Covering Hospital Quality: 5 Tips from A Pulitzer Prize Winner
When Charles Ornstein talks about how to cover hospital quality, people tend to listen. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times series with Tracy Weber on egregiously poor medical care and other problems at a Los Angeles hospital led to its closure.
On Saturday, Ornstein, now an investigative reporter with ProPublica, offered some advice to California Health Journalism Fellows meeting in Los Angeles. Here's a sampling:
1. Your state health department is a treasure trove of data. Regularly check for 2567 forms (statement of deficiencies) for hospitals in your area. For a list of state and regional offices, click here. In California, click here to search hospital deficiency reports online and here for hospital financial information and quality data collected by state agencies.
2. Prep well before talking to hospital officials about your findings: "You are at a point of weakness if you haven't done your homework....you want to be in command of an interview. I don't like to interrupt people. Let them give their talking points. If a CEO won't do an interview without questions in advance, you can indicate in your story that the subject wouldn't do a live interview. Keep your questions for the list general. You can ask questions not on the list in the form of follow-up questions."
3. Start small. "You could look at nurses in your community or pharmacists in your community or one year's worth of data at a hospital." ProPublica offers a number of tools and widgets to help reporters localize national health stories, such as Dollars for Docs, that Ornstein and Weber have reported.
4. Organize your data. Take a laptop or portable copier with you when you review documents. Create forms or spreadsheets to organize your data, giving a lot of thought to the data you want to collect or might need in the future before you start entering it.
5. Look for multiple sources of information about hospital quality. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education monitors hospitals for how well they educate their residents. Hospitals whose accreditation to train residents has been revoked or placed on probation are worth your scrutiny. Other sources for reviewing hospital quality data include HealthGrades, HospitalCompare, the Leapfrog Group and the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare.
More Reporting Resources:
Covering Safety-Net Hospitals: Health Reform, Local Budget Cuts: Tips from Karl Stark, Philadelphia Inquirer health and science editor
On the Beat: Covering Hospitals: This is a free online tutorial sponsored by Poynter's NewsU and the Association for Health Care Journalists. Charles Ornstein and Karl Stark are the instructors.