A story about a burn clinic that published in December started almost a year before it was written.

“BURN INC.” began with a tip about an elderly man with a skinned shin and ended with an expose of the nation’s largest burn center network.

The tip came in early 2023, when an 87-year-old man called Senior Project Reporter Tony Bartelme about how a clinic sent him $110,000 in medical bills after staff slapped skin substitutes made from pig placentas on a shin wound.

That led to tips about the Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta, the nation’s largest burn center and a place that had long used burn patients’ stories to market this business. One story involved a patient in South Carolina who racked up a bill upward of $30 million.

Bartelme told this patient’s deeply human story while combing through lawsuits and cultivating sources deep inside the burn network that treated him. The resulting story, “BURN INC. ,” is a first-ever look at this famous burn center’s rise and fall.

Among its findings: The burn center used a loophole in South Carolina laws to charge patients outrageous sums. It exposed how the center’s leaders built the institution on a foundation of questionable practices with trial lawyers. And it showed how HCA, the nation’s largest health care provider, scooped up burn clinics and was alleged to have lied to regulators.

This is Sunshine Week. It’s a newspaper tradition for decades now to spend one week in March looking at the landscape of public records and public meetings in our coverage areas. This annual audit ensures that the right to know isn’t eroding under our watch.

It’s also a chance to share the way reporters at The Post and Courier use public records to find stories that no one else is covering.

In the case of the “BURN INC.,” Bartelme used court records to tell this story.

He started sifting through lawsuits in state and federal courts in early March 2023. Reporters access federal lawsuits through a pay-per-use service called PACER. The total bill for 2023 to access these records was $5,462, paid for through donations to The Post and Courier Public Service and Investigative Fund .

As Bartelme combed through court records, he found reference to the South Carolina man who got a $30 million medical bill.

“No one had identified him,” Bartelme said. “I tracked him down and it became a powerful story.”

To get to the bottom of how this could happen, Bartelme filed Freedom of Information Act requests for ambulance records, trying to find numbers of patients being transported from South Carolina to Georgia.

“I didn’t come up with anything because they were using private money and billing for that use,” Bartelme said. “We spent a lot of money to find the answers, and some of those records led to dead ends. But you can’t be scared to look. You have to fail a few times until you finally find the story.”

For almost a year, Bartelme read through workers comp claims, pored through academic journals and interviewed experts in order to understand the science and business of burn treatment.

“It was a surprisingly complicated story,” he said. “I had to build a network of people who didn’t want to talk or who were scared to talk.”

“BURN INC.” is among a body of watchdog stories published by The Post and Courier in 2023 focused on health care.

“Now the word is out,” Bartelme said, “Patients can use that information to make informed decisions.”