Audio of this session
• Charles Ornstein, ProPublica
[MP3, 19 minutes | 8.8 MB]
• Duff Willson, The New York Times
[MP3, 22:30 minutes | 20.6 MB]
• Audience Q&A
[MP3, 33 minutes | 15 MB]
Workshop materials
• Ornstein's presentation
• Wilson's presentation | handout of sources
Tip sheets and articles
• How we did it: Investigating organ transplant centers; Ornstein & Weber
• A road map for covering your local hospital's quality; Ornstein & Weber
• Using Nursing Home Compare; Ornstein & Weber
• How well does your state oversee nurses?; Ornstein & Weber
• Investigating health care fraud; Wilson
Associated Press reporter Stephanie Nano helped host the chapter event, which featured New York Times reporter Duff Wilson.
Two award-winning health care reporters offered tipsand story ideas to help other journalists dig into financial reports, legal documents, and databases that the average consumer can't navigate and present the information in a useful way.
Charles Ornstein, a senior reporter at ProPublica and AHCJ president, and Duff Wilson, a New York Times reporter, discussed their work and offered tips on mining hospital data, spotting conflicts of interest, understanding publicly available financial reports, and persuading patients and families to share their stories.
They spoke to 25 journalists and answered questions at “Investigating Health Care,” a recent New York City Metro AHCJ chapter meeting that was hosted by the Associated Press and the AP New York bureau at their Manhattan offices.
Ornstein explained his “Show Your Work” philosophy of transparency: providing readers with the original data or records and research methodology helps them understand what they’re reading and appreciate its context.
He acknowledged that big charts can be intimidating, but that “making friends with data” can identify story ideas and in some cases, help readers make life and death decisions. He pointed out helpful resources available to AHCJ members including health data mapping tools from Esri, spreadsheet tutorials, and Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare database.
Ornstein talks with AHCJ member and independent journalist Sheree Crute at a New York City chapter meeting.
Wilson used his work to demonstrate how cross-referencing journal article authors with legal and financial documents can often reveal undisclosed conflicts of interest. He suggested that that effort might be made easier with the advent of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which takes effect in 2013. It will require companies to disclose all physician honoraria and grant payments.
In his work researching several cases of “uninformed consent,” Wilson used death certificates and obituaries to identify clinical trial subjects who died as a result of being unaware of the deaths of previous participants and of physician’s financial ties to products used in the research. He used SEC filings to root out those financial ties and said they are an excellent source of information
In a discussion of editors’ insistence on including “the human face” of health care stories, the AP’s Stephanie Nano asked the speakers to recommend sources for finding patients and ways to persuade patients and their families to share their experiences.
Wilson warned against using advocacy organizations for finding patients and suggested independent physicians as more objective sources. Ornstein recommended community health clinics and Ivan Oransky, AHCJ treasurer and executive editor of Reuters Health, suggested two Web sites: epatientdave.com and inspire.com.
