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.
In Search of Solutions to Alaska’s Law Enforcement Crisis
We spent a year investigating how Alaska’s sexual violence crisis is compounded by a lack of law enforcement. Now, we’re looking at the system and how it can be fixed.
Local Reporting Network
We’ve Been Tracking Pharma Payments to Doctors For Nearly A Decade. We Just Made A Big Breakthrough.
For years, we’ve wondered whether a doctor who received a payment linked to a particular drug prescribed more of that drug. With our new analysis, we finally have the answer: yes.
Your Doctor Might Have a Disciplinary Record. Here’s How to Find Out.
Does your doctor have a criminal conviction? Has your doctor wrongly prescribed controlled substances? Use this tool to look it up.
We Found Over 700 Doctors Who Were Paid More Than a Million Dollars by Drug and Medical Device Companies
ProPublica has been tracking drug company spending on doctors since 2010. We just updated our database and found that companies are still paying private doctors huge sums for promotional talks and consulting.
Updated: Dollars for Docs
How much are your doctors being paid by drug or device companies? Look them up in our newly updated database.
University of Illinois Told Our Partners They Must Share Sexual Misconduct Tips With Campus Authorities. Here’s How We’re Protecting Our Sources.
To maintain the privacy of our sources, ProPublica will collect tips coming in about sexual misconduct at the University of Illinois and only share them with our partners at NPR Illinois under certain circumstances.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Leaders Violated Conflict-of-Interest Rules, Report Finds
A policy review follows months of turmoil at the cancer center, which pledged an overhaul, including new rules on public disclosure and limits on outside profits.
Looking at Nursing Homes? See Which Ones Have Been Cited for Deficiencies
On the eve of a Senate nursing home hearing, we’ve updated Nursing Home Inspect. Compare nursing homes based on the deficiencies cited by regulators in the past three years. You can also search over 60,000 nursing home inspection reports to look for trends or patterns.
See How Your Doctor or Provider’s Prescribing Patterns Compare
Medicare’s popular prescription-drug program serves more than 42 million people and pays for more than one of every four prescriptions written nationwide. Use this tool to find and compare over 460,000 doctors and other providers who wrote over 50 prescriptions in Part D in 2016.
Numerous Mistakes Led to Fatal Blood Transfusion at St. Luke’s in Houston, Report Finds
Hospital leaders released the scathing government inspection report on Tuesday, along with a plan to correct significant lapses in patient care. The changes follow a yearlong investigation by ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle.