William Scanlon

Medical writer

I was the health/medical writer at the Rocky Mountain News for 12 years prior to the newspaper folding in late February of 2009. I have been doing contract work since then and have joined with a group of former Rocky reporters to try to launch a website and news half hour on the Denver PBS affiliate. It would concentrate on serious informative and investigative journalism, and one of the regular emphases would be health journalism -- access, reform, etc.

Articles

<p>About halfway through my October trip to Grand Junction, Colorado to see if the community's unusual health-care model could or should be replicated, I got so enthused about the possibilities that I had to keep close tabs on my objectivity.</p><p>I settled for a package that presents the Grand Junction model as an intriguing possibility, while including skeptics and naysayers.</p>

<p>As Congress slugs it out over health-care reform this week, hopeful eyes are on Grand Junction, CO., where low-cost, high-quality near-universal health care is the norm.</p> <p>You can find my new five-part series on Grand Junction’s health care system <a href="http://www.kbdi.org/news/">here</a&gt;. &nbsp;</p> <p>The doctors in Grand Junction, a western Colorado city of 53,000, say their system can become a national model, and there are doctors in dozens of communities ready to replicate the system that uses a non-profit insurance provider but allows doctors to work for profit.</p>

Over five days, Colorado Public News examines how Grand Junction, Colo. has emerged as a model of low-cost, high-quality, near-universal healthcare. Part 1 details how health care professionals and leaders have built a system with an emphasis on primary care and prevention.

<p>My National Health Journalism Fellowship project involves exploring whether an approach taken by Grand Junction, western Colorado's largest city, could work elsewhere and possibly be a model for low-cost, high-quality near-universal health care, at least until something significant is done at the federal level.</p>