In this special edition of “How They Did It,” Ananya Bhargava interviews Chicago Tribune reporters Lisa Schencker and Emily Hoerner about their recent award-winning investigative series “Medical Misconduct.” The two reporters demonstrate the great investigative work that can be done when an investigative reporter teams up with a beat reporter to dive deeper into their realm of expertise. Schencker, a reporter covering the business of healthcare, spent many years reporting on allegations of abuse by a single doctor but felt there was still more to the story. With the assistance of Hoerner, a long-time investigative reporter, the two reporters were able to uncover repeated mishandling of sexual abuse allegations within multiple well-known Illinois health systems. In this episode, the reporters discuss how they got started on the investigation, the obstacles they faced, and what surprised them most about the process.
Their series won the 2024 Silver prize in the Barlett and Steele Awards Regional/Local category. Visit the Chicago Tribune to read their investigation or businessjournalism.org/awards to view all the 2024 winners.
Transcript
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Ananya Bhargava: Welcome to a special edition of We Mean Business, where we dive into the stories behind the Barlett & Steele Award winners. Join us as we uncover the winners’ investigative processes, the challenges they conquered, and the powerful impact of their reporting.
Chicago Tribune reporters Lisa Schencker and Emily Hoerner are the winners of the Silver Award in the Barlett and Steele Regional/Local Category for their “Medical Misconduct” series. This investigation unveiled the repeated mishandling of sexual abuse allegations within multiple well-known Illinois health systems. The reporters documented not only how health systems failed to protect patients from healthcare workers who were under investigation for sexual abuse, but how allegations of abuse were quietly settled away from the public eye and out of reach of regulatory boards. In today’s episode, I had the privilege of sitting down with the incredible reporters to learn more about how they did it.
Lisa Schencker: I am Lisa Schencker. I am a business reporter, business health reporter, at the Chicago Tribune. I have been a reporter for a long time, but this was the biggest investigative project I had ever done. I’d say, over the years, I had done, like a little bit of investigative work here and there, but not to this scope.
Emily Hoerner: I am Emily Horner. I’m a reporter at the Chicago Tribune as well, and I primarily work on projects and investigations. Prior to joining the Tribune, I was working on, like criminal justice-related investigations at a nonprofit newsroom. And since I joined the Tribune, I kind of focused a little bit more on, like public health and things related to that. And I got connected with Lisa and we started working on this project together. It’s the first time our world’s kind of joined up.
Schencker: I thought what our paper did, pairing us up, made a lot of sense for this kind of a project. Because I feel like I had reported on the issue, I had a background in covering healthcare, and Emily as a full-time investigative reporter, had the investigative skills. She knew how to make the databases and exactly which documents to look at and how to organize all that. And so I thought that made a lot of sense, and I could see that working in other newspapers as well. You know, you take the beat reporter and pair them up with the investigative reporter and then they can kind of share their knowledge and it worked well.
Hoerner: Yeah, I agree. And I think you can definitely do investigations on your own, but working with other reporters collaborating is always a smart idea. There’s so much that I learned from Lisa and I think our story, our series, was better for it.
Bhargava: Perfect. So, what inspired you to begin this investigation?
Schencker: As a reporter covering healthcare, I had been writing for years about what happened with Dr. Ortega at Endeavor where he had these lawsuits that had been filed against him accusing him of sexually abusing patients, and I had written a number of just kind of daily stories about those lawsuits and about him pleading guilty to the criminal charges. Over the years, as I had talked with the lawyers, and as I had written about this, it just seemed to me like there was more there, there was more to the story. Always it struck me that they were alleging in these lawsuits that the health system that employed him knew and had warning and I wanted to dive deeper into that. And then, once Emily and I were connected, we worked together to really expand on that.
Hoerner: Yeah, and I think the original kind of thought that Lisa really had was, “Let’s really understand what happened with this one particular case.” And I think once I joined in, we were like, “Well, is this, like, a really rare thing?” I feel like we hear about these big cases happening every once in a while, these like one-off, and is there something bigger here? What’s the universe of this problem in our state where we work and live? And can we get at that?
Bhargava: So what would you say were your first steps when you were beginning this investigation?
Hoerner: One of the first things that we had taken on was figuring out other cases. So we were looking for lawsuits that were filed against healthcare professionals. We were looking at healthcare professionals who had been criminally charged, and then, like once, we found an example of a healthcare provider, then we tried to find out if anyone else had also accused this person of wrongdoing. And so, you check, like all of these different areas to try to find examples that might be relevant. Another thing we did was Freedom of Information Act requests at locations of hospitals where people made complaints for certain crimes like criminal sexual assault or criminal sexual abuse. And then we’d find the incidents, and then we’d request the reports, and then we’d read the reports and see if any were relevant and try to learn more from there. So it was really piecing together information from many, many different places to try to build a data set of information about these types of cases at hospitals and other like healthcare locations in Illinois.
Bhargava: So what were the main challenges or obstacles you faced during the investigation and reporting process? And then also, how did you navigate those obstacles?
Hoerner: I think there were a lot of obstacles. It’s not like we could go to the hospital and be like “Hey, when has this happened and can you produce records for us?” First of all, they don’t have to tell us anything. They don’t even have to answer our questions. Certainly, they don’t have to turn over documents. And then, you know, we’re also talking about, you know, patients have privacy as well. That I think was a big barrier, was like how are we going to get around going directly to the source, which is all like that would have been the easiest thing, if we could just ask all of the hospitals, “Has this ever happened?” Instead, it was like let me file a Freedom of Information Act request with the police department, who may have learned about this thing that happened at the hospital, but maybe they didn’t learn about it. So let me check for anytime that this hospital has been sued and maybe there’s something relevant in there. You know we tried to be thoughtful about how we pursued stuff. We tried to think about all of the public entities and how they interact with these nonprofit and private businesses that are providing healthcare to people.
And then the other kind of big obstacle was probably making sure we were really careful and respectful to the people that we spoke with, making sure that they were feeling comfortable when they were sharing their stories. And we, of course, never wanted to re-traumatize someone for the sake of a news story that is not worth it.
Schencker: I think one of the other obstacles we faced was access to court hearings. At one point, Emily might be able to speak to this as she was the one who got kicked out of the first hearing specifically. But we were trying to keep tabs of what was going on in the civil cases against Dr. Ortega. And one of the hearings Emily went to, the judge basically ordered her to leave, and we had to get a Tribune lawyer involved to ensure that we had access to these public hearings.
Hoerner: Yeah, I was in court one day, and the judge essentially kind of said, “How did you know about this hearing? How does this reporter know about this hearing today?” And kind of told me that the appropriate time for me to be there is, like, I think when the case goes to trial. And so obviously, we as reporters try to know what our rights are. And so we reached out and the Tribune got an attorney on the case, and made sure that we were allowed to be there. Lisa and I still attend the hearings. The cases are still ongoing. So it’s still something that we are following to this day.
Bhargava: Your investigation definitely highlighted broad systemic issues and the health systems negligence when it came to these cases, and then it also had a very human focus. So how did you balance that covering like the more legal and technical aspects of it, while also articulating the accounts of the survivors?
Schencker: I think we felt like it was really important to focus on the survivors’ stories, just because it really shows readers like, “Why does this matter? What does this mean to a person? What does this look like?” And so we really, we tried to reach out to as many survivors as we could. We did a lot of interviews and I think we had survivors at the top of two of the stories interspersed throughout the second one, but we just really wanted to make sure that we were including survivors voices in each of the parts, just to really humanize the situation and show like, why does this matter? And we felt like it was something that anyone could relate to, right? Like everybody goes to the doctor, everybody has to go to the hospital at some point. And this was just really something that anyone, any reader, could read this and see why this would matter.
Hoerner: Yeah, and I think we gave just as much reporting power to understanding what is legally required and what happened in all these incidents and, you know, reading through these thousands and thousands of pages of records that we had. But when we got to the point where we were writing we wanted to kind of let the people who had first-hand experience really speak for themselves, give them space in the story.
Bhargava: Would you like to share any other parts of the investigation that you feel that we should really talk about?
Schencker: One thing we found surprising was just how many health systems we found where this had occurred. We knew about what was happening at the one health system that started the wheels turning on this project, but I think I was surprised to see how many other health systems it had happened at, where there was an allegation of abuse, and the person stayed on the job, and then there was another allegation of abuse. And it was also surprising, I think the lack of consequences when that happened.
Hoerner: So yeah, I agree it was definitely surprising. And I think, like for me, as a person who had not done a lot of reporting on the healthcare system. It was also very interesting just to kind of start learning about how all of this works, and I think I didn’t have an appreciation for how difficult it was going to be to get information. So I think that was, just from not having a deep understanding of that world, that was a big challenge that I wasn’t necessarily anticipating.
Bhargava: And how would you say you view the role of investigative journalism in society today?
Hoerner: The reason I got into this is is because I was hoping to be able to be a part of positive change in the world. And so I think, doing some of these stories, having the ability to take the time to really report something out even if it takes many months to do so can, in the end, produce something that is important and valuable to society and to the people who make decisions about what our laws say and what is required. So I think it’s really important. I’m a biased person, obviously I am an investigative reporter.
Schencker: Yeah, I would agree with that, that I see investigative journalism as shining a light on problems, just like a lot of journalism does. And I think having spent pretty much all of my career as a beat reporter, you know, I’ve always thought of all journalism as shining a light. But this was different to me in that I feel like most of the stories I write, I’m like writing about a development, something has happened with an institution or a person. Or I’m writing about a problem that someone else found, and this to me, as an investigation, was so different and that it wasn’t us reporting on a problem someone else had found. It was us digging into, really digging into the documents, and sending out a lot of FOIAs and talking to a lot of people to basically say, “Hey, we found a problem here.” You know, here is something that we were able to uncover. And so that, to me, was kind of the difference between doing a big investigative piece as opposed to what I do in my normal job as a beat reporter. We really had to know our stuff and be as sure as we could possibly be about our findings, right? Because, like I was saying before, these were our findings. Y ou know, it’s not like as a beat reporter when someone produces a report and you can say, “Well, according to the authors of this report.” We had to be really solid on what we understood the law to be and what the documents said, and yeah, where the holes were in the systems.
Bhargava: That was the Chicago Tribune’s Lisa Schencker and Emily Hoerner who are the Silver Award winners of the Barlett and Steele Regional and Local category. To everyone listening thank you for tuning in. For more information on the awards, visit our website businessjournalism.org.
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