Hearst wins Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigating hospital errors

Hearst Newspapers received a Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists for its “Dead by Mistake” multimedia package that tracked medical errors in hospitals.

It found that 200,000 American patients’ deaths annually are preventable. “Patients are in the dark about facilities’ safety records, yet only fragments of the government’s wealth of information is shared,” it says.

Reporters from Hearst media outlets across the country, as well as graduate journalism students at Columbia University, worked to produce the stories, charts, videos and interactive graphics in the package. Eric Nalder, senior enterprise reporter for Hearst, and Cathleen F. Crowley, medical writer for the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., were the principal writers.

The biggest challenge for the project was the lack of information, Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large
for Hearst Newspapers and the San Francisco Chronicle, said in a background piece on the Web site.

Today’s Tip: Go beyond Freedom of Information Act requests in seeking data.

“We set out to gather information not available and/or accessible to the public, or even to health-care professionals,” Bronstein said. “In the process, we compiled and analyzed collectively nine databases, including hospital-discharge records in four states, hospital administrative penalties, health-care project research and whatever other available information we could find for the most comprehensive look at the issue undertaken to date.”

The Los Angeles Times encountered much the same need for detective work as it sought to flesh out information about sudden-acceleration cases involving Toyotas that resulted in fatalities.

Tackling a nationwide project such as the Hearst one required a national team. Local papers can tackle the story by looking at death certificates and searching for terms such as “adverse” or “infections.”

You can also use Web sites such as this one that compiles information from county Register of Deeds offices to search death certificates. You also have to work outward from the hospital to determine where you can find information: medical examiner, courthouse, funeral homes, etc.