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Recent tragedies, past medical cover-ups

medical data enabled the chicago tribune to flesh out stories of patients killed by hospital infections, the fourth leading killer of Americans [chicago tribune photo by nancy stone]

Several of the most significant milestones in reporting tragedies and medical cover-ups benefited greatly from public access to hospital directory information and other medical records and reports.

The New York Times used the lists of thousands of victims from hospital lists and other records to great effect in "A Nation Challenged," a special section published regularly after September 11 to chronicle the devastation following the attacks. In particular, the section's "Portraits of Grief" offered compelling vignettes of victims, helping a public stunned by the enormity of the tragedy to comprehend the consequences and losses of the attacks.

If the privacy rules had been in full effect on September 11, the newspaper might never have compiled such vignettes.

Directory information enabled the public and journalists to keep track of victims felled during the Oklahoma City bombing, the school shootings in Jonesboro, Ark., and Littleton, Colo., and during the anthrax scare last fall. Such information helped the public fully understand the effect and extent of the tragedies.

In 1972, Jean Heller of the Associated Press documented the plight of 399 poor black men in Macon County, Ala., who suffered from untreated syphilis as part of a study funded by the U.S. Public Health Service. Federal doctors studied the effects for decades instead of offering the men penicillin that could have cured them.

Until Heller reported the details of what is now known as the Tuskegee Experiment, the study enjoyed the endorsement of federal regulators and the American Medical Association.

Such public oversight would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, under the new federal medical privacy rules.

Rule changes

In comments filed by SPJ, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and others, journalists encouraged the Health Department officials to revise the proposed rules to accommodate newsgathering, specifically allowing hospitals to release "certain essential information to secure its health and safety and to enable it to oversee the conduct of its government and the performance of its health care system."

Indeed, even something as routine as a hospital directory is an invaluable and oft-used source of information for journalists. Duff Wilson of The Seattle Times said calls to hospitals for name, condition, admittance and discharge times about patients happen all of the time, particularly in deadline reporting.

"We'll call the hospital several times during a shift," Wilson said. "And they'll tell us if the patient is satisfactory or critical . . . it lets us know if this is a serious event."

That's about the only time, too, Wilson said, that journalists use arguably private information without seeking patient permission. For Seattle Times' prize-winning series "Uninformed Consent" last year, Wilson and reporter David Heath secured the permission of more than a dozen families to view their patient histories and other documents.

The result: Details on how patients died prematurely amid two clinical trials for cancer treatment at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and how the patients and their families were never told about their doctors' financial interests in the treatment.

"Journalists' concerns are usually about the public interest and how medicine is being practiced and overseen," Wilson said. "And it's almost never without the complete permission of our subjects."

Susan Kelleher, an investigative reporter at the Seattle Times who won a Pulitzer at the Orange County Register in 1995 for a series of articles on human egg and embryo thefts at a University of California fertility clinic, said the rules would further barricade avenues of reporting that already have more than their fair share of roadblocks.

With the help of concerned clinic staff, Kelleher and other investigative reporters published more than 200 stories of fertility fraud. The exposure led to the closing of the clinic and the adoption of improved fertility clinic guidelines by the American Medical Association.

In the meantime, Kelleher said the privacy of patients for the fertility story and other reporting efforts was never compromised.

"I have yet to have any single person express outrage to me that I had access to their medical records," Kelleher said. "And that's after seven years of health reporting."

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