reporters about how state and local agencies are releasing, or refusing to release, basic demographic information (not names) about people who have died from H1N1/swine flu.
We have a guest blogger today: Dan Lee, former Riverside Press-Enterprise reporter and current student at the Annenberg School for Communication, is working for the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships and ReportingonHealth.
By Daniel Lee
Reporters covering the health care reform debate have failed to adequately investigate the claims made by both Democratic and Republican leaders and could do more to focus on its local impacts, experts said Wednesday.
Pia Christensen of the Association of Health Care Journalists responded to an earlier blog post that I had essentially ignored some good reporting on the Public Citizen report about how hospitals are failing in a very big way to report bad doctors to the National Practitioner Data Bank. She cited three stories, saying:
Trudy Lieberman is the president of The Association of Health Care Journalists board of directors, and she is the director of the health and medicine reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York. Ms. Lieberman is also a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review, and a contributor to The Nation. Below is her blog post on how health care reporting is possible - and necessary!
New York state has an interesting job that is foreign to most other states, the office of the Medicaid Inspector General. Lucky for health writers, the Inspector General there, James G. Sheehan, believes not only in rooting out people who are ripping off taxpayers, but in sharing his techniques and tactics with reporters.
Gary Schwitzer is the professor that health reporters fear. With the creation of HealthNewsReview, he has brought back nightmares of having your work marked up in red and posted on a corkboard for everyone to see.
John Carey, a 20-year veteran at BusinessWeek, wrote a story that set the pharmaceutical world on its ear in January 2008. Titled "Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?," the article systematically broke down the many myths behind the so-called "miracle cure" for heart disease: statins. Carey's story won an award from the Association of Health Care Journalists at its conference in Seattle.
Those of us lucky enough to attend New York Medicaid Inspector General Jim Sheehan's talk Saturday at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference in Seattle heard him make reference to Dr. Jayam Krishna-Iyer. I was curious about the back story. Here it is:
A doctor who can't prescribe drugs is like a fish that can't swim. It's usually a sign that something is wrong.
