About Pia Christensen
Pia Christensen (@AHCJ_Pia) is the managing editor/online services for AHCJ. She manages the content and development of healthjournalism.org, coordinates social media efforts of AHCJ and assists with the editing and production of association guides, programs and newsletters.
AHCJ member Fred Trotter publicly unveiled a major data set last week that could reshape how journalists report on medical professionals. At the Strata Rx conference in San Francisco, Trotter showed off data he received from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that could show the relationships among physicians, as well as their referral patterns.
Fred Trotter has agreed to let AHCJ members have access to his development website so they can look up specific doctors. To access it,
click here and login to the AHCJ site.
Trotter plans to release the full data set and the search tool to the public at a later date (see below). Trotter answered some questions from AHCJ President Charles Ornstein:
Q. Tell us about the data set you just unveiled.
A. This is the social graph of medicine. It is the referral patterns for most of the doctors, hospitals and labs in the country, based on a FOIA request for Medicare data. For any given physician in the United States, there is a good chance that this data set reveals what other doctors, hospitals and labs they typically work with.
Q. How could it be useful for journalists?
A. Using the data, journalists will be able to figure out “who to gumshoe” for health care stories.
Some ideas:
● You have a “bad doctor” story. This works for crime, fraud, etc. Who was referring patients to that doctor, what hospital was he or she working with? At the least, the people you identify would be interesting to interview. At worst, these people may be co-conspirators.
● Who are the best doctors in your city? Who is the best local resource to interview about cardiology, neurology, etc. Specialists who have lots of inbound referrals from different doctors implicitly have the respect of other doctors in the community.
● By grouping doctors by hospital referrals, it will be possible to see which ones are “aligned” with different hospitals. It is also possible to measure how exclusive this affiliation is. Most local health care reporters have an intuition of how the local health care market operates, but this will provide specific details.
● By working with data scientists we can make lots and lots of pretty diagrams to support journalistic assertions. Continue reading →
