Webinar: Mining California Hospital Data for Great Stories

The live webinar is over, but you can find an archived version of the webinar on our ReportingonHealth YouTube site in the Reporting Tips and Tools playlist.

We were excited to partner with the Association of Health Care Journalists to offer a new webinar, Hiding in Plain Sight: Mining California Hospital Data for Great Stories, on September 13, 2011.

Charles Ornstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior reporter for ProPublica who has frequently presented for the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, will help you use this data to uncover great stories in your community. Here are some potential stories:

• Does your local hospital place more cardiac stents than others?

• Do more of its patients leave the emergency room without being seen?

• Does it have a high level of C-section births?

These questions and others are relatively easy to answer thanks to a data gold mine kept by the obscure California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. It doesn't matter if your hospital is public, nonprofit or for-profit, data on its patients and services are available online. Although the webinar will explore California data, journalists around the country can benefit too, as similar resources exist in other states.

Ornstein provides a step-by-step guide to using this information and offers story ideas to take home with you in the Webinar.