Focus on Health Care: Alumni Spotlight on Health Care Reporter Caroline Chen (M.S. Stabile '13)

We are pleased to present a new story in our series about how Columbia Journalism School has been training students to become leading health care reporters. Around the globe, the work of health care journalists is vital for keeping the public aware of how the actions of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, medical professionals, government agencies, and policymakers can impact our lives and well-being.  Today, we spotlight the work of Columbia Journalism School alumna Caroline Chen, a 2013 graduate of the Master of Science Program's Stabile Investigative Specialization who is now a health care reporter for ProPublica. Chen is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she has taught the Data I class, in which students learn how to evaluate and analyze data for appropriateness, context and meaning.

At ProPublica, Chen has reported or co-reported stories that have provided cancer patients with a guide to clinical trials, revealed that the FDA has been rushing risky drugs to market, explored how black people and Native Americans have been under-represented in clinical trials of new drugs, and uncovered that immigrant shelters have been drugging teenagers without their consent.  In May 2019, The New Yorker and ProPublica co-published Chen's "The Birth-Tissue Profiteers," a story about how new mothers have been donating their birth tissue to a $2 billion stem cell industry that remains unproven and essentially unregulated. 

Before joining ProPublica, Chen reported on health care issues for Bloomberg News. At Bloomberg, her reporting exposed how a pharmaceutical company altered doctors’ orders to wring more reimbursements out of insurers, how a rare disease drugmaker scared patients into continuing therapy, and how medically complex babies were stranded in hospitals because of a lack of home-care nurses. 

Chen recently joined Sheila Coronel, the Toni Stabile Professor of Professional Practice in Investigative Journalism and Director of the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, in a video discussion about the Master of Science Program's Stabile Investigative Specialization and the importance of investigative reporting. They were joined by education reporter Emmanuel Felton, a 2013 graduate of the M.S. Stabile Program. "What motivates me to be a reporter is to tell stories for people who don't have the platform to have a voice and who may not have the power to respond when there is injustice done to them," Chen explained in the roundtable discussion. Please watch the video below.




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