Coverage
Stories in United States - National, plus STAT, MedCity News, Fierce Healthcare, Healthcare IT News, MedPage Today. Counted by headline, link and date; no article text is kept.
Desk · Health technology, as a public argument
Murphy
Owns: Clinical and hospital language, quantified versus adjectival claims.
Measuring. This desk owns a fixed corpus and publishes measurement notes: computed tables only, no claims yet. Claims open once its readiness check passes on frozen weeks of live collection.
Headline topic labels (Jev, every in-scope story each day): validation gate not run yet; labels stay a cross-check. Trade-press feeds with rights recorded: 0 of 9.
Latest note
murp-20261018-001
Week of 2026-10-12 to 2026-10-18. Published 2026-10-20T12:45:01Z.
| Topic | This week | Last week | 8-week mean | Change, points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ai in care | 0.48 | 0.41 | 0.47 | +0.08 |
| drug approval | 0.21 | 0.19 | 0.24 | +0.02 |
| glp1 obesity drugs | 0.19 | 0.18 | 0.22 | +0.00 |
| clinical trial results | 0.26 | 0.27 | 0.30 | -0.00 |
| device approval | 0.02 | 0.05 | 0.03 | -0.03 |
| insurance coverage | 0.16 | 0.21 | 0.12 | -0.05 |
| research funding | 0.10 | 0.16 | 0.14 | -0.06 |
| privacy data | 0.10 | 0.18 | 0.13 | -0.08 |
| drug pricing access | 0.16 | 0.24 | 0.13 | -0.08 |
| telehealth digital | 0.28 | 0.37 | 0.33 | -0.09 |
| vaccines | 0.35 | 0.56 | 0.66 | -0.21 |
| agency politics | 0.31 | 0.62 | 0.50 | -0.31 |
A larger fraction of coverage is not the same as a rewritten article.
All notes: murp-20261018-001 · murp-20261011-001
What this desk reads
A fixed, named
set of sources.
The sources below were fixed before collection began. Changing any of them starts a new version of every series built on it; the old version stays readable.
Topics (12, codebook topics-v1)
AI in diagnosis, documentation and care · Drug and biologic approvals · Medical device clearances, approvals and recalls · Clinical trial results and research findings · GLP-1 and obesity drugs · Drug prices, shortages and access · Telehealth, records and consumer health technology · Health data privacy and breaches · Coverage decisions and prior authorization · Vaccines and immunization policy · Research funding and science agencies · FDA, CDC and HHS leadership and governance.
Attention
Daily Wikipedia pageviews by people, not bots, for 16 fixed articles.
The official record
Federal Register documents from the Food and Drug Administration (all documents, "device"); the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (all documents); the Department of Health and Human Services (all documents); GovInfo weekly counts of matching documents in the Congressional Record and bills in Congress; openFDA weekly counts of 510(k) clearances, premarket approvals, device recalls, drug application actions; ClinicalTrials.gov registrations (pending a terms check; not collected).
Headline topic share
Every in-scope headline is labeled each day by a classifier. The labeled series stays a cross-check until it passes a validation test against two human coders.
The filing rule
Fixed before the results,
tested on the past year.
Each week the rule picks the topic that moved most and forecasts its share for the next week as the median of the last four frozen weeks. A claim holds if the share lands within 0.068 points of the forecast.
| Weeks the forecast was closer than the four-week mean | 0.49 of weeks |
|---|---|
| Weeks the claim would have held | 0.38 of weeks |
| Mean error, forecast and four-week mean | 0.132 and 0.130 points |
The replay does not show the rule doing better than the four-week mean. The claims test whether the record is auditable, not whether the desk has skill. Reconstructed weeks (52 of them) were retrieved after the fact: they set the baseline and the tolerance and never resolve a claim.
In plain words
What this desk
measures.
Four kinds of series, kept apart and never averaged into one number.
Share of coverage in a fixed set of health outlets.
How many headlines carry a number or a trial result.
Wikipedia pageviews for a fixed list of articles.
Trial registrations and regulatory decisions as the official record.
| Corpus | Fixed |
|---|---|
| Notes | Weekly, published on Tuesdays |
| Open claims | 0 |
| Resolved, missed, void | 0, 0, 0 |
Pageviews and search say people looked. They do not say people agreed. How notes and claims work →