Investigating health care

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For all the work by California investigative reporter Charles Ornstein that has alerted the public and moved agencies to act, the question he hears often most is: Why don’t you write more positive stories about hospitals?

His reporting has uncovered lapses in care in California hospitals and beyond. He and his colleagues examined the longstanding troubles at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Medical Center -- which closed this summer after repeatedly endangering patients -- and won a Pulitzer Prize for their five-part series. Last year, he and reporter Tracy Weber chronicled the failures of the nation’s organ transplant system, explaining how hundreds of patients in Northern California were effectively shut off from new organs when they were moved into Kaiser Permanente’s new kidney transplant program in San Francisco. That coverage triggered a congressional investigation and changes in federal regulations; the program was forced to shut its doors within days of their first story.

The praise comes in from those who want to share similar stories, seek advice on how to research their own doctors, and say they are glad they don’t have to learn the hard way about the serious problems being uncovered.

But inevitably those who work in health care and those who have had benign experiences with the health-care systems being scrutinized raise the question: Why do you seem to put the most energy and effort into reporting the negative?

Ornstein answers:

We hope that we are making health care safer by writing about what doesn’t go right.

Certainly there are many positive stories about what takes place in hospitals -- exemplary employees, new trends and state-of-the-art equipment. Doctors, hospitals and other health care providers are in the business of treating diseases and saving lives. Most health care professionals put in long hours and honestly bill for their services. If they make an error or mistake, many are honest about it and apologize. In general, patients are satisfied with their care and many patients owe their lives to quality medical treatment.

But as an investigative reporter, I examine cases in which the system breaks down and patients are placed in harm’s way. Most people expect to receive competent care. We believe it is very important to show examples where they don’t and what can be done to provide safer care.

Recently, actor Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins received an accidental drug overdose at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. By writing about such preventable errors, not only did The Times encourage patients to ask questions about their own care, we also flagged the need for other hospitals to examine their own practices. Similarly, we heard time and again that our stories about King-Harbor, formerly known as King/Drew, caused hospital executives around the country to examine their quality practices.