Karen Garloch, the Charlotte Observer’s medical writer, has written about hospitals and health care since 1987.

She is part of a team of reporters who produced a series about North Carolina nonprofit hospitals' finances and profits that was a finalist for the 2013 Pultizer Prize in Local Reporting. The series also won the bronze award in the 2012 Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism, and other national awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Association of Health Care Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Society of Business Editors and Writers.

She also received awards in 2010 for series which found that many N.C. infants whose deaths were attributed to SIDS had possibly suffocated from sleeping in unsafe settings, and for a serial narrative about one couple’s heart-wrenching decision to bring to term a baby with a fatal birth defect.

Garloch is a graduate of Ball State University and has also worked for the Cincinnati Enquirer and other newspapers in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky.