McGrory ’05 named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting
by Alex Reboredo ’22, Opinion Editor
Kathleen McGrory ’05, the deputy investigations editor at the Tampa Bay Times, was recently named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series of eight articles, called “Heartbroken.” In the series, McGrory and her colleague Neil Bedi investigated the heart surgery program at the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., prompted by a tip submitted in Nov. 2017.
“I was alerted of pretty big and important personnel changes in the unit,” said McGrory. “Two doctors — one of whom was a surgeon, the other was in charge of a cardiovascular intensive care unit — had both left the hospital under somewhat mysterious circumstances. The tipper reached out and said that it was something that we, at The Tampa Bay Times, should look into because it was his understanding that babies were being hurt and killed.”
McGrory and Bedi used hospital discharge data to show that the death-rate for children who had heart surgeries had tripled within a period of two years. They also collected records that exposed the systemic problems with the hospital’s quality of care, and that front-line workers — like nurses — have raised concerns back in 2015. It wasn’t until 2017 that the hospital began addressing these problems.
The Pulitzer Prizes recognized the series for “impactful reporting, based on sophisticated data analysis, that revealed an alarming rate of patient fatalities following Johns Hopkins’ takeover of a pediatric heart treatment facility.”
The reporting, however, was far from easy.
“There were a number of challenges. Investigative reporting is hard, By nature, you’re trying to report on things that somebody doesn’t want out there. But investigative reporting on hospitals and healthcare is particularly hard for a number of reasons,” said McGrory, the former health and medicine editor at the paper.
She added: “We were trying to look at the hospital’s outcome. We know that the hospital had its own data that it collects and looks at that helps it know how its various programs are doing, but the hospital didn’t have to turn that data over to us because that wasn’t public data. There was some data that was out there available through an organization of heart surgeons, but that data was four-year data. So it was an average death rate over four years. We knew that four years worth of data could hide one year of bad outcome.”
McGrory and Bedi, however, were able to identify an alternate data source by pulling a detailed hospital discharge record that the hospital must send every year to comply with Florida State Law that included patients’ gender, age, reason of admittance, treatments, doctors that conducting the treatment, insurance, and billing information.
For the series, McGrory and Bedi were using death rates and compliance rates but found the methods that the federal government used to report that data was out of date. To use more accurate data, Bedi created a method for calculating death and compliance rates by reading all of the academic data, talking to experts, and understanding the data before them.
The reporting posed an emotional challenge, too.
“You’re meeting people and you’re asking them to tell you about the most devastating thing that’s ever happened to them,” McGrory said. “So, by nature, that’s an emotional experience both for the person you’re interviewing and you, as the journalist.
“Oftentimes, as reporters, we recognize that if we, ourselves, get too emotional it’s going to prevent us from doing our job. We believe the job we have to do is really important. We have to tell the story to prevent this situation from happening to other families in our community.”
McGrory didn’t always have these skills, however. With a major in Spanish and Economics and a few Chinese courses under her belt, her journalism career started on the Hill. She was also an editor and writer for The Spectator, contributing to every section of the paper during her four years as a student.
“Hamilton doesn’t have a journalism program, and that was just fine for me,” she said. “The open curriculum at Hamilton really encouraged curiosity and allowed me to dabble in a lot of different subjects that I otherwise wouldn’t have learned about, and I think that’s very much in keeping with journalism.”
During her time on the Hill, she also worked for the Utica Observer-Dispatch and was a stringer for the Syracuse’s The Post Standard. Reflecting on her experience, McGrory said that “Hamilton really gives you the ability and framework to study what you love, and do what you love, and do it in a creative way.”
McGrory continued her studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism then interned at The Miami Herald. “The rest,” she says,” is history.”
