Genetic testing company blames press coverage for bankruptcy filing

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Joseph Burns

About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health insurance. He welcomes questions and suggestions on insurance resources and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

Charles Piller

Proove Biosciences, a genetic testing company in Irvine, Calif., was placed into court-ordered receivership at the end of August for “restructuring and asset sale.” Proove’s founder and former CEO Brian Meshkin has blamed the company’s financial problems on investigative articles that Charles Piller, West Coast editor for Stat, wrote about the company’s lead product over the last several months, according to Pillar’s coverage of the receivership proceedings.

Meshkin, who called Piller’s reporting about Proove “erroneous and damaging.” He claimed that stories were based on false allegations from disgruntled employees, ignoring that Piller also had quoted genetic testing experts skeptical of the scientific claims behind the Proove Opioid Risk test. Proove has marketed the test as a way for doctors to predict a patient’s likelihood of becoming addicted to opioids. Continue reading →

Lessons from Covered California: Marketing matters

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Joanne Kenen

About Joanne Kenen

Joanne Kenen, (@JoanneKenen) the health editor at Politico, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform and curates related material at healthjournalism.org. She welcomes questions and suggestions on health reform resources and tip sheets at joanne@healthjournalism.org. Follow her on Facebook.

At 3 pm ET on Thursday, Oct. 12, Victoria Colliver of Politico will lead a conversation with Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, about lessons learned during the first years of enrollment in the ACA exchange. They’ll also discuss how the exchange is adapting to the changed political climate for health care in the Trump administration.

HHS recently announced that it would slash marketing, advertising, and signup assistance for the 2018 signup season, which begins Nov. 1. That the administration was reducing outreach should not have been a surprise, given that as soon as President Trump took office, his HHS leadership team pulled back on advertising and marketing during the critical final days of the 2017 signup season.

Spending on marketing and advertising for the 2018 plan year will drop from $100 million spent on 2017 sign-ups to $10 million. Funding for consumer helpers called “navigators” will be cut 40 percent – from $62.5 million for 2017 to $36.8 million for the coming season. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency responsible for overseeing the ACA, says navigators were falling short of their sign-up targets and wasting money and asserted that “the new funding formula will ensure accountability within the Navigator program.” (For more on the administration policy, see in this Vox story.) Continue reading →

Some do’s and don’ts when interviewing people with disabilities

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Tara Haelle

About Tara Haelle

Tara Haelle (@TaraHaelle) is AHCJ's medical studies core topic leader, guiding journalists through the jargon-filled shorthand of science and research and enabling them to translate the evidence into accurate information.

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As I write this blog post, I’m scheduled to interview two individuals for a story based on a study about autism and its link to an increased risk of certain comorbidities. One person is an autistic adult, and the other is the parent of an adolescent diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.

At this point in my career, I have spoken with many autistic individuals and count several among my friends, but before I had known anyone on the autism spectrum, I likely would have felt a bit of initial uneasiness: Is there anything I should or shouldn’t say or do? Will they communicate in ways I am familiar with? Will they understand how I am trying to communicate? Continue reading →

Officials air concerns about potential for worse flu season

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Bara Vaida

About Bara Vaida

Bara Vaida (@barav) is AHCJ's core topic leader on infectious diseases. An independent journalist, she has written extensively about health policy and infectious diseases. Her work has appeared in outlets that include the National Journal, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg News, McClatchy News Service, MSNBC, NPR, Politico and The Washington Post.

Public health officials have warned over the past several weeks the U.S. flu season this year may be worse than usual following a tough flu season in Australia.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN that “in general, we get in our season what the Southern Hemisphere got in the season immediately preceding us and an intelligent guess” is that North America will most likely have a bad flu season.

Further, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, influenza chief at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the Associated Press that: “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but there’s a chance we could have a season similar to Australia.” Continue reading →

Vaida to lead newest AHCJ core topic effort: infectious diseases

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Pia Christensen

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 AHCJ's social media efforts and edits and manages production of association guides, programs and newsletters.

Bara Vaida

Bara Vaida, an independent journalist based in Washington, D.C., will lead AHCJ’s newest core topic on infectious diseases.

She will be guiding AHCJ members to the resources they need to cover the many aspects of covering infectious diseases through blog posts, tip sheets, articles and other material. The core topic area of healthjournalism.org will feature a glossary, a more lengthy explanation of key concepts, shared wisdom from other reporters, story ideas and more. Continue reading →