Lawmakers have strengthened Illinois' longstanding sexual abuse survivors law in an effort to ensure patients receive critical care after sexual assault.

The changes come after APM Reports' investigation last year revealed for the first time how dozens of hospitals violated that law. Those violations included failing to offer sexual assault testing kits and not contacting child or adult protective services.

The 49-year-old Illinois law requires hospitals to be designated either "treatment" or "transfer" hospitals. The former must provide key services to all rape victims, with some exceptions in pediatric cases. The latter must get state approval to transfer rape victims elsewhere. APM Reports found some hospitals transferred patients as far as 80 minutes away even though a closer hospital could have treated them and collected evidence.

The bill allows the state to fine hospitals that fail to take corrective actions after violating the law and makes it easier for the state to deny hospital transfers that leave patients traveling long distances, enduring long wait times, or without transportation.

The bill also expands access to health care vouchers, which cover medications, exams and testing for sexually transmitted infections after a sexual assault. Previously, only those who showed up at a treatment hospital could get the government-funded vouchers. The new legislation allows survivors to get vouchers at any hospital.

Gov. JB Pritzker's office declined to say if he would sign the bill. He has until the end of July to do so.

A federal judge struck down a lawsuit claiming that “defective” teaching materials had prevented countless students in Massachusetts from learning to read well.

“The court begins (and ends) its analysis with the educational malpractice bar,” Judge Richard G. Stearns wrote in his order dismissing the lawsuit against educational publisher Heinemann, its parent company HMH Publishing and their best-selling authors Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. For nearly five decades, courts nationwide have repeatedly ruled that educational malpractice is impossible to prove.

The suit, filed by Boston-area mothers Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak on behalf of their children, sought class-action status and argued that the defendants misrepresented their instructional materials as “research-backed,” and “data-based,” despite what the mothers argued was insufficient phonics instruction.

The authors and publishers named in the suit are at the center of the APM Reports podcast Sold a Story, which investigated why so many schools taught reading using methods that had been repeatedly discredited by cognitive scientists. Benjamin Elga, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview last year that the podcast opened his eyes to “an injustice that cried out for redress.”