So much for the notion of evil government, doing its dastardly best to keep its citizens in the dark. By recently releasing two more critical documents and putting them directly onto the Web, the Department of Health has added again to its information arsenal.
“We consider a key part of our job to inform the public,” said Robert J. Marshall, assistant director of community affairs, which is why officials there readily return phone calls and requests for information.
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The media, said Marshall, is “not something we tolerate. It’s something we actively seek out,” especially when there’s such a wealth of knowledge to share.
The department recently released its 1999 Hospital Financial Operations Dataset and a brand new analysis report called “Hospital Costs in Rhode Island” (see related story).
These documents will now be located on the department’s Web site, which also now has a new and more consumer-friendly address, www.healthri.org (its former Web address was the more laborious and less easily remembered www.health.state.ri.us/).
These newest reports will join what’s already a comprehensive mix of information on the Web site, from the latest on the West Nile Virus to quality analysis of Rhode Island hospital care to links with the Joint Commission on Accreditation Organizations.
The Web has proven a vital component in the health department’s commitment to prove the veracity of one of its slogans, “Information is a product, not a possession.”
Deputy Director William J. Waters Jr. compares the transformation of the department since the Internet to the old children’s game of “Here’s the church and here’s the steeple.”
“We’re turning this place inside out,” Waters said, overturning his clenched hands and wiggling his fingers – by releasing what’s always been a vast store of information within their Capitol Hill offices out on the Web for everyone to see.
Waters calls it no less than “a revolution,” and he and Marshall exhibit a restrained excitement and pride in their accomplishment, the knowledge that they’re doing a very good thing.
“As time goes on we hope to cover all the bases,” Waters said, to build on the patient satisfaction and clinical performance information on all health care facilities and professions that now, by law, must be made available to the public. “Right now there’s a lot of information to take advantage of.”
In line with this simplified, one-stop, consumer friendly mode, the Department of Health has also changed its acronym from DOH to HEALTH, to not only make them and their Web site more meaningful for people but to cut to the chase on what the department’s all about.
“Health is one of the major reasons people use the Internet,” not business, Marshall said, and a key concern, especially these days, is that the health information one gets on the Web is legitimate
Health officials have been using the acronym internally for months now, and although it’s been publicized, any change admittedly takes some getting used to. “The problem is DOH doesn’t mean anything,” Marshall said.
And with their Web site now getting more than 15,000 hits every month, “we want to make sure people in Rhode Island have that HEALTH concept firmly in mind,” he said. “People come to our Web site [and] they know they can get the truth.”
“The Web is the best thing that ever happened to public health,” Waters said, by providing a greatly cheaper form of communication than what officials used to have to rely on, like television and radio public service announcements. A good example is the state’s meningitis scare a few years back, where the department could put out reports and lists of vaccine clinics on its Web site, which the media could access directly and then report to their audiences.
Although the information presented on the site represents “millions and millions of dollars of work” in research, the costs of putting it on the Web are rather negligible, Marshall said. It’s also easier now because documents can be designed in a way that they can be transferred to the Web in just a few minutes.
“The dollars are minimal in comparison to the audience that can be reached,” Waters said.
Richard Levinson, M.D., associate executive director of the American Public Health Association, has seen his share of unsavory health information Web sites, so many that he’s come to see the words “good Web site” as almost an oxymoron.
“There’s lots of bad information mixed with good information” out there,” Levinson said, and “unless people are very careful” it’s easy to get misled. Which is why relying on government sites, like the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and yes, sites offered by the health departments of individual states, is so vital to the public health.
“This is a very good step. It’s a very progressive step,” Dr. Levinson said last week of HEALTH’s commitment to releasing the results of its research directly onto the Web. “It’s a wonderful undertaking.”
