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 ...

Utah is considered one of the healthiest states in the country. We enjoy some of the lowest rates of smoking, binge drinking, preventable hospitalizations and cancer deaths.

But the state's relative good health masks the reality that Utah has some of the worst disparities when you look at health outcomes and access to healthcare by where people live, their income and their race and ethnicity.

The Salt Lake Tribune launched the series Healthy for Whom in January to explore why some neighborhoods are ghettos of poor health. The latest installment was about how certain neighborhoods have higher rates of ...

It's always nice to get a tip, but we found our local overtime pay leaders by goofing around in some online records. I came across an online database of public employee salaries offered by SeeThroughNY, a non-profit transparency portal.

And like any curious journalist, I pulled out our county government and sorted it top to bottom in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

This was not the typical payroll information we routinely get from government payroll offices. This database of 4,727 records originated from the state pension system, run by the state comptroller’s office. It wasn’t just a ...

Des Moines Register reporters Chase Davis and Perry Beeman spent months compiling and making sense of data for a series on air pollution in Iowa. But, with more than 1,600 polluting facilities across the state, there simply wasn’t space in the stories to mention any but the most noteworthy. That’s where data editor James Wilkerson and digital projects editor Michael Corey came in. They developed an interactive map that allowed users to see information about the facilities near them. "It localized the story to basically every community in Iowa," Davis said of the map. It also gave ...