I don't remember how the subject came up, but at one point in a conversation with a mover and shaker in Sioux Falls, we started talking about hospital helicopters.

Sioux Falls is home to two hospital systems. Each system has smaller hospitals in South Dakota, as well as other states in the Upper Great Plains. The Mother Ship hospitals in Sioux Falls have medical helicopters, and it's pretty common to see them flying around.

The mover and shaker told me about a meeting he had with executives at one of the systems. During the meeting, a helicopter started ...

Our newspaper’s analysis of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data revealed that 131 providers in the Atlanta metropolitan area claimed a UPS Store mailbox as their medical office.

In turns out, Atlanta medical providers were not conducting medical procedures in mailboxes. Most of these providers filled out the federal paperwork incorrectly.  But dozens of others committed fraud by  using the UPS Store mailboxes as purported real offices. With a sham provider number and a UPS Store address, they could also provide what looked like a real physician’s approval for unnecessary or non-existent medical services and equipment ...

When I began covering health for The Bakersfield Californian, I frequently heard sources mention the high number of foreign-trained doctors serving the Central Valley.  So many of our county’s physicians, they said, had attended medical school overseas. Even within our newsroom, colleagues commented about their personal experience seeing international medical graduates for almost all of their medical care. We discussed how to cover a topic that seemed ripe for exploration – and especially relevant given the overall doctor shortage and recruiting challenges present in the valley – but too intangible to report in any substantial way.

Before we could do anything ...

In the past few years, pharmaceutical companies have been required under federal law to publicly disclose their payments to physician consultants and speakers, opening up a whole new avenue for journalists, including the writers of the Connecticut Health I-Team.

Each time another pharmaceutical company begins posting its payment disclosure data online -- often in a hard-to-find link on its website -- I've taken a look through, to check on Connecticut doctors. As in most other states, hundreds of doctors here earn thousands of dollars to promote drugs marketed by pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, Cephalon, Eli Lilly, Janssen.

In the spring, I ...

I think most people are afraid of a hospital bill that bankrupts them. It’s why I pay more for a medical insurance plan with a cap on out-of-pocket costs and, more significantly, it’s one reason why so many uninsured or underinsured consumers avoid hospitals as long as they can.

Beyond that fear, there’s a public interest in minimizing the number of huge hospital bills. They cause insurance premiums to rise as costs are spread. They cause hospital charges for everyone to increase when uninsured patients don’t pay. And they deplete public treasuries as many large bills ...

Throughout our two-year rolling investigation into Parkland Memorial Hospital, plenty of people were more than willing to tell us that the legendary Dallas County hospital was providing top-notch care.

But what proved difficult was actually verifying the accuracy of such claims. Hospital officials repeatedly balked at releasing data that would allow the comparison of Parkland against peers in key areas.

Our investigation centered primarily on patient safety and issues of resident supervision by doctors from Parkland’s academic partner, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. We used as case studies the stories of people like Jessie Mae Ned, a ...

New York Times reporter Barry Meier knew lawsuits against the manufacturers of all-metal artificial hips were on the rise. But it wasn’t until I queried a balky Food and Drug Administration database that he was able to confirm that all-metal hip implants were quickly becoming the biggest and costliest medical implant problem since Medtronic recalled a widely used heart device in 2007.

The FDA collects voluntary reports from patients, health care providers and medical device manufacturers about problems experienced with specific devices. The federal agency compiles the reports of deaths, injuries and product malfunctions in a database known as ...

The right data can build the foundation of a great investigation, especially when it's used as a window into an area normally hidden from public view.

In our series "Do No Harm: Hospital Care in Las Vegas" for the Las Vegas Sun, Marshall Allen and I used hospital discharge records, available in some form in most states, to examine the quality of care patients received in Nevada.

Overall, the stories revealed some startling statistics on harm, infection and certain surgical misadventures for the very first time. Not only was it new information for Nevadans, counting the occurrence of falls ...

When the California legislature passed a law to drastically increase funding to nursing homes, it came with a promise that worker wages would rise, staffing would soar and patient care would improve.

The law passed in 2004. When I started working on investigative articles for California Watch in the fall of 2009, it seemed like a good idea to take a close look at whether the promises attached to hundreds of millions of dollars came true.

What we found was noteworthy. State and federal funders poured an additional $880 million into nursing homes over five years, moving the annual funding ...

California's Board of Registered Nursing oversees more licensees, some 350,000, than any state nursing agency in the country. It is responsible for ensuring that nurses at patients' bedsides are not only competent, but sober, sane and law-abiding. So when we became suspicious that the board was fumbling its duties, leaving members of the public at risk, we wanted to ground our reporting in more than anecdotes, although those were rich and plentiful. Figuring out how to do this proved both time-consuming and hugely rewarding.

We first became interested in the board after we spent much of 2003 and ...