Posted 10/28/13 at 1:21 pm FiDA highlight
Columbia School of Journalism
Lecture Hall (2950 Broadway at 116th St.)
November 6, 2013, 10am – 3pm
10:00-10:15 am: Welcome - Chris
Meyer, Consumer Reports, Vice President, External Affairs.
10:15-10:30 am: Introduction: The Overlooked Consumer
Perspective
Lisa McGiffert, Campaign Manager, Safe Patient
Project
10:30- 11:30 am Pulling Back the Curtain: Translating patient safety data
into useable public information.
The
panel will discuss current and future ideas for turning data into information
that can be used by consumers, patients and health care providers to improve
medical care and save lives.
Charlie Ornstein – ProPublica
John Santa, MD, MPH –
Consumer Reports’ Health Rating Center
Pete Eisler, Reporter, USA Today
Moderator:
Marshall Allen – ProPublica
11:30 -12:00 pm Bill Baby Bill: Today’s health care mantra &
what it means for consumers
Rosemary Gibson – Author and public interest
advocate will discuss how overuse of medical care is unnecessary, expensive and
can be dangerous.
12:00-1230 pm: Lunch
12:30-1:30 pm: Bad Bearings: The rise and fall of
the metal-on-metal hip
Steven Tower, MD: An orthopedic surgeon who got a
metal-on-metal hip implant will share his journey on becoming an “accidental
authority on the health hazards of metal-on-metal hip implants.”
1:30-2:30 pm: Stories Matter: Publishing patient experiences to drive public policy change.
This panel will explore participants’
transformation after the pain of death and injury of a loved one to becoming
expert patient safety advocates. Their work demonstrates the important role
that patients and consumers are playing in the push to end medical harm.
John James, PhD- Patient safety advocate and author
of “A New, Evidence-Based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital
Care,” published by The Journal of Patient Safety.
Pat Masters- Author of
Design to Survive, 9 ways an IKEA Approach Can Fix Health Care and Save Lives.
Dan
Walter- Author of Collateral Damage: A Patient, a New Procedure & the
Learning Curve.
Moderator-
Suzanne Henry, Policy Analyst, Consumers Union Safe
Patient Project
2:30-3:00 pm: A Consumer Movement 10 Years in the Making
Lisa McGiffert will cover a retrospective of
accomplishments and work ahead for the Safe Patient Project Network.
Speaker
Bios
Chris Meyer- Vice President of Consumers
Union External Affairs and Information Services. He supervises CU’s multi-state
advocacy campaign work and activist recruitment. Chris also supervises the
Communications Division and Strategic Planning and Information Services. Chris
came to CU in October 2004 after working for 20 years for the New York Public
Interest Research Group, a student-directed research and advocacy group focused
on consumer and environmental issues. He served as the group’s executive
director from 1997-2004.
Lisa McGiffert- Manager of Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project
which works on state and national levels to make information available to
consumers about medical harm, focusing on healthcare-acquired infections,
medical device safety, medical errors, and physician accountability.
Beginning in 2003, the campaign initiated state laws to publish hospital
infection rates and raise public awareness about the problem; today more than
half of the states and Medicare require such reporting. The campaign’s
collaboration with individuals who have personal experiences with medical harm
has developed into a national consumer activist network to make health care
safer. McGiffert routinely lends the consumer voice on these issues at
conferences, with the media and when serving on national and state-based
patient safety advisory committees. From 1991-2003, McGiffert directed CU
advocacy efforts on the full array of health issues in Texas including access
to care, health insurance, physician and hospital regulation and quality of
care. Prior that, she was the legislative director for the Texas Senate
Committee on Health and Human Services and a juvenile probation/parole officer.
Charles Ornstein-Reporter for Propublica.
Charles was a lead reporter on a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times in
collaboration with Tracy Weber, titled “The Troubles at King/Drew” hospital
that won the Pulitzer
Prize for Public Service, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Sigma
Delta Chi Award for public service in 2005. His ProPublica series, with
Tracy Weber, “When Caregivers Harm: California’s Unwatched Nurses” was a
finalist for a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Ornstein reported for
the Times starting in 2001, in the last five years largely in partnership with Weber.
Earlier, Ornstein spent five years as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He is president of the
Association of Health Care Journalists and a former Kaiser Family
Foundation media fellow.
John Santa- Director of the Consumer
Reports Health Ratings Center. John has been Director of the Consumer Reports
Health Ratings Center since 2008. Previously he practiced internal medicine in
Oregon and served in administrative roles in hospitals, insurance companies,
and medical groups that insure and care for commercial, Medicare and Medicaid
patients. From 1999 to 2003 he was Administrator of the Oregon Office for
Health Policy and Research, a state agency concerned with Medicaid and other
areas of health policy.
Pete Eisler- Investigative reporter at USA
TODAY, where he’s reported on everything from lax enforcement of U.S. safe
drinking water laws to medial errors and superbugs in US hospitals, including
the series “When Health
care makes you sick.” In 2013, Eisler shared the Gerald Loeb Award for online
journalism, the Hillman Prize for Web-based investigative reporting, and the
duPont-Columbia Award for digital journalism. His work also has been honored in
the Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Reporting, the National
Headliner Awards, the National Press Club Awards and the Awards for Excellence
in Health Care Journalism. He is a board member and treasurer at the Fund for
Investigative Journalism, which provides reporting grants to independent
journalists, and he volunteers as a high school teaching fellow for the News
Literacy Project in Washington, DC.
Marshall Allen-Reporter for ProPublica.
His “Do No Harm: Hospital Care in Las Vegas,” written in collaboration with
Alex Richards for the Las Vegas Sun, was honored with several journalism
awards, including the Harvard
Kennedy School’s 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a
Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting. His health-care coverage
was recognized as the best in the country in 2009 by the Association of Healthcare
Journalists (AHCJ). In 2007, he won second place for his beat reporting
for the Sun where he spent five years before coming to ProPublica in 2011. He
has been instrumental in creating ProPublica’s Patient Harm Community on
Facebook. Before he was in journalism, Allen spent five years in full-time
ministry, including three years in Nairobi, Kenya. He has a Master’s degree in
Theology.
Rosemary Gibson – Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center; an editor
for JAMA Internal Medicine “Less is More,” author of Wall of Silence:
The Untold Story of the Medical Mistakes that Kill and Injure Millions of
Americans, The Treatment Trap: How the Overuse of Medical Care is
Wrecking Your Health and What You Can Do to Prevent It, Medical
Meltdown, and Battle Over Health Care.
Steven Tower, MD – Tower specializes in orthopedics
in Anchorage Alaska and was featured in a 2012 Consumer Reports article about
medical devices, which led to patients contacting him from all over the world.
Dr. Tower, who was “captured by why hips fail” since his training in hip
replacements, describes himself as an accidental authority on metal-metal
complications following his
own experience of being poisoned by a metal-on-metal hip implant. This
experience launched him on a passionate quest to educate physicians and
patients about the perils of this device. Along the way he ran into roadblocks from the FDA and his
own profession.
John James-Patient safety advocate and author of “A New, Evidence-based
Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care, published by The
Journal of Patient Safety, Sept 2013. This estimate has been hailed as a
much needed update on the death statistics published by the Institute of
Medicine in 1999. John’s Patient Safety America monthly newsletter is dedicated
to his 19-year old son, John Alexander James, who died as a result of
uninformed, careless, and unethical care by cardiologists, and provides
critical analysis of published studies and reports on medical harm. He serves
on the Texas advisory committee overseeing implementation of laws requiring
reporting of health care-acquired infections and medical errors. He is the author of A Sea of Broken
Hearts: Patient Rights in a Dangerous, Profit-Driven Health Care System.
Pat Masters-Author of Design to Survive,
9 ways an IKEA approach can fix health care and save lives. Through colorful
analogies, gripping stories from families and top doctors, and her quest to find
out what happened to her own father, Pat has served up key strategies for
patients, families and health care providers, with the conviction that we can
do better. Pat is a veteran
news and medical reporter at several New England television stations;
the creator of the Patient Pod, a patient engagement & empowerment tool
that brings patient autonomy and communication to the bedside, that is
undergoing a clinical trial in a hospital system with “teachback” to reduce
hospital re-admissions; and an active blogger. Her blog posts at Islands of
Excellence have been cross-posted by the National Patient Safety Foundation,
The HealthCare Blog, KevinMD and Reporting on Health. She worked to pass Rhode
Island’s hospital infection reporting and serves on the state’s advisory
committee to implement that law.
Dan Walter- Author of Collateral Damage: A Patient, a
New Procedure, and the Learning Curve. “MY larger purpose in writing this book
is to tell Pam that she does matter, and that her life is important — and her
story is important – and it deserves to be honestly told…” What unfolds in
Dan’s book is a compelling behind the scenes look at the corrupting corporate
influence on American’s health care system. A review by David Mayer said “… this book should be required
reading for all resident physicians and health science students entering the
field.” Dan has served as a Communications Director of the American News
Network and for US Senator Herb Kohl and as a political consultant with Joe
Trippi. He was a technical writer for Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s health care
reform effort.
