William Heisel, former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes about investigative health reporting. He is currently the director of global engagement at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
GlaxoSmithKline, the largest drug company in Britain and one of the largest in the world, has made an industry first move.
It just got even easier to see whether your hospital has a significant infection problem. If state and federal agencies were racing to provide the most useful information in the simplest to understand format, Hospital Compare just took the lead.
Online maps make cool tools, but do they foster cleaner, safer health care? The public knowledge and peer pressure they create can be powerful forces to get hospitals addressing their infection problems.
Wish you had a place to compare hospital post-op infection rates before you consider where to have your procedure? In California you can with the state's map of central-line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI), MRSA and VRE.
Liz Szabo's USA Today story -- Doctor accused of selling false hope to families -- is one of the best medical investigations I have read. Here are a few lessons from the piece.
One medical device company offers a warranty for its partial knee product, saying they’ll replace it at any point for the rest of your life. But the company won’t pay for anything but the device itself.
Humorous videos make the point that police officers, firefighters, pilots, and others must undergo drug testing, but physicians don't. The same initiative is also fighting a sacred cow for California doctors -- the malpractice cap.
In January, California will shore up promises it made when launching its innovative prescription drug-tracking program with more funding and a better ability to find patients who doctor shop or physicians who prescribe an abnormal amount of opiates.
When Montana’s governor signed a law creating a suicide review team in May 2013, he called reporter Cindy Uken personally to tell her he signed it. For the last year, she's been reporting on the state's high suicide rates and the possible ways to change those trends.
What would you do if you were picking out vegetables at the grocery story next to a health care worker in scrubs and blood-stained shoe covers?
