Insights

An ocean view and a smoothie bar do not have any bearing on the quality of health care being delivered by doctors, nurses, and hospital staff. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple way to compare hospitals?

Sonoma County is famous as a foodie capital and for its beautiful stretches of open space and parks. But it's also home to some stark health disparities, with rates of obesity and diabetes in towns such as Roseland much higher than elsewhere. Telling that story was the challenge before me.

HuffPost Healthy Living is looking for a new Senior Editor in NYC. Also, don't forget, if you're a resident of California the 2015 California Health Journalism Fellowship applications are due Monday, Dec. 1, 2014.

A man walks down a crowded street loaded with the potential to destroy hundreds of lives. He’s not wearing a bomb — he’s carrying a mutation in his genes that can cause the heart to beat out of rhythm and stop. Worse, no one can seem to track him down.

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.

As the number of California Medicaid enrollees signing up for coverage has grown, the number of doctors hasn't always been able to meet the demand for care. The problem has been especially acute among Chinese-Americans, many of whom struggle to find physicians willing to see them.

A massive new cohort study was supposed to help researchers and policy makers better understand how environmental factors shape children's health into adulthood. But delays, leadership changes and soaring costs have put the study's future in jeopardy.

With Obamacare's second season of open enrollment underway, advocates remain focused on signing up the remaining uninsured. In California, the uninsured rate is projected to drop to 6 percent by 2019. But getting it much lower will require creative new strategies.

Check out this week's roundup of job and fellowship opportunities: Foxnews.com is looking for a web video producer/writer for their health section. Gannett is seeking a health reporter. And for California journalists, don't forget to apply for the 2015 California Health Journalism Fellowship.

The health beat is so rich with documents, data and smart people that it can be hard to sort through it all under deadline pressure. But if you look in the right places, you can quickly report intelligent stories that cut through the noise and get noticed.