The Newsday series, "Managed Care and Doctors: The Broken Promise," tackled a topic that is becoming increasingly important for journalists to analyze as the health care industry continues to grow larger every year. Whether you're at a large or small news organization, looking at health care in your community is possible. There were three primary databases that Newsday used for its series:
Hospital procedures performed at local hospitals. Use this to calculate the number of hospital visits and charges related to disciplined doctors. (Newsday and The New York Times sued to gain access to this database.) Doctors who have been disciplined. Each state has a regulatory agency for licensed professionals, which would be able to provide this information. (A Web site in New York lists the doctors, but it is not in database format. Newsday received this database electronically through a Freedom of Information Act request.)
There are plenty of industry sources where you can get averages or typical numbers for hospital finances, such as how much debt they have or how much money they make from outpatient versus inpatient procedures.
A list of board-certified doctors. One place to check is the American Board of Medical Specialties, an umbrella group that represents 24 specialty boards. (www.certifieddoctor.com/verify.html)
Finances
Another area of the medical industry that could be scrutinized, without requiring a great deal of resources, is finances of local hospitals or clinics. Most health care organizations have some sort of government regulation, and therefore financial reporting requirements. Each state should have a government agency overseeing health care, where you could obtain a great deal of information. Some hospitals are non-profit organizations, which are required to file Form 990s. The Internal Revenue Service Web site (www.irs.gov) lists organizations that have filed the tax-exempt forms, including some basic information for each one. However, the forms are not available there.
Recently, some IRS-990s have been posted at the Guidestar site (www.guidestar.org/news/features/990status.html) or on the National Center for Charitable Statistics site (http://nccs.urban.org/9901).
Other sources
There are plenty of industry sources where you can get averages or typical numbers for hospital finances, such as how much debt they have or how much money they make from outpatient versus inpatient procedures.
The Health Care Financing Administration may be able to provide some good information. Their Web site (www.hcfa.gov) has some statistical data, such as payments to hospitals and national statistics you can use for comparison purposes.
On its Web site, the Department of Health and Human Services (www.dhhs.gov/progorg/oig/cumsan/index.htm) has a list of people who can't take Medicare or various other federal payments for services, and other useful information.
Before launching into a story of this type, you might also want to check the IRE Resource Center. They have a large number of not only stories that have been done by other news organizations on health care topics, but also some tipsheets that could be useful. You can search the Resource Center database at www.ire.org/resourcecenter.