1. Provide the title of your story or series and the names of the journalists involved.
Bad For Business
2. List date(s) this work was published or aired.
Aug. 2, 2010
3. Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Hospitals' reliance on investment income to stay afloat has helped the industry maintain an unsustainable business model in which it doesn't turn a profit on its core business of patient care. The result is a vulnerability to economic downturns such as the Great Recession.
4. Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
I analyzed about 30 published (in book form, not online) datasets on hospital finance and utilization to find out what trends have been driving healthcare economics since the advent of the efficiency revolution. After
creating a massive spreadsheet of the relevant data, I supplemented it with publicly available trend data like population numbers and inflation adjustments.
5. Explain types of human sources used.
While the story features several voices from hospitals, including the CEO of Iowa's largest health system, I also reached out to the academic world to find the views of people whose salaries aren't dependent on the financial returns of hospitals. Not surprisingly, they offered quite a different view.
6. Results (if any).
Let's just say hospital chief financial officers were not caught in a rush to agree that a magazine reporter had unearthed evidence of the flaw in their business model. After the story ran I did note that bond analysts and industry lobbyists seemed more circumspect in describing their investment performance, but I can't say that their shift in thinking was due to the story.
7. Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
No corrections or challenges to the story's accuracy were run or received.
8. Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
When building a complex spreadsheet, make sure you fact-check every single one of your hundreds (or in this case, thousands) of fields of data before you start running calculations and ratios. Don't assume that your first stab at entering the data was accurate, just because the fact-checking will be tedious.