How I did it

Learn from these journalists how they have covered various aspects of health care related to reform. They provide valuable tips and sources and explain how they got past the challenges to explain the complex world of health reform to their audiences.

Reporter finds identifying health policy influencers is not a simple task

November 2019
Paige Winfield Cunningham, a national health care reporter for the Washington Post and the author of the Post’s daily health policy newsletter, explains just what it took to find out who is helping the Democratic candidates devise their health reform plans – and why it was harder than you might expect.

She persisted because she was convinced that a behind-the-scenes look at the health policy influencers would be deeply interesting – particularly because the Democratic primary has been marked by differences over how to bring the country to universal health coverage.

Decoding upcoding: Reporter finds manipulation of patient condition severity in ER bills 

July 2019
Jenny Deam, who specializes in reporting on the business of health at the Houston Chronicle, has been digging into health care costs – and she’s found a trove of information in billing codes. When she saw that what insurers were paying for ER charges was going up significantly even though the overall number of insured patient visits was remaining steady, she suspected that the severity of the patient conditions was being “upcoded” which meant more revenue to the hospital.

Here are her tips on how you can obtain bills, and understand facility fees and “upcoding.”

Reporters find dire problems with Texas’ Medicaid system

June 2019
This year’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, went to two reporters at the Dallas Morning News who investigated the Texas Medicaid system.

David McSwane and Andrew Chavez spoke to the Shorenstein’s Journalist’s Resource about their series Pain & Profit.” We’re reprinting it, with their permission, as a “How I Did It” piece.

Chronicling America’s uninsured and their gut-wrenching decisions 

February 2019
The people with the most at stake in America’s health-care debate often have the smallest voice in it.

A year ago, John Tozzi's editor came to him with an assignment intended to change that: Find people who had decided they could no longer afford medical insurance. Follow them for a year. And show readers how the affordability crisis in U.S. health care shaped their lives.

Reporting on Arkansas Medicaid work requirements – and their fallout

January 2019
Benjamin Hardy spent most of 2018 mining a fairly narrow vein of health policy: Arkansas’s first-of-its-kind work requirement for certain Medicaid expansion beneficiaries. He wrote three big stories about the work rule and related topics, along with many smaller ones. His initial plan for the year was to survey Arkansas’s Medicaid program more broadly, not just the work requirement. But he soon found that this particular policy and the human stories it generated were so complex — and so poorly understood — that it became his main health care beat.

Reporting on surprise medical bills

October 2018
Kaiser Health News and NPR have been collaborating on a series called Bill of the Month – including a particularly powerful  piece by KHN’s Chad Terhune about an insured high school teacher hit with a $108,951 bill after a heart attack at age 44.

In this How I Did It essay, Terhune gives many detailed and specific hints on how to identify, verify, and report on these bills. 

Reporter examines causes of infant mortality in Indiana

Giles Bruce

June 2018
Way too many babies die in Indiana. In 2017, 623 children in the state died before reaching their first birthdays. Indiana has the eighth-highest infant mortality rate in the United States, with 7.5 deaths per 1,000 live births. Giles Bruce explored the reasons behind that statistic in his six-part series, "What's Killing Indiana's Infants," for The Northwest Indiana Times.

Nonprofits, tax breaks and getting hospitals to keep people out

Jay Hancock

March 2018
Kaiser Health News and Capital News Service have been publishing a series called “Baltimore’s Other Divide” – the state of health in a city which has vast disparities in health status, and some of the country’s best known hospitals. The latest installment, by Jay Hancock, Rachel Bluth and Daniel Trielli, focuses on asthma “hot spots.” Drawing on rich hospital data, they identified the worst places for asthma in the city – ZIP code 21223. People there, like 9-year-old Keyonta Parnell, go the emergency room more often, and call 911 more often. The hospitals know that. But it’s not in their financial interest to fix it.

Traveling to Tennessee for a possible preview of health insurance markets

Erin Mershon

January 2018
During her yearlong AHCJ Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance, Erin Mershon reported several feature stories on the impact of the Affordable Care Act in rural areas, including this story on Tennessee Farm Bureau Insurance – an established health plan that is exempt from Affordable Care Act rules and standards. It gives some hints about what health insurance could look like under President Donald Trump’s executive order – a system that could lead to two parallel insurance markets – one where plans follow ACA rules and accept everyone, and one where the plans may be more affordable for people who are healthy but may not be available to those who are not.

Behind the investigation into former HHS secretary's travels

Dan Diamond

Rachana Pradhan

November 2017
It began with a casual conversation with a source – and ended with Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price’s resignation. The two Politico health reporters who broke the story described their investigation into his taxpayer-funded travels in a Politico Magazine piece. Joanne Kenen, AHCJ's health reform core topic leader and the pair's editor at Politico, recounts how they found and pursued the story.

ACA project shows how media outlets can partner to produce significant reporting in their region

April 2017
The House repeal bill may have failed, but long-run risks to coverage – through later congressional or administrative action ... or inaction – remain.  This “how I did it’ essay describes how seven public radio stations collaborated to get a sense of how the loss of coverage would affect their communities, already hard hit by the heroin crisis and all the stresses and strains that rural hospitals and clinics already experience.

Kentucky-based health reporter Mary Meehan, part of the Ohio Valley ReSource collaborative, describes it.

In a state that spurned Medicaid expansion, the recently unemployed fall through the cracks

March 2017
Houston Chronicle reporter Jenny Deam last year wrote an in-depth story about how a mill is closing in a Texas town cost people not only their livelihood but also their health coverage. And because the mill was so crucial to the Cuero economy, that closure had ripple effects that overshadowed the beleaguered community.

Deam now has written a “How I Did It’ story for AHCJ about how she uncovered the story. The project enabled her to provide an example of how the politics of the Affordable Care Act had made it impossible for unemployed mill workers in a “bright red corner of a red state” to obtain affordable coverage.

How leveraging a study’s raw data can help kick up your coverage a notch

Markian Hawryluk

September 2016
Each week my email inbox is swamped with press releases about hundreds of new medical studies. The ones that catch my eye are generally those that I can build on in some way to make them more meaningful for my readers at the Bend Bulletin in Oregon. And that’s precisely what happened this summer with our coverage of a study on pharmacy access from one our state’s universities.

The study was conducted by researchers at Oregon State University. But more importantly for me, the researchers used Oregon-specific data to reach their conclusions. I knew I could build on the data for a story that meant more to my readers, and link it to larger trends in health care.

There’s not one reason why co-ops are failing; there are dozens

Adam Cancryn

March 2016
In March 2014, I scored an interview with the chief executive of a new health insurer called Maine Community Health Options.

The interview wasn't much of a "get" by any standard. MCHO was a little-known health plan that sold coverage to customers on Maine's state exchange. But it was exciting to me for one reason: MCHO was a consumer-oriented and operated plan, part of the first generation of nonprofit health insurers created by the Affordable Care Act and funded by taxpayers.

The co-op program, which consisted of 23 startups, offered an alternative to buying coverage from the traditional big insurance companies. The individual co-ops would ideally be more community-focused, friendlier and more accessible to the average consumer, and maybe even cheaper.

Keeping longterm coverage fresh: Collaborating with multimedia to show tale of Medicaid expansion

Jeffrey Young

February 2016
When you write about the same subject all the time, thinking up new ways to engage readers on ongoing issues can be difficult. That's especially true with slow-moving stories you cover iteratively over a period of months and years, such as the advancement of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion.

Over the past three-plus years, Jeffrey Young has written numerous stories about the policy, political, economic, and human interest aspects of Medicaid expansion for The Huffington Post.  The stories tended to focus narrowly on one or a few states, or broadly on the overarching debate. Because the Medicaid expansion is such a crucial part of the ACA – and in particular the dramatic reduction in the uninsured rate – he wanted to come up with a new method of presenting this information that both would appeal to those who'd been following the story and attract interest from those who hadn't.

Local stories add color to data-driven reporting on hospital financial performance

January 2016
Not-for-profit hospitals are required give back to their communities to justify their tax exempt status. Those efforts usually take the form of providing charity care to the uninsured or subsidizing the training of new doctors.

A number of health policy researchers and politicians have been putting hospital community benefit spending under the microscope. There are even examples of municipalities that have stripped hospitals of their tax-exempt status when they determined that these providers were operating like for-profit entities.

During Beth Kutscher's 2015 AHCJ Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance, she looked at the impact Medicaid expansion had on hospital finances. And she spent some time reporting on how not-for-profit hospitals have to give back to their communities to justify their tax exempt status. See what she found.

Making an investigative piece about ‘preventable harm’ accessible to readers

August 2015
Sarah Kliff's story,“Do No Harm,” began with a simple question.

She is one of AHCJ's 2015 Reporting Fellows on Health Care Performance and, while writing a series on fatal medical errors, she wanted to understand why preventable harm happens. Why do errors that we know how to stop persist?

Her attempt to answer that question became one of the largest projects she's undertaken as a journalist. “Do No Harm,” published on Vox, took about four months to research, report, and write. Kliff learned a lot about how to manage big projects — and find good sources for long narratives. Here she shares few lessons she took away from the experience.

Spotlighting sepsis: How one journalist reported on 'dirty little hospital horror'

July 2015
As senior quality editor for HealthLeaders Media, Cheryl Clark wrote more than 1,300 stories about hospitals' efforts to improve quality and safety and related issues. The story she wrote for the June 2014 issue of HealthLeaders, about how U.S. hospitals are improving recognition and treatment of sepsis — which is diagnosed in 750,000 patients a year and kills 40 percent — won the 2015 National Institute of Health Care Management prize in the trade print category.

Rates of sepsis seemed to be one more dirty little hospital horror to explore, one that the Joint Commission said cost hospitals about $16.7 billion annually. Yet hospitals' efforts to tackle it seemed hidden behind improvement initiatives attracting more attention, such as reducing hospital-acquired infections, and preventable readmissions, lowering emergency room wait times and raising patient experience scores.

Here, she explains how she did her reporting, despite a lack of data and sources who didn't want to talk.

Covering the ACA state subsidy issue

Lauren Sausser

June 2015
Lauren Sausser of The Post and Courier in South Carolina was surprised by an email from a reader asking her to write more about Medicaid expansion in South Carolina – specifically, this state’s refusal to expand the low-income health insurance program under the Affordable Care Act.

This year, health insurance subsidies have played a much more prominent role in The Post and Courier’s health care coverage. Like other news outlets, her newspaper is waiting to find out what the Supreme Court decides in King v. Burwell. If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, subsidies will end in states using the federal exchange.

In South Carolina, a King victory would mean that coverage will become unaffordable for an estimated 200,000 people who have purchased subsidized policies through the federal insurance marketplace. It’s been a big story. Meanwhile, Medicaid expansion, with a few exceptions, is relatively stagnant here.

Following doctors on the path to primary care

January 2015
When I started following a group of residents in a primary care training program, I expected to produce a lively radio documentary on idealistic young doctors who are bucking the trend against frontline medicine. After all, pay and prestige is much lower in primary care than specialties, while workload and stress is generally higher. It must take a special kind of person to go into the field anyway.

To be sure, they were all lovely people, compassionate and clearly committed to medicine. But by the end of my year of reporting, two out of the three had changed their minds about primary care, deciding instead on more lucrative specialties. Their decisions may have been disappointing for the field, but they did make for a more compelling story. I was able to use their personal dilemmas, unfolding in real time, to illustrate the crisis in primary care.

I had help in doing this – a year-long fellowship from the Association of Health Care Journalists that paid for travel expenses and some production help. But I believe this kind of long-term project is do-able without a fellowship, as long as you have a forward-thinking editor and the patience to let the story reveal itself slowly.

Reporting on how, why hospital superusers account for bulk of health-care spending     

January 2015
Tim Darragh, when he was with The Morning Call, of Allentown, Pa., reported and wrote a four-day series of stories about a local effort to find ways to improve care and individual health while reducing expenditures for so-called “super-utilizers.” These patients constantly use expensive emergency departments for their health care needs – in many cases, poorly controlled chronic and mental health illnesses, coupled with social isolation, unhealthy living environments and poverty.

Your community might not have a federally-funded pilot program to address super-utilizers as Allentown has. But your community has superusers and it has similarities with Allentown that you can explore in your own reporting. Read about how Darragh approached the reporting and key issues he found.

Putting a human face on Maryland's unique all-payer system

December 2014
Maryland is the only state with an “all-payer” hospital system – a system in which every health plan and every payer pay about the same rate to a given hospital for a given procedure or treatment. That includes Medicare, under a waiver from the federal government.  A commission sets the costs and there’s a lot less cost-shifting in the system if everyone is playing by the same rules.

I have been fascinated with Maryland’s Medicare waiver for a little more than two and a half years. That’s when the Baltimore Business Journal hired me to write about health care and I first learned about the policy that is the lifeblood of Maryland’s $15 billion hospital industry.

Covering the potential effects of hospital consolidation in Yakima, Wash.

October 2014
When my editor and I first discussed the idea of a hospital consolidation project, I felt my eyes glaze over at the thought of all the spreadsheets and 990 forms I would have to sift through. Consolidation is a largely financial decision, so I assumed that numbers would provide the driving force for the story.

Instead, I found that while the numbers do add weight to hospitals’ claims of desperation, the bulk of the story lay elsewhere.

Here’s the gist of it: In Yakima, Wash., the one remaining independent, nonprofit community hospital announced a year ago that it’s looking for someone to partner with to stave off financial uncertainty in the future. It reached out to several larger Seattle organizations, but only one is still engaged in talks.

Building transparency in health care costs

August 2014
Anybody who has ever built software knows how tricky it can be (hello, HealthCare.gov!).

So what’s it like to build software when the partners are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Bialystok, Kiev and Tahiti and you’re journalists and developers working against a fierce deadline?

Extensive document requests yield true cost of Illinois’ PR campaign for insurance coverage

July 2014
Carla K. Johnson, an AHCJ board member and Chicago-based Associated Press medical writer, describes the steps and documents requests that helped her dive deeply into the deals and contracts behind the state of Illinois’s multimillion dollar promotional campaign for the Affordable Care Act.

Read her stories and see the highlights of the documents she amassed and shared using Document Cloud.

Undocumented immigrants struggle for access to health care

June 2014
When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, there was a lot of talk about who would be covered under the legislation. Medicaid would expand in some states and more individuals would have private insurance coverage. But there were a few groups that were exempt from the requirement to purchase insurance including Indian tribal members, individuals eligible to opt out because of religious beliefs, and undocumented immigrants.

In fact, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for both of the main provisions of the law meant to extend coverage to 32 million Americans, the Medicaid expansion and the state insurance exchanges. Tammy Worth investigated how the law would affect care for this population as well as the providers who treat them.

Reporting on the ACA in rural Kentucky

June 2014
Kentucky received national attention when it became the only Southern state to fully embrace the Affordable Care Act by creating its own health insurance exchange and expanding Medicaid to cover hundreds of thousands more residents.

But, in impoverished rural areas that stood to gain the most from the greater access to care that the ACA promised, many residents remained fiercely opposed to the law and the president who pushed it.

Against this backdrop, a team from USA Today and The Courier-Journal in Louisville decided to launch an in-depth examination of how the law is beginning to play out in Appalachian Kentucky. Courier-Journal medical writer Laura Ungar shares how they did it. 

Making sure patients aren't surprised by hidden hospital fees

May 2014
Daniel Chang wrote a piece for The Miami Herald on some of the hidden hospital fees that can take patients by surprise – and which insurers don’t necessarily cover.

These hidden fees are coming about because hospital executives have been  preparing their institutions for payment reforms  they see coming as a result of the Affordable Care Act – particularly the way the law shifts financial risk away from patients, private insurers and government payers, and to the caregivers themselves, namely hospitals, physicians and other providers.

Here's what Chang learned while reporting this story.

Drilling down into numbers uncovers Marketplace glitch

April 2014
Ten days before the (expected) close of open enrollment, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the federal exchange's window-shopping tool – the one that the administration encourages everyone to check before applying for Marketplace insurance – was using the wrong year's poverty-level guidelines. Neither the Obama administration nor any health-care consultants or policy experts that reporter Don Sapatkin could find had noticed it and the site was corrected within hours after the story was posted.

In theory, almost anyone going on the site got slightly incorrect information for 35 days. Most seriously affected, however, were people just above the poverty line in states that have not expanded Medicaid. When they put their information into the tool, it responded: “Not eligible for help paying for coverage.” Many of them may have given up right there and not submitted the actual applications (which were using the correct poverty stats and were assessed correctly). It’s impossible to tell from the notification letter whether errors were made.

Use state public records laws to cover these aspects of health exchanges  

March 2014
Colorado health reporter Katie Kerwin McCrimmon is a relative newcomer to AHCJ and she shared some of her experiences in covering Colorado’s state health exchange on AHCJ’s electronic discussion list recently.

She used the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) “to pry information out of our exchange since I dealt with obstructive PR folks and exchange managers for most of 2013.”

Not all states have the same records laws. Not all the states have structured the exchange governance in the same way. And of course, not all the states are running their own exchanges. But her experiences in Colorado are still instructive in trying to get information released.

Finding wide variations in health reform implementation between states

February 2014
Modern Healthcare reporter Beth Kutscher watched the differences in Affordable Care Act implementation in her state of Tennessee and neighboring Kentucky, where the state's online health marketplace was enrolling about 1,000 people a day. Tennessee was a stark contrast. The state had defaulted to the federal exchange, which meant that even if consumers – and especially younger, healthier individuals who help dilute the risk pool for insurers – had considered buying a plan, there was a good chance they’d log off HealthCare.gov in frustration and not return. She began to think about what it meant for the hospitals in the two states – and she decided to find out. Here’s how she got her story. 

Finding compelling stories about a fraying safety net in a fast-changing insurance marketplace

January 2014 
Jim Doyle, who covers the health care industry for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has been working on an ongoing multi-part series on health care access and the fraying safety net. What he found when he traveled around rural parts of Missouri and Arkansas is that, while the Affordable Care Act will bring changes in the health insurance marketplace to these area, it only goes so far in helping the poor get access to care. “If you report on rural hospitals, you'll soon recognize the parallels between the health care disparities the poor face in rural areas and in the inner cities and that health insurance reform only goes so far, causing many safety-net organizations to struggle,” he writes. Of particular interest to health care journalists is Doyle’s impressive list of resources he uses to inform his reporting and his willingness to tap a wide variety of sources for his work.

Delving into cost reports reveals financial health of hospitals, amount of charity care they provide

December 2013
Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit investigative journalism team, recently published a two-part series on hospitals based on financial data obtained for every hospital in the state. The series revealed that between half and three-fourths of small general hospitals in Oklahoma were losing money, and that hospitals had spent only small fractions of their net patient revenues on charity care.

Reporter Clifton Adcock explains how he got the data, with some specific tips on how to find alternative sources for data when government officials are uncooperative and how to make sense of daunting hospital cost reports.

Reporter looks at why, how clinic banned drug reps and their samples

October 2013
Six years ago, a clinic in Oregon made the decision to ban representatives from the pharmaceutical companies. The doctors and staff say goodbye to free samples of expensive drugs, lavish lunches, pens, notebooks, mugs, toys for children and other "benefits."

Markian Hawryluk, a health reporter with The Bend (Ore.) Bulletin, picked up on a recent journal article about the transformation and used that as his inspiration to write about how the clinic made its decision and how it changed the way doctors there practice medicine, as well as how the move impacted the community.

As data is collected under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a part of the Affordable Care Act that will require pharmaceutical companies to disclose the money and gifts given to physicians, reporters may start noting similar changes in their area.

Poor oversight of Medicaid managed care programs takes toll on patients

August 2013
When Kaiser Health News hired Jenni Bergal as a freelance contractor, she was given only one assignment: Write about Medicaid managed care. It’s an important topic, with millions more people expected to be enrolled as Medicaid expands under the Affordable Care Act starting next year.

She set out to find out how well the states are overseeing and monitoring the quality of care provided by the managed care plans they contract with, and how states compare with each other. In this article for AHCJ, she explains the challenges in doing so. She also reminds us that even policy stories are about people and shows us how problems in one state's managed care program have affected its residents.

Reporter finds surprising stance on smokers’ surcharge

August 2013
Stephanie O’Neill, a health care reporter for Southern California Public Radio, tells the back story of her report on why California – a state that has taken the lead in combatting tobacco – had second thoughts about whether to charge smokers higher insurance premiums as permitted under the Affordable Care Act. It’s a topic you can explore with legislators, insurers and public health advocates in your state.

Covering health reform's effect on addiction treatment

June 2013
Carla K. Johnson, an Associated Press medical writer and AHCJ board member, recently did an insightful piece on how the coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act would affect treatment for substance abuse and addiction.

She analyzed several sets of federal data to find the current capacity of the addiction treatment system and the number of possible new patients. Armed with the data, she then did another round of interviews with addicts, their families and their treatment providers.

Here she shares how she got her story – and provides tips and sources that can help you explore this topic in your own community.

Readmissions, the drug store and a sleep-deprived patient

April 2013
Colorado Public Radio's Eric Whitney recently reported on a new program involving Walgreens pharmacists that is intended to help hospitals reduce readmission rates. It seemed like a straightforward story about improving patient care and new business opportunities created by the Affordable Care Act.

Not so straightforward was the improvising Whitney had to do when things started going awry. He writes about the challenges of putting together a piece for radio, what went wrong and how he was able to pull it all together.

As Whitney writes, there are innovative strategies being tried across the country. Broad reporting on the topic will help audiences better understand one place where health care is failing, and why solutions aren’t always simple.

Race to electronic health records may come with a price

December 2012
Amid all the enthusiasm over increasing the use of information technology in health, politicians and policy makers paid little attention to the implications of a gold rush sparked when billions of taxpayers’ dollars suddenly came up for grabs. Hundreds of medical technology companies scrambled to sell digital systems — often by promising doctors and hospitals they could boost revenues by billing higher rates to Medicare and other health insurers.

The fallout from those early decisions could be coming back to haunt taxpayers, according to a three-part investigative series from the Center for Public Integrity. The series documented that thousands of medical professionals steadily billed Medicare for more complex and costly health care over the past decade — adding $11 billion or more to their fees — despite little evidence elderly patients required more treatment.

Reporter Fred Schulte explains how the project came about, how the Center did its reporting and provides plenty of background on medical coding, Medicare billing and the potential fallout as health care providers install and use electronic systems.

Reporters can use hospital readmission data to explore key issues

September 2012
The Affordable Care Act honed in on hospital readmissions because many health policy experts believe they’re symptomatic of the broad dysfunction of the health care system where providers don’t work with each other as patients pass from one setting, like a hospital, to another, like a primary doctor’s oversight or a nursing home.

Readmissions penalties that begin in October are intended to prod hospitals to start making sure patients get the care they need after they walk out the door. It’s a nice window into many of the most important issues in health care, including cost, access and disparities.

Jordan Rau, of Kaiser Health News, explains the penalties, the readmission data and offers tips on how to use the data to write about hospitals with specificity and authority.

Health care blessing or blueprint for a scandal?

July 2012
The risks and benefits – both physical and fiscal – of cancer screening have become a burning topic, and have been absorbed into the endless political controversies surrounding the health reform law.

Are certain tests "essential benefits" or a boondoggle that can actually do more harm than good? And if they are deemed "unessential," then someone who disagrees inevitably uses the "R" word (rationing.)

We asked Reuters Health reporter Frederik Joelving to share how he reported on a high-profile doctor touting a new screening test. The test may be quicker and cheaper than the standard procedure, but hasn’t been proven to help anyone.

N.C. hospitals make big money while suing vulnerable patients for rising costs of care

July 2012
In 2009, as the debate about health care reform picked up steam in Washington, D.C., an editor at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., posed a question: Should the newspaper take a deep look at the cost of health care?

A series of interviews and some database work led to a memo directing the coverage to concentrate on hospitals and a key decision: Ask colleagues at The Charlotte Observer to join. North Carolina's two biggest hospital systems were based in Charlotte. The biggest, Carolinas HealthCare System, was suing thousands of its patients each year for payment. If the two papers worked together, they could pull off a series that could run statewide, with more reach and impact.

Here, investigative reporter Joe Neff from The News & Observer, investigative reporter Ames Alexander and medical writer Karen Garloch from The Charlotte Observer share how they reported the five-day series, the most useful sources and their reporting strategies.

Debates over screening, comparative effectiveness research lead to compelling reporting

May 2012
Can the government change the way that doctors care for their patients?

This is one of the key questions reporters will try to answer as they cover the Obama administration’s efforts to promote comparative effectiveness research. Rochelle Sharpe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning freelance writer, has written about comparative effectiveness research that is designed to determine the most effective ways to treat disease and fill gaping holes in our medical knowledge. Here, she shares sources and questions that reporters should be asking about the topic.

Reform will require nonprofit hospitals to assess charity care; reporters can evaluate it now

February 2012
One little-known element of the health care reform law sets new rules for nonprofits. They are required to assess community needs, and inform patients of charity policies. Some legislators want tougher rules and oversight to make sure they are providing enough service to the community to justify the tax break.

Reporter Tony Leys, of the Des Moines Register, describes how he examined how much charity care is provided by hospitals in Iowa in return for the substantial tax breaks they get for operating as nonprofit organizations. Leys, a 2011-12 Regional Health Journalism Fellow, was able to compare local hospitals, using new IRS reporting requirements for nonprofit hospitals, and estimated how local property tax revenue was affected by the tax-exempt hospital properties in those areas.

Reporter investigates high rates of elective procedures

November 2011
One of the goals of the health reform law is to change the payment incentives to get rid of some of the unnecessary or overly aggressive care. This is not rationing, proponents point out, but it is getting patients the care they need without getting them the care they don't need, which often carries risks, side effects and big medical bills. That's been part of the message from the Dartmouth Atlas.

Reporter Emily Bazar, of the California Health Care Foundation Center for Health Reporting, found some extremely high rates of elective heart surgery in one California community. She took data availability in California, some of the Dartmouth framework, and her own reporting and endeavored to reveal the meaning behind some surprising statistics: Citizens in one Central Valley town were five times to six times more likely to undergo elective heart surgery than other Californians.

Bazar analyzed the study to determine if external factors influenced the data, or if Clearlake residents were really receiving unnecessary (and expensive) operations.

We asked Bazar to share her experiences reporting on this data and to shed light on how journalists can transform statistics into a compelling story. While Bazar’s investigation is based on California data, all or nearly all states collect similar data that can be analyzed. Here is what Bazar learned from reporting this story.

Access Denied: Looking at a lack of health care availability

October 2011
The 2010 health reform law is supposed to dramatically expand coverage of the uninsured. In the meantime, there are still some 50 million uninsured people. And questions remain about how underserved areas are going to absorb millions more people when they get covered.  The  Tulsa World Reporter Shannon Muchmore recently completed a three-part series about access to health care in Oklahoma, finding a shortage of physicians, particularly specialists, contributes to an underserved population.

"Access Denied" looks at how it affects all Oklahomans and what can be done to improve access to care. Here, she provides some tips (including some tools that can walk you through some simple data analysis) for journalists interested in pursuing similar reporting in their areas, accompanied by a number of resources about rural health care, disparities in access to care and workforce issues.

Reporting on why some patients are stuck in hospitals

September 2011
Patients typically complain about being released from the hospital sooner than they would like. So Yanick Rice Lamb became intrigued when she heard about patients languishing in hospitals weeks and even months after being medically ready for discharge. This can happen to uninsured and underinsured patients who need long-term care.

Given the recent downturn in the economy, this could potentially happen to anyone who loses a job and the health coverage that came along with it. When she learned about AHCJ's Media Fellowships on Health Performance, she found that delayed discharge was an ideal topic: It was an underreported topic and information was fragmented and spotty, at best.

Find out what she learned from her 10-month look at this narrow slice of the population – the sickest, poorest and most invisible patients. She includes an extensive list of story ideas and angles for other reporters to look into.

'Landmark:' Behind the scenes of covering health care reform

July 2010
After passage of health reform, a Washington Post team wrote "Landmark: The Inside Story of America's New Health-Care Law and What It Means for Us All." Joanne Kenen interviewed two of the authors, Ceci Connolly and Alec MacGillis, who offer some of the high and low points of the passage of health care reform, as well as stories reporters should cover in the coming days.