HSPH welcomes health care journalists to Boston

Health journalists toured HSPH labs.

March 22, 2013 — Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) helped welcome more than 750 reporters, editors, and news producers to Boston for the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference, held March 14-17, 2013. HSPH co-sponsored the event, which offered skill-building workshops as well as presentations by HSPH researchers and others on a variety of current health care topics.

HSPH panelists included:

  • K. “Vish” Viswanath, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences, who spoke about making online health information more accessible to everyone;
  • [[Karen Joynt]], instructor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, who spoke about the cost of hospital readmissions on local hospitals;
  • [[Cassandra Okechukwu]], assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences, who spoke about workplace determinants of health;
  • [[Lucian Leape]], adjunct professor of health policy, and David Bates, professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, who spoke about addressing medical errors;
  • [[James Ware]], Frederick Mosteller professor of biostatistics and associate dean for clinical and translational science, who spoke on a panel about interpreting clinical studies.

Thirty journalists participated in a site visit at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center within the HSPH’s Department of Environmental Health. They toured the Aquatic Biogeochemistry Lab, where researchers look at the role of aquatic ecosystems as a conduit for contaminants released to the environment, and the Trace Metals lab, where participants had strands of their hair sampled for traces of mercury. Testing was performed by HSPH researchers Zhao Dong and Nicola Lupoli, and doctoral student Yongmei Shen.

Amy Roeder
Photo by Aubrey LaMedica