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News Release
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Kaiser Health News (KHN) Wins
Prestigious Barlett & Steele Investigative Journalism Award
SAN FRANCISCO – KFF is pleased
to announce that Kaiser Health News (KHN), its editorially independent health
news service, has won a top prize Wednesday in the 13th annual Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Journalism.
KHN Senior Correspondent
Christina Jewett discovered that for nearly 20 years, the FDA was striking
deals with medical device makers to keep millions of malfunction and injury
reports out of the public database known as MAUDE – and instead letting
device makers submit reports to a secret database, hidden from public
view.
KHN’s “Hidden Harm” investigative series also revealed
that the FDA granted special reporting exemptions that were so obscure that
safety experts, doctors and even a recent FDA commissioner were not aware
they existed.
The hidden database included 500,000
reports of injuries or malfunctions tied to breast implants; 66,000 surgical
stapler malfunctions and more than 50,000 incidents tied to the Sprint
Fidelis, a device implanted in the chest to shock a patient’s heart back to
normal.
Citing KHN’s work, device-safety
experts called on the FDA to open up the hidden reports of harm. That
triggered FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb to tweet that the reports would
be open to the public: “We're now prioritizing making ALL of this data
available," Gottlieb wrote. On June 21, the FDA published its entire
hidden database online, revealing 5.7 million device-related injuries or
malfunctions for the first time.
“We established KHN to do truly
important and impactful journalism just like this – getting out the facts,
holding government accountable, and most of all helping people,” said
Drew Altman, KFF’s President and CEO and Founding Publisher of KHN.
“It’s so gratifying to publish
an investigation that has such rapid impact and will make medical care safer
for millions of patients,” said KHN editor-in-chief Elisabeth Rosenthal.
“‘Transparency’ is all the rage in health care. But as Christina showed, it
often take relentless reporting to expose the truth.”
The KHN series was one of two
“Gold” award winners in the Barlett & Steele Awards, administered by the
Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State
University. Other winners announced Wednesday include The Wall Street
Journal, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, NBC News,
The Associated Press and The Oregonian.
The awards are named for the
investigative team of Don Barlett and Jim Steele, whose honors included two
Pulitzer prizes.
About The Henry J. Kaiser Family
Foundation and Kaiser Health News:
Filling the need for trusted
information on national health issues, KFF (the Kaiser Family Foundation) is
a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. KHN is an
editorially independent program of KFF and is the nation’s leading and
largest health and health policy newsroom, producing stories that run on khn.org and are published by hundreds of news
organizations across the country.
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Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Kaiser Health News (KHN) Wins Prestigious Barlett & Steele Investigative Journalism Award
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