Image by 401(K) 2012 via Flickr
Court documents are among the best sources for journalists covering the aggressive tactics tht hospitals and health systems use when seeking payment from patients who owe them money.
This advice comes from two Kaiser Health News journalists — senior correspondent Jay Hancock and data editor Elizabeth Lucas — who were Pulitzer Prize finalists this year for their reporting on predatory billing practices. Continue reading
By Dominique Cappronnier – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
About this time every year, the story of Dan Jennings, a man I got to know fairly well, always seems to come to mind. It was Sept. 14, 1999, when his odyssey as a patient zero of medical errors began, and became a wake-up call for me, a journalist, who realized how easy it is for lapses in simple safety protocols to ruin lives.
Jennings was 46, an educator for a San Diego company that sold devices to treat patients with sleep apnea. He traveled around the country teaching doctors about diagnosing and treating the disorder and demonstrating the correct use of continuous positive airway pressure devices, or C-PAPs. Continue reading
Kaiser Health News and NPR have been collaborating on a series called Bill of the Month. This piece by KHN’s Chad Terhune was one of the most memorable. Like many of these articles, it got results – the story got a ton of attention, outrage was generated and voila, the bill was lowered. It was cited by a bipartisan group of senators who introduced legislation curbing the practice of “surprise billing.”
Image: Kaiser Health News via Creative Commons
Arthur Allen’s piece, The ‘Frequent Flier’ Program That Grounded a Hospital’s Soaring Costs, ran recently as part of Politico’s What Works series. Allen leveraged his IT expertise to report out a broader piece on health information technology efforts in Texas.
Like many journalists in Washington, D.C., Arthur Allen knows his jargon.
As the editor for Politico’s eHealth, Allen is all too familiar with the trappings of Congress and the resulting litany of regulations and rules that follow any major health-related legislation, including a 2009 bill that aimed to encourage doctors and hospitals to invest in information technology. Continue reading
Health reporters should be asking the hospitals they cover plenty of in-depth questions about their star ratings and other collected quality measures. But they should not assume that those measures reflect the hospital’s true performance.
That was the takeaway from an engaging panel on hospital quality measures held at AHCJ’s Health Journalism 2017 conference in Orlando. Continue reading
