Tag Archives: ethics

Conflicts of interest can be harder to detect when reporting on psychosocial research

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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.

Photo: Joe Houghton via Flickr

Journals require authors to disclose any possible financial conflicts of interest (COIs) because research has shown links between industry funding and study outcomes. Funding from pharmaceutical or medical device companies is relatively straightforward to track, but financial COIs in psychosocial research can be more complex and underreported. Nonetheless, they are no less important to disclose, argue Ioana-Alina Cristea, Ph.D., and John P. A. Ioannidis, M.D., DSc, in a JAMA Psychiatry commentary earlier this year. Continue reading →

Why we should use caution when reporting on AI in medicine

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Rebecca Vesely

About Rebecca Vesely

Rebecca Vesely is AHCJ's topic leader on health information technology and a freelance writer. She has written about health, science and medicine for AFP, the Bay Area News Group, Modern Healthcare, Wired, Scientific American online and many other news outlets.

Photo: Roger Mommaerts via Flickr

Hospitals and health systems are jumping into artificial intelligence (AI) in an effort to help physicians better analyze images and other clinical data. But reporters should be careful about overstating the value that these new tools can bring to clinical decision-making.

Radiology is the medical specialty probably most associated with AI today because of the tantalizing possibility that computers could help radiologists read images more quickly, enabling earlier diagnoses and treatment.

Continue reading →

In covering Ebola outbreak this time, some lessons to remember

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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.

Photo: NIAID via Flickr

Ebola is back in the news again with the evolving outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Could the virus come to the United States again?

Given that every disease is now just a plane ride away it certainly could, although the odds are low. Global health workers are responding to the outbreak aggressively.

The unfolding events in the DRC however, are a reminder that reporters – like public health officials – should be prepared for the next infectious disease threat. Continue reading →

AHCJ strengthens its ethics rules on conference funding

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Felice J. Freyer

About Felice J. Freyer

Felice J. Freyer is AHCJ's vice president, chair of the organization's Right to Know Committee and a member of the association's Finance and Development Committee. She is a health care reporter for The Boston Globe.

AHCJ has strengthened its ethical standards on funding for the annual conference, enhancing the ethics code established at our inception 20 years ago to guard against undue influence by outside groups or the perception of such influence.

You can find evidence of the recent changes in the conference program and registration form: Continue reading →

Doctors talk about ethical decisions, surgery on conjoined twins

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Gideon Gil

About Gideon Gil

Gideon Gil (@GideonGil) is a managing editor of Stat, treasurer of AHCJ and chair of AHCJ's Finance and Development Committee. He was the health and science editor at The Boston Globe for a decade and a medical reporter and an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., for 19 years, and had a hand in three Pulitzer Prizes.

Photo: Gideon Gil/StatDr. Oscar J. Benavidez (left), Dr. Allan M. Goldstein and other doctors at MassGeneral Hospital for Children used a 3-D model of the twins’ anatomy during surgery to separate them.

The twin girls were joined at the abdomen and pelvis. They had two heads and four arms, but three legs. They had two hearts, but shared a liver, a bladder, and other organs. One was active, the other subdued and growing weaker.

Some 20 hospitals had said they couldn’t help the girls, who had been born nearly two years earlier in a village in Africa. But Dr. Allan M. Goldstein, surgeon-in-chief at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, said yes, they would consider operating to separate the twins. Continue reading →

Behind the investigation into former HHS secretary’s travels

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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.

A few months ago, two of our Politico health reporters Dan Diamond and Rachana Pradhan, told me they had heard that Tom Price, then the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, had been traveling on chartered aircraft.

But they had to prove it. And they had to prove it meticulously, in a way that HHS could not dispute. Continue reading →