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| Health Care Technology, Reform and Consumer Power, 2005 |
| When I learned I had cancer in 2004, I could've sat around feeling sorry for myself -- and actually, for a few minutes, I did. But there were better things to do -- like get well, while producing some of the best work of my career. I dove into exploring how technology could improve health care -- and health care policy --if the $2 trillion industry and the government could make decision-making smarter and more transparent for patients like me. The experience quickly turned me into someone who can cover the forefront of debates over health care delivery, law and financing, which may be the most crucial domestic issue of the next decade. The three stories here won the New York Press Club consumer-reporting prize and the Excellence in Technology Journalism award from the technology section of the Public Relations Society of America. The PRSA contest, it's worth noting, was judged by journalists and not PR professionals. This line of stories began with The Digital Hospital, my cover story with colleague Arlene Weintraub. Done while I was in chemotherapy, this package drew reader mail from three continents. Most of it was about my first-person piece about how bad medical information-sharing had nearly killed me during my own care, just as 100,000 or more Americans die after medical errors each year. The big follow-up story was Bush's Healthcare Radical, a profile of national health IT coordinator David Brailer. That piece looked at how information-sharing technologies hold the key to standardizing care, unleashing market power to demand better quality, and even saving Medicare. We also said that Brailer's medical Internet threatened a loss of patient choice that will provoke political battles for years. (Indeed, it has already begun: Hillary Clinton's healthcare proposals include one element touched on in the Brailer piece, prompting claims that she would ration access to care). As with Digital Hospital, the Brailer piece is a package where the reporting is spread out among the sidebars and graphics as well as the main bar, so read it all. In between the two came Hunting for Hospitals that Measure Up, a personal-business take on how consumers can use emerging tools to pick treatments, hospitals and doctors, taking more effective control of their own care. The awards matter less than the way the world has changed after my stories -- and some ways in which it hasn't changed enough. Hackensack University Medical Center was profiled on the cover of US News and World Report's Best Hospitals issue six months later, even though US News had never rated Hackensack in the nation's top 40 in any specialty. The doctor I put on the cover was summoned to D.C. to help Senators Clinton and Frist draft legislation they introduced two months later, and he is now a consultant to the Japanese health ministry, which wants to copy emerging U.S. best practices. Subimo, the company highlighted in Hunting for Hospitals, was acquired by WebMD in 2006. David Brailer is running a health-IT private equity fund that Arnold Schwarzenegger gave $700 million of California pension money to invest-- more than George Bush gave Brailer to wire the whole country. Here's what didn't change. I had less serious surgery again in 2007. My doctor had finally bought software to automate tracking and management of my care. Progress, right? Sure. But to save a little time, and because he's used to it, he wrote out my prescription for pre-surgical antibiotics by hand. The pharmacy screwed up and gave me an anti-psychotic drug that put me in an emergency room with an overdose instead. And while my hospital has put in the patient-education system I asked them for in the 2005 first-person piece, it's so primitive it only worked for one of the eight days I was in the hospital. So there's plenty left to do. |