The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "emergency" ...
-
Cracking the Codes
Cracking the Codes documented how thousands of medical professionals have steadily billed Medicare for more complex and costly health care over the past decade – adding $11 billion or more to their fees – despite little evidence elderly patients required more treatment. The series also uncovered a broad range of costly billing errors and abuses that have plagued Medicare for years – from confusion over how to pick proper payment codes to apparent overcharges in medical offices and hospital emergency rooms. The findings strongly suggest these problems, known as “upcoding,” are worsening amid lax federal oversight and the government-sponsored switch from paper to electronic medical records.
Tags: Medicare; health care; billing; medical offices; hospitals; government; medical records
-
Addressing 911
It all started with a tip from people on the front lines, and quickly unraveled into a story that has sparked much needed oversight of Ingham County's new consolidated 911 center. The center merged two 911 dispatch centers into one back in June of 2012. In October, a group of first responders approached Reporter Ann Emmerich with alarming concerns about problems within the system. They believed at least two deaths could be connected to delayed response times because emergency crews were sent to the wrong address. They also believed county officials were trying to "cover up" the problems. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Ann Emmerich began digging into records from the 911 Dispatch Center. She obtained documented complaints from the Lansing Fire Department, call logs from the dispatch center, and time stamped recordings of 911 calls. Just days after Emmerich made those FOIA requests, Lansing's Mayor announced he would form a task force to investigate concerns with the County's 911 Center. At the time, there was no advisory board in place to oversee the center. Once officials went public with the formation of a task force, the original board that worked to establish the 911 center was brought back together to begin oversight.
Tags: broadcast; 911; FOIA; 911 center
-
Bales: Army suspect in Afghan shooting was liable in financial fraud
On the day that tips arose about a U.S. soldier who may have strafed two Afghan villages, I left the office for a flight to Tacoma. Within 48 hours of the soldier’s being identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, I and two colleagues broke the news that the emerging hagiography of Bales drafted by family and attorneys had more to it than the story of a soldier who enlisted at the ripe of 27 driven by outrage over the 2001 terrorist attacks—and then broken down by an unrelenting cycle of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Our story started with pure spidey senses: Bales’ s family and lawyer said he had left a stockbroker’s career to enlist, as they explained his call to serve. Yet he had not finished college and clearly had financial troubles, I had determined. And he was active in brokerage in the late 1990s in Florida I learned by checking assorted online records—which raised my suspicions about the quick-money penny stock trading that was commonplace then. Based on those instincts, while also doing the running daily story from Bales’ Army base in Washington state, I had checked some online brokerage records and enlisted Julie Tate to look at others and run through civil and criminal filings in Ohio (Bales’s home state and then nationally). Within an hour, I had found one suspicious record and Julie had found others and we were off on a 30-hour run of investigative reporting and boots on the ground interviews that yielded the breaking news of Bales’s more complicated—and less laudatory—past in the period just before he joined the Army. We located and I interviewed an elderly couple who had lost substantial savings in accounts managed by Bales and received copies of detailed financial records that corroborated their claims and showed Bales as the account manager. We also peeled back corporate records for a now-shuttered firm run by Bales and his brother with backing from a longtime friend and reached him to further flesh out the checkered professional history of the Staff Sgt. at the center of an explosive, fast-moving and intensely competitive story. The story demanded intense investigative reporting that netted notable results in far far less than 30 days of a breaking event.
Tags: U.S. soldier; Afghanistan; military draft; terrorist attacks; deployment
-
Hidden suffering, hidden death
The deaths of severely disabled Illinois residents who lived at home cared for by friends and relatives were not being investigated by the state agency specially created to protect them — the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Human Services. The reason given for not investigating?The agency's internal documents showed that that OIG considered the dead to be "ineligible for services," even when victims died shortly after being hospitalized on an emergency basis and after the agency had received calls on its hotline alleging that the disabled person had been abused or neglected. The Belleville News-Democrat's wide-ranging investigation initially focused on the deaths of 53 of these home bound disabled adults.
Tags: Department of Human Service; Office of the Inspector General; OIGl; victims
-
From the Data, Educational Disparities Emerge
The analyses showed stark racial and ethnic disparities in student retentions, but states continue to plow forward with the policies, doing almost no analyses on their own. The racial gaps surprised even experts.
Tags: racial gaps; education
-
A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea
The book tells how the government and BP responded to an emergency unlike anything encountered before in the history of petroleum engineering: a blowout in imle-deep water. The book chronicles the 87-day effort to cap the Macondo well after the explosion on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon.
Tags: Deepwater Horizon; BP; oil rig; drilling; Macondo well
-
A Lethal Dose- The War On Synthetic Drugs
The Star Tribune broke new ground with its investigation of the shadowy world of synthetic drugs, which quickly emerged as a substantial public health threat in 2011. Though these substances have been touted as "safe and legal," the drugs have provoked unusually violent behavior and deadly consequences.
-
Campus Security
ChicagoTalks reporters found only a handful of the 63 colleges and universities in Cook County are following an Illinois law -- the Campus Security Enhancement Act of 2008 (SB 2691) -- aimed to make campuses safe. Under the law, colleges and universities are required to create all-hazard emergency and violence prevention plans, along with threat assessment teams and violence prevention committees. The schools are also required to hold annual security trainings. ChicagoTalks reporters contacted, often repeatedly, every public and private, two and four-year college and university in Cook County, and determined that 11 schools appear to be violating the law, while 45 schools provided conflicting or incomplete information -- or no information at all. Reporters found just seven schools in compliance.
Tags: campus security; Cook County; violence prevention; colleges; universities
-
Parking Patients
"Parking Patients" examined the amount of time hospitals in the Memphis area were taking to assume custody of patients brought to their emergency departments by city ambulances. In hundreds of cases we found patients were spending hours strapped to ambulance stretchers, waiting inside emergency departments for hospital staff to sign off on the transfer of care. In the meantime, city paramedics were tied up waiting with the patients and unavailable to answer other emergency calls. We found dozens of cases in the last year in which the city ran out of available ambulances to answer these calls, and had to rely on private companies to fill the gap, sometimes resulting in longer response times. The fire department blamed these shortages on the practice of hospitals using paramedics as "free labor."
Tags: broadcast; hospitals; paramedics; patients; waiting; ambulances
-
Consumer Medical Investigations
CBS explored bogus health plans, one of the biggest consumer fraud issues to emerge from the economic recession.
Tags: medical care; haggling; consumer fraud; health care