behind the news

KPIX Leads the Way on the Kaiser Investigation

The San Francisco CBS affiliate’s series of reports on Kaiser this month shows just how good local television news can be, when it wants to.

May 19, 2006

Last week we tipped our hat to the Los Angeles Times for publishing a set of investigative stories which shed light on major problems plaguing the in-house kidney transplant program launched in mid-2004 by Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. The stories, we said, marked “journalism that is the very definition of a public service.”

As it turned out, that piece failed to recognize the crucial work of another California news organization which deserves just as much credit for its role in breaking and advancing the Kaiser story with a concurrent and continuing set of impressive reports: KPIX-TV in San Francisco.

At 7:38 p.m. on the evening of May 2, in fact, it was CBS 5’s investigative team, led by reporter Anna Werner, which first broke the explosive Kaiser news in an online piece headlined, “Kaiser Permanente SF Facing Transplant Troubles” — shortly before the Times published its first article.

Later that night CBS 5 led off its 11 p.m. newscast with Werner’s story — and it was a whopper.

The story began with Corra Mayo, an elderly woman who in 1999 was referred by Kaiser Permanente (her HMO and the state’s largest) to UC San Francisco Medical Center to be put on its waiting list for a new kidney.

In 2004, Mayo believed she was at the top of UCSF’s list to receive a kidney. “But before that could happen, Kaiser announced they would take over doing those transplants themselves rather than paying UCSF to do them,” Werner reported, adding that Kaiser sent Mayo a letter promising “you will not lose your place on the waiting list.”

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Then Mayo’s case got lost in the shuffle — and when her family finally got a response from a Kaiser official, Mayo said, “They didn’t recognize the case and thought they must’ve misplaced my chart.” So now Mayo — initially expecting a four-year wait for a new kidney — has been waiting seven. “It’s sort of a fatalistic feeling, because I’m just almost ready to give up,” she told Werner.

“There are more than 2,000 patients like Mayo on Kaiser’s transplant waiting list, and some of them are desperately ill,” Werner continued, broadening the story to report “some troubling questions” about the Kaiser program from patients and insiders that her investigative team had uncovered.

Reporting that two of the Kaiser program’s three transplant nephrologists (the doctors who care for kidney patients before and after surgery) were on personal leave, Werner presented a crucial letter from one of them, James Chon. In January Chon “wrote this 12-page letter to Kaiser’s physician-in-chief,” Werner said, “detailing problems he saw in the program, including ‘numerous resignations’ and other internal issues, which the doctor called ‘very serious and potentially explosive problems.'”

The broadcast relied on an extensive interview with David Merlin, the former administrator for Kaiser’s program, who said the program was and is “disorganized.” “Entire patients were lost for long periods of time,” remarked Merlin, who said he was fired by Kaiser after working there two months:

I had administrative staff and nursing staff bringing me phone messages and bringing me patient charts to say, ‘Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Here’s another one that fell through the cracks,’ and that was a term that they used often. …

Many, including myself, were concerned that some patients may have had a tremendous decline in their health status because of the neglect that had occurred. And the patients have a right to know.

The broadcast also put Kaiser officials on the hot seat in the way a newspaper story could not, as executive Mike Alexander and medical director Sharon Inokuchi defended Kaiser’s program before the camera. “We’ve had a great success rate,” Alexander asserted, while Inokuchi improbably claimed that any patients who had been lost track of “did not suffer any disadvantage as a consequence.”

The Merlin interview was an exclusive, while Mayo’s plight, Chon’s letter and an Inokuchi interview were all separately featured in the initial story from the Times, which most of its readers first saw with the delivery of their printed papers the next morning.

All in all, the KPIX story clearly and succinctly highlighted the Kaiser program’s problems — the first of many consistently high-quality reports that Werner, a two-time duPont Award winner, would go on to deliver.

The next night, Werner returned to report that the state Department of Managed Care had confirmed they were investigating Kaiser’s kidney program — the lede San Francisco Chronicle readers would see fronted on that paper’s business section the next morning. Early in the evening of May 8, Werner wrote on CBS 5’s Web site that “Federal and state Medicare and health officials conducted a surprise inspection of the Kaiser transplant program late Monday” — a more expansive version of the lede the Times ran with its Tuesday editions.

And on it has gone, as Werner has reported new developments as the story has unfolded — from the public apology to patients by Kaiser’s top official in Northern California, to Kaiser’s stunning decision to suspend its transplant program, to the problems afflicting even the hotline Kaiser set up to help its kidney patients transition back to care at outside hospitals.

And so permit us to revise our earlier statement: Both the journalism produced by the Times and that produced by KPIX performed a public service here. Each investigation played to the strengths of its medium, and together the Times and KPIX’s initial stories exposed the manifold problems of the Kaiser program, setting the stage for the striking changes to come — changes that have already helped many patients’ lives.

KPIX’s series of reports on Kaiser this month shows just how good local television news can be, when it wants to.

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.