{ "id": "1998-may-system-protecting-military-malpractice", "slug": "1998-may-system-protecting-military-malpractice", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-may-system-protecting-military-malpractice.html", "year": 1998, "month": "May", "monthNum": 5, "headline": "System protecting military malpractice", "kicker": "HEALTH CARE IN THE ARMED FORCES", "author_name": "Stuart Watson", "author_title": "", "affiliation": "WRAL-TV", "summary": "A journalist recounts the two-and-a-half-year investigation into the death of an infant at a military hospital, using databases and FOIA requests to uncover systemic issues with military medical care.", "keywords": [ "investigation", "military", "database" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Data & Databases", "Health & Environment" ], "technologies": [ "9-track tape", "FTP" ], "full_text": "Normally I'm terrible at phone tips. To my detriment. If Deep Throat called, I'd put 'em on terminal hold, then cut 'em off. Maybe that's why my colleagues rib me about being more at home with a stack of documents or a database. But it was hard to hang up on Kristie Piittmann. She called March 22, 1995, to say Army medicine killed her baby.\n\nHaving firsthand witnessed labor and delivery four times, her story hit home. You could see it happening. The fever. The racing fetal heartbeat. The antibiotics administered too late. The awkwardness of telling the mother when Cole Piittmann was born a few weeks before Christmas 1994. Then the rush to a civilian hospital and the parents' ultimate choice: handing over the infant to be airlifted to Duke University with little hope of survival or unhooking all the tubes and letting their only son die in their arms. They chose the latter.\n\nIt was a heart-rending story, all right, the news director said, but how was it different from allegations of malpractice in a civilian hospital among civilian doctors? In other words, you have a story - now what is the report? What is the meaning, the context? The full answer would take two and a half years of reporting.\n\nAlley cats\n\nWe went down a number of blind alleys before finding the lessons of Cole Piittmann's death. First we checked the death rates at the military hospital against death rates in the neighboring civilian hospital. Fewer infants died at the military hospital. Then we checked the status of infants transferred from the military hospital to civilian hospitals using a database of death records downloaded from the Web. Finally we checked the number of infants at various hospitals who died of Group B strep infections like Cole Piittmann had. The alleys led nowhere.\n\nThe next set of blind alleys concerned the doctors. We filed Freedom of Information Act requests asking whether Kristie Piittmann's doctors had ever been sued before. The Army denied us saying it couldn't find such information, that doctors' names aren't linked to malpractice claims, and even if they were, the information was exempt from public inspection.\n\nWe also asked whether the doctors had ever been disciplined. Again denied. An Army doctor's disciplinary history-short of court-martial - is exempt from public disclosure. But the U.S. Army Claims Service at Ft. George Meade in Maryland mentioned a database. Did somebody say 'database'? We filed an FOI request.\n\nThe Army withheld names and identifying information for claimants. But after one appeal, the Army included the names, addresses and phone numbers of attorneys. Some attorneys proved helpful in tracking down old clients. The U.S. Army CLAIMS database arrived in the form of a tiny cassette not much bigger than an audio cassette. We didn't have a player. After consulting CAR gurus on the NICAR listserv, we hired a local data house to transfer the cassette to nine-track tape. Though we didn't have a nine-track tape drive in house, our corporate data processing officer did. We begged him to clean it up and FTP it to us.\n\nAll of this took months. The corporate data processors would ask little questions like, \"Do you want us to clean this Army data or do you want your paycheck this week?\" In the end, we had a complete database of every tort claim filed against the Army for about eight years.\n\nThis database could have told us the type and rates of malpractice claims at various military hospitals. But there were all sorts of caveats. Some hospitals were much larger. Some might have been in areas where more aggressive trial attorneys recruited and encouraged military families to sue. In the end, we primarily used the data to track down similar malpractice cases at the same facility.\n\nCivilian differences\n\nThen I bumped into Russell Carollo, an investigative reporter at the Dayton Daily News. I had called Carollo in the summer of 1996 to ask how he got information about missing and stolen military weapons. He had shared his data, provided that we credited his news organization, which we did.\n\nI mentioned that I was interested in medical malpractice in the military. He said, \"Stuart, the stars have aligned. We've been working on this for months.\" Carollo and Jim Stewart at CBS News helped sharpen our focus. They said they didn't think we would ever be able to fairly compare malpractice rates at military and civilian facilities. They said the systems were too different.\n\nThe story, they said, was the differences between the two systems and how those systemic differences left military families unprotected against malpractice. Foremost, active duty soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines could not even file malpractice claims. Doctors were not named individually in claims. Military doctors didn't carry their own malpractice insurance. And disciplinary records were hidden. (We knew this last fact from our FOIA experience.)\n\nCarollo and Jim Nesmith at the Cox News Service had already done considerable work. Carollo offered to share if WRAL didn't air the report before the Dayton Daily News went to print.\n\nCarollo had accumulated databases of military doctors from all branches. We later split the cost of hiring a data entry house recommended by a NICAR listserv member to input the Public Citizen list of more than 13,000 \"questionable\" doctors and run it against the databases of military doctors.\n\nWe then shared the grunt work of filing open records requests with various medical boards to ensure the doctors mentioned in the Public Citizen list were the same ones in the military databases.\n\nResearch reaction\n\nThe years of research paid off in October 1997 when WRAL-TV, the Dayton Daily News and the Cox News Service reported how the military protects bad medicine.\n\nMilitary doctors do not carry their own malpractice insurance like civilian doctors, are not sued like civilian doctors and are not disciplined like civilian doctors.\n\nThe Pentagon does not report to the National Practitioners Data Bank the same information as the civilian world does.\n\nAnd, unlike civilian doctors, military doctors can continue to practice after repeatedly failing state medical exams.\n\nThe Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and wire services all ran Carollo and Nesmith's series. WRAL aired a five-part series and a half-hour special report.\n\nThe Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs responded with a 13-point plan for improving military health care. The Surgeons General of the Army, Navy and Air Force were called to a closed-door meeting with the National Security Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The subcommittee later set aside $5 million for an expert panel to evaluate the quality of military health care. The Pentagon pulled doctors who failed medical exams from clinical positions. And it all started with a phone call, a massive database, and lots of teamwork with NICARians!", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1997-decemberjanuary-military-hospitals-report", "score": 0.394 }, { "slug": "2005-marchapril-peace-accidents", "score": 0.313 }, { "slug": "1999-june-naming-the-unknown", "score": 0.275 }, { "slug": "1995-october-tracking-military-justice-prisoners-hit-pay-dirt", "score": 0.272 }, { "slug": "2003-marchapril-key-data-resources-for-covering-conflict", "score": 0.27 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-may-system-protecting-military-malpractice.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-may-system-protecting-military-malpractice.json" }