When ProPublica's Marshall Allen, Olga Pierce and Blair Hickman set out to explore patient safety issues for a new series, they decided early on that creating a Facebook community where patients, providers, readers and even other reporters could join the conversation would play a crucial role.

Their goal was simple: to find out why so many patients are suffering harm and to highlight the best ways to solve this problem.

Fifteen-hundred members later, the Facebook group has become a unique resource hub and has generated discussions on why patient harm is one of the leading causes of death in the country, the top patient safety challenges medical providers face, and more.

Allen, Pierce and Hickman join us in the “Storage Closet Studio” to explain how this series came about, how incorporating community and crowdsourcing efforts long before publishing a traditional story has helped power their reporting, and what they hope to accomplish going forward.

You can check out ProPublica’s Patient Harm Community on Facebook and read more about their investigation on our series page.  You can also listen to this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

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