A Los Angeles Times article claims a company named Practice Fusion received money for unnecessarily pushing a large amount of referrals for addictive pain killers to doctors. While the Los Angles Times is deemed a reputable source, there is still reason to fact-check the claims made in any publication (the verbatim statement of fact in the article is: “Its maker, a software company called Practice Fusion, was paid by a major opioid manufacturer to design it in an effort to boost prescriptions for addictive pain pills”). So, to start out this fact-check, I followed the protocol for Move 1 in Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers: looking for previous work.

I began with searching on duckduckgo.com using the search term provided for us, substituting my own keywords, which were “Practice Fusion” which yielded no relevant results, and “Opioid software,” which, again, came up with nothing. So, from here I decided to go onto Move 2 to see if I could find the source of the claim by going upstream.

To start the process of going upstream, I checked to see if the article was sponsored content, which it wasn’t. The article was written by a person with the name Bloomberg, I’m not sure if this is a pseudonym or if it’s simply the writer’s last name, but regardless, he has written multiple articles for the Los Angeles Times. The article was also not syndicated as there was no other publication credited with providing this article for the Los Angeles Times. When having trouble finding relevant linked sources within the article, I searched for the Wikipedia page on Practice Fusion and found a Washington Post article that was referenced which was essentially the same story as the Los Angeles Times article. The Washington post article had more original content cited and linked about the claim that Practice Fusion was paid to increase prescriptions for addictive medication. This article was written by a reliable member of the Washington Post staff named Antonia Noori Farzan, who had also written multiple articles for the publication, therefore it was not sponsored content.

The Washington Post article linked to an official court statement from the District of Vermont’s U.S. attorney’s office. In this statement it described what Practice Fusion was officially charged with: “Practice Fusion solicited remuneration from [a pharmaceutical company] in return for [creating and embedding an alert, known as a clinical decision support] that would arrange for and recommend the ordering of extended release opioids.” This statement was informative enough to end my search in finding out whether or not Practice Fusion was paid to distribute addictive pain medication, it was clearly stated that this was the case and that Practice Fusion had been taken to court because of it. However, to go further, I wanted to try to confirm that this document was legitimate.

At the bottom of the statement was the signature of Christina E. Nolan, the attorney responsible for the document. And while I had little reason to believe that it was fabricated or that her name was not real, I used Wikipedia to search for her, and found that, as the court statement says, she is the U.S. attorney for the District of Vermont.

With this court document being a primary source, there were no other sources to use to go further upstream. However, going back to the Washington Post article, I also saw that another court document was linked where in the statement of facts it read that Practice Fusion had agreed with and taken responsibility for what they had been charged for. The statements made in both of the official court documents gave me reason to believe that the claim that the Los Angeles Times article made was true.

Going upstream for this particular article proved to be a lot less difficult and convoluted than I was expecting. However, I recognize that this is a case where the article I found was responsible in properly citing its source material. Despite this particular path being clear and—dare I say—easy, I know that there are a lot of news articles that leave a lot more to be investigated in terms of their claims being true or false. That being said, while there was a clear line of information and sources in this case, I believe I still demonstrated the motions of going upstream, and I will use this experience to inform my decisions for fact-checking in the future.