Health IT isn't a topic that gets a lot of coverage in the mainstream media. What tips do you have for reporters who want to pitch a health IT story to their editor?
Health IT plays an important factor in physician burnout.
There's all this aspiration to introduce new technology that can do all these wonderful things in health care – like machine learning and data analytics – but the whole system rests on clinicians. They are the interface with the machines and with the patient.
It's important as journalists to pay attention when the people using this technology are complaining about it.
Arthur Allen, a health care editor at Politico Pro, has covered health IT extensively and was a founding member of the eHealth reporting team formed at Politico in 2014.
How can journalists tell these stories [about technology in health care] better?
Be really skeptical of hype. Now that there’s a lot of money in this you’re seeing the entry of traditional digital companies and a lot of startups. They’ll sell you a bill of goods and they’ll sell others a bill of goods and they may be well meaning; they’ve got to try and create a business or those initiatives will flame out. The questions aren’t so much about whether the technology is working but what are the deeper implications of this? What’s the workflow? What happens when the patient gets really anxious about this? Who does the information go to?
It’s technical vs. adaptive change. It’s easy to cover the technical change – here’s the new bell and whistle – and does it do the thing they say it’s going to do accurately. It’s a little harder to cover adaptive change, which is how does this actually fit into the lives of patients and the health systems and health organizations and doctors and nurses? I think those are going to be the more interesting stories.
Robert Wachter, M.D., chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is considered the “father” of the hospitalist field and a leader in the patient safety field. He’s written six books, including “The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age,” which took a detailed look at the role of technology in health care. Wachter is married to journalist Katie Hafner.
What should reporters be asking about the legal sales of patient data?
Do patients, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others in their community know about the trade in patient data and how do they feel about it? How are local research institutions using anonymized patient data, and what are the results? Are local companies selling in the big health data bazaar?
Reporters should also seek to document cases in which employers or marketers are using such information to discriminate against individuals.
Adam Tanner (@DataCurtain) is the author of the new book “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” as well as “What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Business – and the End of Privacy as We Know It” (2014). See his tip sheet on the patient data market.
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