Covering long COVID, the hidden epidemic
2024-01-10 15:00 (America/New_York)
All AHCJ events are listed in Eastern Time.

Up to one in seven people in the U.S. have had long COVID, according to one of the most recent estimates. But it’s still getting relatively little coverage, not nearly capturing the scale of this debilitating condition for which no approved treatments exist.

In this webinar, you’ll hear from a rehabilitation physician who specializes in treating people with long COVID and a journalist who has been living with the condition. You’ll learn what you need to know about long COVID, best practices in covering it and the importance of speaking with people who are dealing with it.

Tara Haelle is AHCJ’s health beat leader for infectious diseases and medical studies. She’s an independent science/health journalist, author, speaker, and photographer. Her work has appeared in the National Geographic, Scientific American, Texas Monthly, Science News, Medscape/WebMD, The New York Times, Wired, and O Magazine, among others. She specializes in public health and medical research, particularly vaccines, infectious disease, maternal and pediatric health, mental health, healthcare disparities, and misinformation. She also covers medical research conferences and edits Long COVID Connection on Medium. Haelle earned a master’s in photojournalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and her images have appeared in Texas Monthly, NPR, the, Chicago Sun-Times and elsewhere.

Monica Verduzco–Gutierrez, M.D., is chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Long School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health San Antonio. She previously was a Medical Director of the Brain Injury and Stroke Program at a top three US News and World Report Best Hospital for Rehabilitation. Her area of clinical expertise is the care of patients with traumatic brain injury, stroke rehabilitation, and interventional spasticity management. Most recently, she has developed a Post-COVID Recovery Clinic to help those who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and suffer from various physical, cognitive, and functional difficulties.

Lygia Navarro is a freelance magazine, audio and multi-media journalist and editor who is also living with long COVID. She has particular expertise covering Latin American and Latine/o/a/x stories across the United States, and has also covered mental health, the environment, immigration, human smuggling, trauma, the intersection of politics and the arts, 2SLGBTQ+ communities, food, and music. Navarro is currently an editor at palabra, the National Association for Hispanic Journalists’ outlet, and a health reporting fellow at Journalism and Women Symposium.

Lunch and Learn: Finding anchor clients
2024-01-18 13:00
At AHCJ’s Lunch and Learns, freelancer members chat about a designated topic over Zoom every third Thursday of the month at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. The Zoom link is always the same.

Coverage 101: Using the new state media guides to write big stories
2024-01-24 13:00
All AHCJ events are listed in Eastern Standard Time.

The United States has a patchwork system of health insurance coverage that leaves some people with great access to services and some with no coverage at all. It depends on a person’s birthplace, age, job, income, location, and health status.To help journalists make sense of the confusion, Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms — with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — has created primers for how insurance works in each state plus a national overview that offers the big picture. You can find the guides and overview now on AHCJ’s website.In this webinar, AHCJ Health Beat Leader Joe Burns, who focuses on health policy and insurance, will talk to Charles Ornstein of ProPublica and Sabrina Corlette, J.D., who led the Georgetown project, about the new tool and how to make the most of it in your reporting.

Joseph Burns is AHCJ’s health beat leader on health policy and insurance. He’s an independent journalist based in Brewster, Mass., who has covered health care, health policy and the business of care since 1991. Burns has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Fortune, Hospitals & Health Networks, and Medical Economics, among others.

Sabrina Corlette, J.D., is a research professor, founder, and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. There, she directs research on health reform issues, with a focus on state and federal regulation of private health insurance. She provides expertise and strategic advice to individuals and organizations on health insurance laws and programs and provides technical support through the publication of resource guides, white papers, issue briefs, blog posts and fact sheets. She has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress and is frequently quoted in the news media on emerging health care issues. She has published dozens of papers relating to the regulation of private health insurance and health insurance marketplaces.

Charles Ornstein is managing editor for local initiatives at ProPublica, overseeing the nonprofit news organization’s regional offices and its Local Reporting Network. From 2008 to 2017, he was a senior reporter covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry at ProPublica, and then worked as a senior editor and deputy managing editor. Prior to joining ProPublica, he was a member of the metro investigative projects team at the Los Angeles Times and a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. Ornstein is a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

SHERF Informational Session
2024-02-07 13:00
Interested in applying for the National Science-Health-Environment Reporting Fellowship? Join representatives from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Association of Health Care Journalists, and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing to learn about this opportunity to gain reporting skills at the intersection of science, health and environment.

Reframing Firearm Violence: How journalists can use research in their reporting
2024-02-09 11:30 - 12:45
Firearm violence is largely covered in the media as a crime issue focused on individual shooting events. But experts assert that reframing firearm violence as a broader public health issue is crucial to finding policy and community solutions aimed at preventing deaths and injury from guns.

Join AHCJ and the National Press Club Journalism Institute at 11:30 a.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 9, for a conversation among experts and journalists on where to find the best data and research on firearm and gun deaths for your reporting.

In this 75-minute webinar, we’ll explore the gaps, go-to resources, and facts and myths about firearms and firearm ownership. Participants will also learn:

The differences among firearm violence, such as what is a mass casualty event versus a mass shooting.

Where to find new research on firearm violence.

How news coverage of firearm violence impacts victims and frontline health workers.

How to move thinking of firearm violence as “the crime beat” to more nuanced coverage across beats.

Kaitlin Washburn is AHCJ’s health beat leader for firearm violence and trauma and a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. She was a gun violence reporter for two years in Missouri for The Kansas City Star as a Report for America corps member. Previously, Washburn was an agriculture reporter covering the omnipresent industry in California’s Central Valley for The Sun-Gazette, also as a part of RFA. Previously, Washburn had internships at the Morning Call in Pennsylvania, the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. and The Oregonian in Portland. She spent three years as a researcher for Investigative Reporters and Editors, based at The University of Missouri.

Jessica Beard, M.D., is a trauma surgeon at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellow, and Director of Research for The Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting. Her research examines the perspectives of firearm-injured people on media reports of their injuries and seeks to define, measure, and support minimization of harmful reporting on community firearm violence.

Abené Clayton is a reporter in the Guardian’s California office and is the lead reporter on the newspaper’s “Guns & Lies in America” series, which launched in 2019 and focuses on the impacts of and solutions to community violence. She started covering gun violence in her hometown of Richmond, California, and is now based in Los Angeles where she covers the people who live where shootings and homicides happen most.

Jennifer Mascia is a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace, the only newsroom that exclusively covers gun violence, which launched in 2015. She previously reported on gun violence for The New York Times, where she began her career as a news assistant. She served as the lead writer for the Times’s annual Neediest Cases campaign, which profiles New Yorkers in need, and wrote and produced The Gun Report, a daily tally of gun violence victims in America that ran for a year and a half after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Lunch and Learn: Overcoming writer's block
2024-02-15 13:00

Health Care Issues Forum — AHCJ New York Chapter Event
2024-02-15 18:30 - 20:00 | Borough of Manhattan Community College, Fiterman Hall, Conference Room #1302, 245 Greenwich St, New York City, New York, 10007, United States
Free tickets for AHCJ members. Use promo code: AHCJ

Join us for an important panel discussion about healthcare misinformation. Hear from the following panelists:

Sony Salzman, Coordinating Producer, ABC Medical Unit.

Dr. Lisa H. Rose, Professor of Human Services and Social Work, Borough of Manhattan Community College.

A brief reception with light refreshments will follow the panel portion of the event. Share this invitation with a friend!

Organized by Children of Bellevue and AHCJ.

Location

Borough of Manhattan Community CollegeFiterman Hall, Conference Room #1302 (use Elevator #9)245 Greenwich St, New York, NY 10007

More information

Children of Bellevue is dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. Its mission is to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health care reporting, writing and editing.

AHCJ is dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. Its mission is to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health care reporting, writing and editing.

Gun violence reporting certification: What it is and why journalists should get it
2024-02-16 13:00 - 14:00
The movement in journalism for less episodic and more thoughtful, trauma-informed gun violence coverage is growing, as are opportunities for journalists to learn how to get it right.

A recent example is a certification workshop held by the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting. The day-long training, called the “Gun Violence Prevention Reporter Certification Workshop,” explored best practices for reporting on firearm violence and prevention. Participants included 25 journalists and 15 community-based gun violence prevention experts.

The central idea is that reporting on gun violence as a public health issue can provide a better understanding of why violence happens and how to prevent it. This type of reporting is also about minimizing the harm done by sensationalized, episodic violence coverage.

In this webinar, Jim MacMillan, founder and director of The Initiative for Better Gun Violence Reporting, and Alaina Bookman, a violence prevention reporter for AL.com and a participant in the workshop, talked about the main points of the workshop, how certification aims to improve coverage of firearm violence prevention, the benefits of offering a certification, and what plans are in the works to offer the certification to more journalists.

Kaitlin Washburn is AHCJ’s health beat leader for firearm violence and trauma and a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. She was a gun violence reporter for two years in Missouri for The Kansas City Star as a Report for America corps member. Previously, Washburn was an agriculture reporter covering the omnipresent industry in California’s Central Valley for The Sun-Gazette, also as a part of RFA. Previously, Washburn had internships at the Morning Call in Pennsylvania, the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. and The Oregonian in Portland. She spent three years as a researcher for Investigative Reporters and Editors, based at The University of Missouri.

Alaina Bookman was born and raised in Dallas and is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. She has experience working as a journalist for the Houston Defender and as an archivist at the University of Texas Black Diaspora Archives. Her role as a violence prevention reporter at AL.com is supported by Report for America, a nonprofit that aids local newsrooms.

Jim MacMillan is the founder and director of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting and the assistant director of the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at Temple University. He has been a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and the Knight-Wallace Fellows, as well as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and Swarthmore College. Previously, MacMillan spent 17 years at the Philadelphia Daily News and photographed the war in Iraq for The Associated Press, after which he and his team were awarded The Pulitzer Prize.

Using the CDC's Environmental Justice and Social Vulnerability data in your reporting
2024-02-20 12:00 - 13:00
Environmental health is a deeply intersectional topic, which opens up the possibility of using lots of different datasets in your reporting. In this webinar, coordinators from the CDC’s Environmental Justice Index (EJI) and Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) will show you how to access and use data found in these portals.

Social vulnerability refers to the potential negative effects on communities caused by external stresses on human health. Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, to develop, implement, and enforce environmental laws, regulations, and policies. These topics are deeply connected and when these indexes are used together, they can help to include perspectives that have historically been marginalized.

Join us for this webinar to explore the data.

Paul Gordon (he/him), AHCJ’s health beat leader for environmental health, is a Chicago-based environmental journalist, photographer and arborist. His work appears in The Nation, Grist, The New Lede, Sierra Magazine, Belt Magazine, Civil Eats, Clean Energy Wire and In These Times. Gordon graduated from DePaul university where he studied international relations and journalism. During summers in college, he worked in conservation across the East Coast for US Fish and Wildlife and the National Park Service. After finishing school, Gordon worked in conservation and field ecology for the National Audubon Society, Forest Preserves of Cook County, and Fermilab. After being awarded the Congress-Bundestag Exchange Fellowship, he worked as a correspondent for Clean Energy Wire in Berlin and furthered his education in journalism at Freie Universität.

Ben McKenzie, M.S. (he/him), is a geospatial epidemiologist with the Geospatial Research, Analysis, and ServicesProgram (GRASP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/ the Agency for Toxic Substance andDisease Registry. Since 2021, he has served as the team lead for the Environmental Justice Index project in collaboration with the National Center for Environmental Health and the HHS Office of Environmental Justice. Mr. McKenzie is a committed advocate for the application of geospatial sciences to promote health and health equity.

Elizabeth Pembleton, M.P.H. (she/her), received her Bachelor of Science in Health Promotion and Behavior from the University of Georgia, and her Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has worked in various public health areas throughout her career, including nutrition and exercise, healthcare associated infections, foodborne illnesses, HIV, COVID-19, and most recently, Social Vulnerability and geospatial science. Elizabeth joined GRASP in July 2020 as the Senior Project Coordinator for COVID-related projects and has since moved to lead the Social Vulnerability Index beginning in early 2022.

Covering reproductive health: A closer look at issues affecting women of color
2024-02-21 13:00 - 14:00
The impact of abortion bans and the implications of challenges to the Affordable Care Act that aim to limit birth control coverage provide numerous opportunities for reporting. The same goes for stories about the effects of efforts to limit or outright ban the use of mifepristone, a key drug that has been used in medication abortion for more than two decades.

However, proponents of reproductive health equity say that many journalists aren’t paying enough attention to — or are ignoring — how both current and possible restrictions will worsen the health of women of color of reproductive age, particularly Black, Hispanic and Indigenous women. As the implications of those restrictions become clearer, those women — who collectively represent 36.5% women from the ages of 15 to 44 in the U.S. — may be even more likely than non-Hispanic white women to have unintended pregnancies or preterm births.Lupe M. Rodríguez, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and Lauren Sausser, who writes about health care in the South as a member of KFF Health News’ Southern Bureau, will join AHCJ Health Equity Beat Leader Margarita Birnbaum for this webinar.

We’ll explore why — by some reproductive health measures — Black, Hispanic, Native American and Alaska Native women tend to be in poorer health than non-Hispanic white women. We’ll also delve into the role that abortion disinformation and misinformation play in contributing to reproductive health care outcomes in women of color. And we’ll talk about misconceptions about attitudes that women of color have about birth control and abortion. You’ll learn about efforts that aim to give women of color more access to reproductive health care services and encourage them to advocate for themselves.

Margarita Birnbaum is AHCJ’s health beat leader for health equity and an independent journalist based in Dallas. Over the years, her stories about health, as well as crime and other topics she covered early in her career, have appeared in WebMD, American Heart Association News, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald and Reuters. Fluent in English and Spanish, Birnbaum is also an interpreter and translator. Her personal and professional experiences living and working in the U.S. and in several Central American countries have informed her reporting work in covering health disparity trends among racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.

Lupe M. Rodríguez is the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. Over the years, she has worked as a social justice advocate in the U.S. and Mexico. A former vice president of public affairs at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, Rodríguez has an undergraduate degree in neurobiology from Harvard University. She serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Center for Clinical Research at Stanford and was chair of the Commission on the Status of Women in Santa Clara County and treasurer of the Board of Directors for California Latinas for Reproductive Justice.

Lauren Sausser writes about health care in the South as a member of KFF Health News’ Southern Bureau. She is based in Charleston, South Carolina, where she previously spent nine years covering health care at The Post and Courier. A graduate of Clemson University and Columbia University, she has received awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, and other groups. In 2016, she was part of a team of reporters who were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. In 2017, she was recognized as Reporter of the Year by the South Carolina Press Association.

Open wide: Covering the growing field of AI and dentistry
2024-02-28 13:00 - 14:00
Artificial intelligence has been making its way into dentistry. New AI software products have emerged that could enhance dentists’ ability to detect tooth decay, cavities or bone loss and propose treatments before dental health worsens. The FDA already has approved eight such AI products, with more to come, and some large corporate dental chains have already begun using them.In this webinar, we’ll go over how these products work, their benefits and limitations, what’s on the horizon, and how to cover this growing field. Roya Zandparsa, a dentist who lectures at Tufts and Harvard universities, and Casey Ross, national technology correspondent for STAT, will discuss how the products work and are being incorporated into dental care, what we might expect in the future, and how to report on this trend.

Karen Blum is AHCJ’s health beat leader for health IT. She’s an independent health and science journalist based in the Baltimore area. She has written for publications such as the Baltimore Sun, Pharmacy Practice News, Clinical Oncology News, Clinical Laboratory News, Cancer Today, CURE, AARP.org, General Surgery News and Infectious Disease Special Edition; covered numerous medical conferences for trade magazines and news services; and written many profiles and articles on medical and science research as well as trends in health care and health IT. She is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and chairs its Virtual Education Committee; and a member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and its freelance committee.

Roya Zandparsa, D.D.S., M.Sc., D.M.D., F.I.C.D., is a clinical professor and biomaterials course director at the Department of Prosthodontics at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and a lecturer at the Department of Restorative Dentistry and Biomaterials Sciences at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. She also is vice president of innovation and development at Qualitas Dental Partners Organization, the founder & CEO of Expert Dental Advisory, the president-elect of the American Association of Women Dentists, the past president of American Academy of Dental Science, and a Fellow of the International College of Dentistry.

Casey Ross is a national technology correspondent at STAT. His reporting examines the use of artificial intelligence in medicine and its underlying questions of safety, fairness, and privacy. Before joining STAT in 2016, he wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Boston Globe, where he worked on the Spotlight Team in 2014 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Parsing the deadly problem of low vaccination rates in nursing homes
2024-03-05 14:00 - 15:00
Nearly four years into the pandemic, vaccine uptake for COVID, RSV and even influenza remain very low among nursing home residents and staff, according to recent CDC MMWR data. Some 600 nursing home residents died from COVID in the first two weeks of January alone. Meanwhile, flu cases remain high in parts of the U.S., and risk for RSV is still elevated among this vulnerable population.

Despite widespread availability of both the COVID-19 booster and new adult RSV vaccine, infection rates, hospitalizations and deaths continued to climb over the winter months. On top of that, COVID booster uptake by nursing home staff was only 23% at the end of 2023, CDC data shows. Why haven’t more nursing home residents received the vaccine? And, what, if anything, can nursing homes or states do to ensure their residents and staff are protected?

AHCJ Health Beat Leader on Aging Liz Seegert will talk with a geriatrician/researcher and the executive director of an organization that advocates for aging people about what the data tell us, the challenges of ensuring staff and residents receive the shots they need, overcoming persistent misinformation about the COVID and RSV vaccines, and the impact new federal staffing mandates may have on infection control and prevention.

Liz Seegert is AHCJ’s health beat leader on aging. She’s an award-winning, independent health journalist based in New York’s Hudson Valley, who writes about caregiving, dementia, access to care, nursing homes and policy. Seegert is also a contributing writer for Fortune.com, the American Journal of Nursing, and PBS/NextAvenue.org, reporting on myriad health topics, including social determinants of health and women’s health. She has written for TIME Health, The Wirecutter, Money.com, Medscape, Consumer Reports, The Guardian and Medical Economics, as well as dozens of other trade and mainstream media. Her articles have been syndicated in Forbes.com, the Los Angeles Times, the Hartford Courant, The Saturday Evening Post and other major outlets.

Richard Mollot is the executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition (LTCCC), a U.S.-based nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving care for individuals in nursing homes and other residential care settings through legal and policy research, advocacy, and education. Richard has researched and published on a variety of long-term care issues, including: dementia care; nursing home and assisted living standards; the rights of older adults in residential care; abuse, neglect, and crime in nursing homes; nursing home financing; and the imposition and use of penalties for substandard residential care. He is a graduate of Howard University School of Law and a member of the Maryland Bar.

Ana Montoya, M.D., M.P.H., is a geriatrician and health care researcher at the University of Michigan, and a clinical associate professor at the U-M Medical School. Her research focuses on improving the care of older adults by examining health system performance for this vulnerable population, with a particular interest in health disparities, delirium and dementia, management of chronic medical problems and infection control in skilled nursing facilities. She received her medical degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru, and her master’s in public health from the University of Michigan, where she also completed her geriatric medicine fellowship. She is currently enrolled in the Master’s in Health and Health Care Research program at the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. She is the medical director for the Sub-acute and Long-Term Care program at U-M, which is a partnership between the U-M Geriatrics Center and local facilities offering rehabilitation and skilled nursing care. She is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Geriatric Medicine, and Hospice and Palliative Medicine, and certified as a medical director by the American Board of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.

Breaking into ghostwriting and collaborating on books
2024-03-13 13:00 - 14:00
Ghostwriting and collaborating on books are a lucrative income stream — and you don’t have to sacrifice your journalistic principles to do it. The market for these books has mushroomed because publishers are now looking for experts with giant platforms.

Collaborations in their various forms can be a financial and professional lifeline; busy ghostwriters and collaborators can make upwards of $100,000 a year. In this webinar, two writers and a literary agent will discuss this growing market, how to get that first assignment as a ghostwriter or collaborator, what to watch out for in contracts and how to effectively work with an expert.

Barbara Mantel is AHCJ’s health beat leader for freelancing and has written about subjects such as how to find and keep an accountability partner, how to tap the rich resources at libraries and how to break into narrative journalism. Mantel, an award-winning journalist, began her journalism career as the economics reporter and then assistant managing editor of a business news program on ESPN television. She moved to NPR as its economics and business correspondent and later served as the first senior editor, senior producer and director of the public radio program “Science Friday.” Mantel’s byline has appeared in a wide range of media outlets, including CQ Researcher, AARP, Undark, Next Avenue, Medical Economics, Healthline, NBCNews.com, Today.com, NPR and The New York Times.

Susan K. Golant is a book collaborator, co-author, book doctor, ghostwriter, editor and/or writing coach. Golant has been writing nonfiction books alone and with others since 1982 and has more than 40 books to her credit. Her specialities include psychology, health and medical breakthroughs, spirituality and parenting, among others. She has collaborated with or ghostwritten for M.D.s, Ph.D.s and Rosalynn Carter.

Madeleine Morel is the head of 2M Communications, an agency that represents more than 100 ghostwriters and collaborators, matching them with experts, celebrities and public figures who need help getting their ideas into print. Morel has provided writers for more than 60 New York Times bestsellers. Each writer specializes in an area such as health, parenting, memoir/autobiography, science, sports and more.

Reimagining menopause: How reporters can reduce the stigma
2024-03-20 14:00 - 15:00
Half of the world’s population will experience menopause, yet this time in life is fraught with mystery, misconceptions, and a lack of solid information. Although menopause treatment and knowledge can affect healthy aging, primary care physicians and even many OB/GYNs don’t get the training or support they need to counsel patients and help them navigate what can be a challenging phase of life.

Join Liz Seegert, AHCJ’s Health Beat Leader for Aging, a certified menopause specialist, and a journalist who reports frequently on this topic for some myth-busting and guidance on how to report on menopause with sensitivity. You’ll learn about the most useful research on this subject and where the gaps still exist.

Liz Seegert is AHCJ’s health beat leader on aging. She’s an award-winning, independent health journalist based in New York’s Hudson Valley, who writes about caregiving, dementia, access to care, nursing homes and policy. Seegert is also a contributing writer for Fortune.com, the American Journal of Nursing, and PBS/NextAvenue.org, reporting on myriad health topics, including social determinants of health and women’s health. She has written for TIME Health, The Wirecutter, Money.com, Medscape, Consumer Reports, The Guardian and Medical Economics, as well as dozens of other trade and mainstream media. Her articles have been syndicated in Forbes.com, the Los Angeles Times, the Hartford Courant, The Saturday Evening Post and other major outlets.

Rebecca Levy-Gantt, M.D., is a board-certified ObGyn and a certified menopause practitioner. Levy-Gantt has been practicing for the last 15 years in Napa, California, and practiced before that for 11 years on Long Island. She focuses on menopause management, including hormones and alternative management strategies, as well as vaginal and vulvar pain syndromes. She also teaches at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, and writes frequently on menopause issues.

Meryl Davids Landau is a longtime independent journalist specializing in health. Her work on menopause has appeared in National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, Prevention, Everyday Health and other publications. She’s also the author of the award-winning mindfulness women’s novel, Warrior Won.

Lunch and Learn: Freelancer Free-for-all
2024-03-21 13:00 - 14:00
At AHCJ’s Lunch and Learns, freelancer members chat about a designated topic over Zoom every third Thursday of the month at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. The Zoom link is always the same. This time, the topic is open, so come prepared to ask your fellow freelancers for help with anything from coping with a mean editor to buying the right stand-up desk.

Follow the Money: Using HospitalFinances.org and other tools to tell important stories
2024-03-27 13:00 - 14:00
This webinar is the first in a four-part series produced by AHCJ and Investigative Reporters and Editors that will equip you with the tools you need to tell the story of the big business of health care. Longtime AHCJ member Karl Stark, Director of Content Strategy & Editor in Residence at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, will show you how to use AHCJ’s hospitalfinances.org site and other tools to report stories about hospitals’ financial health.

The series is free for all journalists, thanks to the generous support of the NIHCM Foundation.

Karl Stark is the Director of Content Strategy & Editor in Residence at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focuses on encouraging LDI Fellows to write for the public. Before joining LDI, he worked for more than three decades at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he served as Health Editor, Business News Editor and National/Foreign Editor, among other positions. His reporting on the bankrupt Allegheny health system helped lead to indictments of the top three executives. He also served as President of the Association of Health Care Journalists, the nation’s leading group of health reporters and editors. He is a co-author of AHCJ’s “Covering the Quality of Health Care – A Resource Guide for Journalists” and leads a session on covering hospital finances at AHCJ’s annual meeting. He is a graduate of Yale University where he played varsity tennis. He also has distant memories of skating competitively with his sister Julie.

AHCJ NYC Chapter Event: Enough! A Conversation About Cervical Cancer
2024-04-02 17:30 - 18:30 | 1204 Broadway, New York, NY 10001, USA
Cervical cancer is preventable: Doctors know what causes it, how to treat and cure it if it’s caught early enough, and how to prevent it. And yet, the disease kills 360 women every day.

Dr. Linda Eckert, an OB-GYN and leading expert in cervical cancer prevention who recently published a book by that name. The book weaves together evidence-based information with women’s narratives, and exposes the barriers — cultural, gender-related, and political — that keep this deadly disease alive.

Join Dr. Eckert in conversation with Anna Medaris, a health and lifestyle journalist, and Eve McDavid, a cervical cancer survivor and advocate, as they discuss what YOU need to know about cervical cancer, and how we can all work toward meaningful change that saves lives.

1204 Broadway, New York, NY 10001, USA

https://luminary-legacy.us.hivebrite.com/events/79593

Lunch and Learn: How to be a freelance nomad
2024-04-18 13:00 - 14:00

Lunch and Learn: Finding the Right Story Mix
2024-05-16 13:00 - 14:00

Follow the Money: Uncovering insurers’ confidential clauses that hit patients in the pocketbook
2024-05-21 13:00 - 14:00
New York Times investigative reporter Chris Hamby and STAT reporter Bob Herman, who covers the business of health care, will be featured in a May 21 webinar on how journalists can report on the hidden and lucrative alliances health insurers have with cost-containment companies, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and employee benefits consultants. The webinar is the second in a collaboration between The Association of Health Care Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and is being offered as part of the organizations’ “Follow the Money” series, with financial support from NIHCM.

In April, Hamby reported that MultiPlan, a company in New York City that helps health insurers keep costs down, and its health insurer clients have a large and mostly hidden financial incentive to cut payments for policyholders’ claims as much as possible. The result can be patients paying more than they would otherwise.

After doing a year-long investigation, Herman reported last year on a largely hidden ﬂow of money among employee benefit consulting companies, PBMs and health insurers. Those funds went from PBMs and health insurers to the benefit consulting companies, driving up health care and prescription drug spending for employers, workers and their families, Herman wrote.

During this webinar, hosted by AHCJ health policy beat leader Joe Burns, Hamby and Herman will discuss the tools and outline the tips and strategies they used to uncover these hidden agreements and how all health care journalists can report on this important story.

Joseph Burns is AHCJ’s health beat leader on health policy and insurance. He’s an independent journalist based in Brewster, Mass., who has covered health care, health policy and the business of care since 1991. Burns has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Fortune, Hospitals & Health Networks, and Medical Economics, among others.

Chris Hamby is an investigative reporter at The New York Times. While working at the Center For Public Integrity, Hamby won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for his series of stories on coal miners and was later awarded the Lukas Prize to develop his reporting into a book. He was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work on multinational corporations and their violations of domestic regulations and environmental law. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Bob Herman is a business of health care reporter at STAT. He covers hospitals, health insurance, and other corners of the industry — with a goal of explaining and shining light on the massive amount of money flowing through the system. Prior to joining STAT in 2022, he covered the health care industry at Axios for more than five years. He also previously was an editor and reporter covering health insurance and hospitals at Modern Healthcare. Bob and his family are based in Indiana, so naturally he has a deep love for all things basketball.

Health Journalism 2024
2024-06-06 00:00 - 2024-06-09 23:59
The Association of Health Care Journalists will hold its annual Health Journalism Conference from June 6-9, 2024, bringing together hundreds of journalists across the U.S. in midtown New York City.

How to amp up your reporting using LexisNexis tools
2024-07-16 13:30 - 14:30
Top-tier research doesn’t begin and end with a quick check on Google. The best in our business comb the LexisNexis news archives for information and tap its massive database to find potential sources and reach them by phone or email.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how award-winning journalists conduct deep-dive backgrounding on people and subjects, how they get names and numbers from LexisNexis’ list of 800 million profiles, and how they use paywalled content and trade journal expertise to generate story ideas and fresh angles.

Many public libraries offer a limited version of LexisNexis, and some news publications make it available to writers. Fortunately, AHCJ members get discounted access to this robust tool.

However, you don’t have to be a LexisNexis subscriber to attend or benefit from this webinar. Our expert panelist will share his screen and walk you through this trove of source material. If you are a LexisNexis subscriber, you can follow along on your own computer.

Barbara Mantel is AHCJ’s health beat leader for freelancing and has written about subjects such as how to find and keep an accountability partner, how to tap the rich resources at libraries and how to break into narrative journalism. Mantel, an award-winning journalist, began her journalism career as the economics reporter and then assistant managing editor of a business news program on ESPN television. She moved to NPR as its economics and business correspondent and later served as the first senior editor, senior producer and director of the public radio program “Science Friday.” Mantel’s byline has appeared in a wide range of media outlets, including CQ Researcher, AARP, Undark, Next Avenue, Medical Economics, Healthline, NBCNews.com, Today.com, NPR and The New York Times.

Brad Hamilton runs an award-winning digital newsroom, The Hatch Institute, which commissions long-form enterprise pieces and publishes them with big media partners. The institute also mentors and supports other journalists.Hamilton has been a reporter and editor, primarily in investigative work, for 40 years, during which he created and led the New York Post’s first investigations unit and broke numerous front-page exclusives. His work has appeared in The New York Times, ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, Playboy, the Village Voice and other outlets.

In addition, he heads the Institute for Storycraft and Information Gathering, a nonprofit foundation that provides writing and reporting guidance for campus journalists and other college students.

Tracking medical debt, a major cause of personal bankruptcy
2024-07-31 13:00 - 14:00
Medical debt is a significant issue for well over half of Americans, according to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. It may be the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. In this workshop, we’ll discuss sources, strategies, and best practices for reporting on medical debt.

This webinar is part of a series produced by AHCJ and Investigative Reporters & Editors that will equip you with the tools you need to tell the story of the big business of health care. The series is free for all journalists, thanks to the generous support of the NIHCM Foundation.

Speakers

Anissa Durham is the health data reporter at Word In Black, where she reports on health care inequities and mental health in the Black community. Prior to working at Word In Black, she was a general assignment reporter at inewsource and has written for The San Diego Union Tribune, PBS SoCal, The Objective, and Voice of San Diego. Anissa has a bachelor’s degree from National University. In 2024, she produced Life or Debt, a 3-part drug price series which explores the ways Black American’s living with chronic disease are forced to manage an expensive health care system. And in 2023, she produced the reporting series Lost Innocence: The Adultification of Black Children as a fellow with the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and Fact or Fiction: Navigating Health Misinformation.

Noam N. Levey is a Washington, D.C.,-based senior correspondent for KFF Health News, where he is currently producing “Diagnosis: Debt,” a multi-part project on medical debt in the U.S. in collaboration with NPR and CBS News. Noam joined KFF Health News in 2021 after 17 years at the Los Angeles Times, the last 12 as the paper’s national healthcare reporter based in Washington. He has reported on healthcare issues from more than three dozen states and four continents and won numerous honors, including a Loeb award and two NIHCM awards, one in 2020 for his series “Inside America’s High-Deductible Revolution” and one in 2023 for “Diagnosis: Debt.” Noam has also been published in Health Affairs, JAMA and Milbank Quarterly. He started his career at newspapers in Duluth, Minn., Montgomery, Ala., and the United Arab Emirates. Prior to the LA Times, Noam was an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. Noam has a degree in History and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.

2024 Rural Health Journalism Workshop
2024-08-22 10:00 - 18:00
Join us for a daylong virtual workshop of talks, presentations and conversation about some of the biggest challenges in rural health. We’ll unpack the nuances of the rural hospital closures crisis; innovative solutions to health care workforce shortages; the national picture of reproductive health care access; what happened to all that opioid settlement money; and a candid conversation about what people still get wrong about rural America (and why it matters).

Local Host

Sponsors

How rising health care prices are harming employers and families
2024-08-27 13:00 - 14:00
Over the past 10 years, workers’ wages have risen 54% while health care prices have gone up 230% in the U.S. That huge discrepancy means that what consumers spent on health care 10 years ago represented 17% of total compensation compared to 37% now.

Join AHCJ Health Beat Leader for Health Policy and Insurance Joe Burns as he talks to Cora Opsahl, director of the health fund for the Building Service 32BJ labor union in New York City; and Gloria Sachdev, PharmD, president and CEO of the Employers’ Forum of Indiana, about the rising spiral of health care spending and the impact it’s having on employers and families.

Both have led fights on behalf of employers over hospital prices. Both see their efforts as part of a growing trend of employers fighting back against rising health care spending, which leaves businesses with less money for raises and families less money in the bank.

Learn how to find federal health spending data and real life stories that will help bring this issue alive for your readers.

Joseph Burns is AHCJ’s health beat leader on health policy and insurance. He’s an independent journalist based in Brewster, Mass., who has covered health care, health policy and the business of care since 1991. Burns has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Fortune, Hospitals & Health Networks, and Medical Economics, among others. Early in his journalism career, Burns worked as a reporter in Connecticut, first for The Wallingford Post (a weekly), and then The Meriden Record-Journal (a daily), and later for The Hartford Courant (the largest daily newspaper in the state and the nation’s oldest newspaper). For The Courant, he was a reporter, copy editor and regional news editor. During this time, he also taught news writing at the University of Connecticut.

Cora Opsahl is director of the 32BJ Health Fund, a self-funded plan that provides affordable, comprehensive and innovative health coverage to 200,000 union members and their families. Opsahl has led the implementation of multiple benefit changes: removing the New York-Presbyterian hospital system and physicians from the network; transitioning to a new pharmacy vendor and pharmacy group purchasing coalition; and implementing an expanded Centers of Excellence program administered by Mount Sinai Health System. These efforts saved over $35 million in 2022. Prior to joining the 32BJ Health Fund, Opsahl spent 12 years with Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit manager, where she held a variety of roles, including in Medicare Part D, strategy and acquisitions, operations, and account management. She holds an MBA from Saint Louis University.

Gloria Sachdev, PharmD, is the president and CEO of the Employers’ Forum of Indiana, a nonprofit employer-led multi-stakeholder health care coalition. Founded in 2001, the forum aims to align payment with the value of services provided to employers and patients by focusing on hospital prices and quality, value-based health benefit and payment and on health policy. Sachdev also is an adjunct associate professor at Purdue College of Pharmacy. She received her Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Pharmacy degrees from the University of Oklahoma and completed a primary residency at the VA in Madison, Wisc. Also, she has practiced in primary care physicians’ offices managing patients with chronic diseases and founded a consulting company aimed at integrating clinical pharmacists into team-based health care settings.

AHCJ Fellowship Informational Session
2024-09-13 14:00 - 15:00
Interested in applying for the U.S. Health System Reporting Fellowship, the International Health Study Fellowship or both? Join the Association of Health Care Journalists and program alumni to learn about these opportunities to advance the craft of health journalism and encourage nuanced, informed reporting that can drive meaningful change in health care systems worldwide.

Lunch and Learn: How to get fair pay and tailor work to pay
2024-09-19 13:00 - 14:00

Hospital mergers and health care price increases: A primer for reporters
2024-09-24 13:00 - 14:00
Hospital mergers — market consolidation — can lead to health care price increases of anywhere from 3% to 65%, according to a 2022 RAND Corporation review. The FTC’s director of the Bureau of Economics has said hospitals that merge may charge 40% to 50% more than if they hadn’t merged.

Mergers can also result in layoffs and lower tax revenues and have a negative impact on patient care by reducing access to some health care services. With so much research confirming negative effects and as health care prices continue to rise, what — if anything — can be done to slow market consolidation and/or reduce the harms to patients and local economies?

Join New York Times reporter Reed Abelson; health care cost economist Zachary K. Goldman, Oregon Health Authority; and executive editor of The Source on Healthcare Price and Competition Katie Gudiksen, University of California San Francisco, as they explore those questions and talk about what some states, like Oregon, have done to try to control cost growth.

This series builds on a recent webinar series produced by AHCJ and Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) on the business of health care called “Follow the Money.” Once journalists are trained on how to “follow the money” of health care, the Peterson-Milbank-supported webinar series will dive into cost drivers and look at solutions. Journalists will learn about ways that states, employers and other stakeholders can promote affordable health care and will be able to tell these stories in the context of their state and local communities.

Moderator

Reed Abelson

Reporter, New York TimesReed Abelson is fascinated by the changing landscape of American medicine as more doctors and nurses work for hospitals and corporations, and large health conglomerates account for a greater share of the care we get. Abelson also covers the business of health insurance and how it has changed since the debut of the Affordable Care Act and the increasing privatization of government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Abelson aims to be endlessly curious about how the health care system works — and doesn’t — in the United States.

Zachary Goldman

Health care cost economist, Oregon Health AuthorityZachary Goldman is the health care cost economist at the Oregon Health Authority, where he has worked for 8 years. He currently focuses on Oregon’s Health Care Market Oversight Program and the Sustainable Health Care Cost Growth Target Program. Prior to joining the Oregon Health Authority, he was a senior policy specialist at Covered California, the state-based health insurance marketplace. He also worked for a federally qualified health center as a project manager and later as the clinic administrator. Zachary earned his Bachelor of Arts degrees from Brandeis University and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Katie Gudiksen, Ph.D.

Executive editor, The Source on Healthcare Price and CompetitionKatie Gudiksen, Ph.D., is the executive editor for The Source on Healthcare Price and Competition. Dr. Gudiksen is an expert in health care reform and the drivers of health care costs, with a special interest in market consolidation and state policies to address market power. She has helped draft model legislation to improve state merger review processes and to prohibit anticompetitive terms in contracts between insurers and health systems.

Her current work focuses on evaluating the options states have to restrict excessive provider prices, including cost-growth benchmarks and state public options. Her work has been published in Health Affairs, Frontiers in Health Services, the Harvard Journal on Legislation, and the New England Journal of Medicine, and covered by media outlet such as the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

She has successfully worked with various state policymakers and stakeholders by commenting on bill language, presenting to various state agencies and officials, testifying as expert witness at state legislative hearings, and participating in briefings and informational sessions in California, Nevada, Connecticut and Oregon.

Biased devices: Reporting on racial bias in health algorithms and products
2024-10-16 15:00 - 16:00
Doctors measure health in many ways, from routine blood tests for cholesterol or kidney function to using devices like spirometers to test lung function or pulse oximeters for blood oxygen levels. But the results of these routine tests can be misleading because some tests and devices are skewed by algorithms that produce different results depending on a person’s race or ethnicity. Some devices don’t work as well for people with darker skin tones.

These biases can lead to delayed diagnoses and care for Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other communities of color. Now, clinicians, regulators and researchers are working to address inequities caused by the misuse of race.

This webinar will cover the fast-moving, complex space of racial disparities in algorithms and devices. Join Doris Duke Racial Equity in Clinical Equations Civic Science Fellow Jyoti Madhusoodanan and AHCJ Health IT Beat Leader Karen Blum to learn how these algorithms and devices work, how bias creeps in, the toll it takes, and efforts to solve this problem.

Panelists for this discussion are University of Michigan pulmonologist Michael Sjoding, who presented evidence to an FDA advisory committee on how racial bias in pulse oximeters endangers Black patients; and University of Pennsylvania gastroenterologist Shazia Siddique, who recently led an AHRQ-funded systematic review on clinical algorithms and racial disparities.

Moderator

Karen Blum

AHCJ Health IT Beat LeaderKaren Blum is AHCJ’s health beat leader for health IT. She’s an independent health and science journalist, based in the Baltimore area. She has written for publications such as the Baltimore Sun, Pharmacy Practice News, Clinical Oncology News, Clinical Laboratory News, Cancer Today, CURE, AARP.org, General Surgery News and Infectious Disease Special Edition; covered numerous medical conferences for trade magazines and news services; and written many profiles and articles on medical and science research as well as trends in health care and health IT. She is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and chairs its Virtual Education Committee; and a member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and its freelance committee.

Moderator

Jyoti Madhusoodanan

Doris Duke Racial Equity in Clinical Equations Civic Science FellowJyoti Madhusoodanan is AHCJ’s Civic Science Fellow, covering race in health algorithms as part of a year-long fellowship funded by the Doris Duke Foundation. She is an independent science and health journalist who regularly covers biomedical research, health equity, clinical trials, and the translation of basic research into clinical care. Her reporting on race adjustments in clinical algorithms was supported by a 2020 project fellowship from the MIT Knight Science Journalism program; reporting on other topics has received fellowship support from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the GSA Journalists in Aging program, and others. Madhusoodanan is a senior contributor to Undark magazine and her work regularly appears in Nature, Scientific American, and other outlets. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Science Writers.

Shazia Siddique M.D., M.S.H.P.

Gastroenterologist & health policy researcher, University of PennsylvaniaDr. Shazia Siddique M.D., M.S.H.P., is assistant professor of medicine, division of gastroenterology; associate director for research, Center for Evidence-Based Practice; director of research, Center for Healthcare Improvement and Patient Safety (CHIPS); senior fellow, Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania.

Siddique is a physician-scientist with expertise in health services research and health equity. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology, Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, and Senior Scholar for the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Sjoding, M.D., M.Sc.

Associate professor of medicine, University of Michigan Division of Pulmonary and Critical CareDr. Sjoding received his medical degree from Loyola University in Chicago. At the University of Michigan, he completed a Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship and received a master’s degree in health care research. His research focuses on developing novel digital tools to improve hospital care for patients with acute respiratory diseases.

Lunch and Learn: Building a niche beat as a freelance health journalist
2024-10-17 13:00 - 14:00
