Provide names of other journalists involved.
Serena Stockwell, Editor
List date(s) this work was published or aired.
25-Apr-11
Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Health policy is driving two strong trends that affect hospitals and physicians: the need to be transparent about quality of care provided and the growing demand for quality to be measured by outcomes, rather than processes. This story documents how a few cancer care institutions are beginning to report outcomes, such as five-year survival statistics for a given cancer type. However, there is no consensus on what cancer care outcomes are meaningful, and since there are no comparative data for alternative care sites, the outcomes data being reported are basically useless for patient decision-making. To illuminate how sophisticated outcomes reporting can be, the story also briefly describes the state of diabetes outcomes reporting in Minnesota. In a sidebar, a well-known biostatistician explains another reason that cancer care outcome data are not reliable: Tumors are not staged/categorized uniformly.
Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
Since this story is about online outcomes reporting, I reviewed all the outcome reports for cancer centers that I could find. The review of those sites is what crystallized the main point of the article: The outcomes being reported are not useful to consumers.
Explain types of human sources used.
• Chairman of Association of Community Cancer Centers • Top executives at cancer centers that are reporting outcomes • Hospital quality officers • MD Anderson biostatistician
Results:
No specific results in that sense, but the article was very popular on the Oncology Times website, and spent several weeks as both the Most Viewed and Most Emailed article on the site.
Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
No corrections or clarifications requested.
Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
Be prepared for every hospital to claim that their approach to outcomes reporting is best and that others are flawed. Also, hospital leaders will make the case that they are reporting outcomes in the name of transparency (which is somewhat/maybe true) and to help consumers; but the way they frame their data suggests that it is mostly for marketing purposes.