These stories were all related to conflicts of interest in the world of patient safety, and the work led to direct results. The National Quality Forum, which sets patient safety standards that are adopted throughout the health care industry, tried to brush past the fact that the chairman of one of its most prominent committees had been accused by the U.S. Justice Department of taking $11.6 million in kickbacks from a drug company. The NQF put out statements that said none of its standards were compromised by the alleged kickbacks, and those statements were widely reported by other media outlets. I decided to check and see whether the committee chairman, Dr. Chuck Denham, may have actually tried to exert some influence on behalf of the drug company that had been quietly paying him. The resulting story, “Hidden Financial Ties Rattle Top Health Quality Group,” revealed that he had. Transcripts of NQF committee meetings showed Denham lobbying to include specific standards in the recommendations that would benefit the company that was paying him. I spoke to other members of the committee and they said that this was not supposed to be the case. And the final recommendations made by the NQF included an endorsement of the company’s product. Then I learned that Dr. Christine Cassel, CEO of the NQF, was being paid about $400,000 a year to sit on the board of health care companies that could benefit from the recommendations made by the organization she was running. That resulted in the story, “Payments to CEO Raise New Conflicts at Top Health Quality Group.” The story, “Citing Distraction, Quality Forum CEO Resigns Board Seats,” is about her resigning from those positions. The revelations in my story about Denham led to fallout at the Journal of Patient Safety, which he was editing at the time my story came out. He resigned because of the scandal and the editors who replaced him reviewed his work there and found he had published many articles that favored the company that was paying him millions of dollars. I wrote about it in, “Patient Safety Journal Adjusts After an Eye-Opening Scandal.”
