Healthcare Central

  • Earn your Certification in Covering Rural Health today

    Local stories. National impact This year, AHCJ’s annual Rural Health Journalism Workshop is coming to you. Attend four of our five sessions (or watch the recordings below), take the quiz and you’ll receive a certificate recognizing your expertise in one of the most important and evolving beats in health journalism. Aug. 26: Tracking the rocky…

  • Study: Does earlier menopause onset mean faster cognitive decline?

    News coverage about perimenopause and menopause often focuses on midlife symptoms such as hot flashes, poor sleep and brain fog. A new observational study in JAMA Network Open examines what may happen once those symptoms fade. Researchers followed 2,603 older women enrolled in the long-running Religious Orders Study and Rush Memory and Aging Project. They…

  • Nursing home oversight lags, putting residents at risk

    Federal oversight of nursing homes is changing as inspection data show an association between short staffing and serious harm to residents, according to a July KFF analysis. The report examined deficiency data for the nation’s roughly 14,700 nursing homes, home to about 1.2 million older adults and people with disabilities. It found that facilities with…

  • Watch: Sociologist J. Tom Mueller makes ‘The Case for Rural America’

    Rural Health Webinar Series This webinar is Part 5 of our 2026 Rural Health Webinar Series. Attend at least four of our five sessions, complete a brief knowledge check and earn an AHCJ Certification in Covering Rural Health for your resume. Learn more » In the fifth and final webinar of AHCJ’s 2026 Rural Health…

  • Watch: How data centers impact the environment and health in rural areas

    Rural Health Webinar Series This webinar is Part 4 of our 2026 Rural Health Webinar Series. Attend at least four of our five sessions, complete a brief knowledge check and earn an AHCJ Certification in Covering Rural Health for your resume. Learn more » As AI fuels data center construction across the country, many headlines…

  • How to use the Social Security Administration’s Open Data Portal in your reporting

    The Social Security Administration (SSA) Open Data Portal is a free, publicly accessible federal repository. The portal was developed to comply with federal open-data requirements and provides access to the administration’s publicly releasable data assets. Its collections include disability claims data, retirement and survivor beneficiary statistics, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program data, disability hearing information,…

  • Environmental Justice Index: Find communities facing cumulative health effects of place and space 

    Looking for a way to identify communities where environmental hazards, social vulnerability and health risks overlap? The CDC and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Environmental Justice Index (EJI) offers reporters a national, census-tract-level dataset for doing just that. The EJI ranks communities on 36 environmental, social and health factors and combines them into…

Got any book recommendations?

Get In Touch