I have reported on health for most of my career. My work as an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register exposed problems with the fertility industry, the trade in human body parts and the use of illegal drugs in sports. I helped create a first-of-its-kind report card judging hospitals on a wide array of measures for a story that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I was one of the lead reporters on a series of stories about lead in candy, a series that also was a finalist for the Pulitzer.For the Center for Health Journalism (previously known as Reporting on Health), I have written about investigative health reporting and occasionally broke news on my column, Antidote. I also was the project editor on the Just One Breath collaborative reporting series.  These days, for the University of Washington, I now work as the Executive Director for Insitutue for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Client Services, a social enterprise. You can follow me on Twitter @wheisel.

Articles

A Public Death: North Carolina gets serious about health data

In North Carolina, the process of recording deaths has been a slow, paper-only process that creates huge lags in time and makes swift, efficient decision-making much more difficult. That could change as the state moves to digitally modernize its system, and none too soon.

PubMed makes research a comparative snap.

Well Sourced: Skip PubMed at your own health-reporting peril

The deadline clock is ticking and suddenly you have to cover a new study on a foreign topic by unknown researchers. What do you do? Check out what PubMed has to offer for starters. The vast repository of peer-reviewed research is an essential reporting tool.