Jordan Rau covers health care quality and costs. These stories examined differences among medical providers on costs and quality around the country. The stories all used data in novel or newsworthy ways. The hospital report card story found that that the growth of private efforts to rate the quality of hospitals has led to often contradictory conclusions and at times created unnecessary consumer confusion. The story also showed that many of these private rating report cards are built on economic models in which the rating groups charges licensing fees to hospitals that want to use their awards in marketing. The Columbia Journalism Review gave the hospital rating story a laurel, writing that it “at last untangles the proliferating hospital ratings schemes that may do more to confuse patients than enlighten them.” The post-acute spending story showed that Medicare spends significantly more on care provided to patients who have left the hospital in some regions on the country than in others and explained how these variations in spending are among the government’s chief reform targets to reduce the cost of care without harming patients. The Medicare quality payment story analyzed the impact of the financial incentives in the second year of this government program, finding that more hospitals were penalized than given bonuses. The Medicare hip and knee replacement outcomes story looked at which hospitals performed well or poorly in providing one of the most common elective procedures. Those latter three stories represented the first journalistic use of new government data.
