For what I believe was the fourth time in the past five years, Phil Hilts of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT asked me to speak to their Medical Evidence Boot Camp. It happened this week in Cambridge. I was honored and delighted to be on the same program with Drs. Steven Woloshin and [...]
I’m a big fan of Minnesota Public Radio and usually a big fan of their health care news coverage. They’ve done some bold and innovative coverage in recent years. But when I heard (on the radio) and saw (online) MPR’s story, “Prostate cancer scan advance helps Mayo doctors with early detection,” I saw some red [...]
On WBUR Boston’s Healthcare $avvy: The Health Care Consumer Experience website, Martha Bebinger is determined to be more informed before she goes in for her second colonoscopy (the other one was 10 or so years ago). So she’s posted a list of questions she wants answered and she’s asking for suggestions for amendments to the [...]
Three authors from the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science authored an analysis in the BMJ, “Stop the silent misdiagnosis: patients’ preferences matter.” I’ll only provide the bookends of what they wrote. The beginning: In recent decades, rapid advances in the biosciences have delivered an explosion of treatment options. This is good news for [...]
For the second straight year, I’ve published a post in the Health Literacy Month blog series hosted by a company called Emmi Solutions. Shared decision-making was their focus this year, and my entry was entitled, “What is the Impact on Shared Decision Making of the Daily Tsunami of Health News?” ——————————— Every day for the past [...]
The journal Arthritis Care & Research has accepted for future publication – and posted online (for subscribers) – an unedited paper, “Preceding the Procedure: Medical Devices and Shared Decision-Making.” The paper builds on a hypothetical example of a man in his 50s with hip arthritis who is facing a decision about total hip replacement. Excerpts: [...]
I had never met Jim Walsh of the Star Tribune, but he called me recently about a story he was working on. I’m glad he did, because I think our conversation (and subsequent conversations with people to whom I referred him) may have altered the direction of the final product. I hadn’t realized that Walsh [...]
Shannon Brownlee and Joe Colucci write in The Atlantic, “The Cost of Assuming Doctors Know Best” – “patient decision aids are powerful quality-improving, cost-cutting tools — but change is stalled by bad financial incentives.” And, on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog for the Washington Post, Sarah Kliff writes, “Will your doctor prescribe antibiotics? Depends on where you [...]
A paper in Health Affairs (subscription required for access) shows what can be done with decision aids in clinical practice in what the authors describe as “the largest (observational study) to date of the implementation of patient decision aids in the context of quality improvement for elective surgery.” A team from Group Health Cooperative in [...]
The pearl I experienced in person was the 14th annual Rocky Mountain Workshop on Evidence-Based Health Care, held last week in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It was the most intensive training in the evaluation of evidence that I’ve participated in. The organizers planned excellent plenary sessions on topics such as bias in research and making policy [...]
This story focuses on a family that may have a rare genetic mutation that increases their risk of heart disease. Unfortunately, the “rare” part wasn’t mentioned until 1,600 words into this 2,100 word story.
While this story adequately addressed 7 of our 10 criteria, the 3 on which it missed were significant omissions, yet could have been easily addressed.
Solid medical conference reporting, with many expert interviews and good context provided. Goes far beyond the conference presentation itself.
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