Charles Ornstein
Charles Ornstein is managing editor, local, overseeing ProPublica’s local initiatives. These include offices in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, a joint initiative with the Texas Tribune, and the Local Reporting Network, which works with local news organizations to produce accountability journalism on issues of importance to their communities.
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Charles Ornstein is managing editor, local, overseeing ProPublica’s local initiatives. These include offices in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, a joint initiative with the Texas Tribune, and the Local Reporting Network, which works with local news organizations to produce accountability journalism on issues of importance to their communities. From 2008 to 2017, he was a senior reporter covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry. He then worked as a senior editor and deputy managing editor.
Prior to joining ProPublica, he was a member of the metro investigative projects team at the Los Angeles Times. In 2004, he and Tracy Weber were lead authors on a series on Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, a troubled hospital in South Los Angeles. The articles won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service.
In 2009, he and Weber worked on a series of stories that detailed serious failures in oversight by the California Board of Registered Nursing and nursing boards around the country. The work was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Projects edited or co-edited by Ornstein have won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, the Scripps Howard Impact Award, the IRE Award, the Online Journalism Award and other major journalism honors.
He previously worked at the Dallas Morning News, where he covered health care on the business desk and worked in the Washington bureau. Ornstein is a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University. Ornstein is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Outlook for “Obamacare” in Two Maps
How states handle Medicaid and new insurance exchanges will determine if President Obama’s re-election victory gives his healthcare overhaul a boost.
Why Do Hospital Generators Keep Failing?
The power failure at New York University Langone Medical Center during Hurricane Sandy shows that hospitals still may not be doing enough to prepare for disasters.
Search Our Nursing Home Inspection Data, Now With Thousands of New Reports
New government data expands our searchable cache of nursing home inspection reports to include details about 217,000 reported deficiencies.
Now On Nursing Home Inspect: 140,000-Plus Inspection Reports
Our super-fast news app lets users easily find violations at nursing homes nationwide.
Nursing Home Inspect Update: More Homes, More Violations
Our Nursing Home Inspect news app now contains more than 134,600 deficiencies from nearly every nursing home in the United States. News organizations have identified many problems at homes in their communities.
Tipsheet: How to Use Nursing Home Inspect
Tips to help you get the best results from your searches.
What We Found Using Nursing Home Inspect
We’ve made it easy to search nearly 118,000 deficiencies found during government inspections at 14,565 nursing homes nationwide.
Why Can't Medicine Seem to Fix Simple Mistakes?
The death of 12-year-old Rory Staunton from septic shock prompted NYU's Langone Medical Center to revamp its emergency room procedures to address a startling lapse. History shows that the profession is unlikely to learn from this mistake.
Mystery After the Health Care Ruling: Which States Will Refuse Medicaid Expansion?
The Supreme Court ruling allows states to decline the Medicaid expansion included in the Affordable Care Act without losing federal money for their existing Medicaid programs. If the 26 states that challenged the law opt out, an estimated 8.5 million fewer people would be covered by Medicaid.
Patient Died at New York VA Hospital After Alarm Was Ignored
The Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General again found problems with the care provided by nurses in a cardiac monitoring unit at the VA hospital in Manhattan.