Indian origin software architect shares Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting

By NewsGram Staff Writer

An Indian origin software engineer shared The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

The in-depth reporting dealt with bringing out the news story with the help of information technology tools.

According to Michael Siconolfi, the journal's investigations editor, Palani Kumanan, a software scientist and technical lead with Dow Jones, was a part of the winning project's graphics team.

The journal won a Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest honor, for a sequence of articles that revealed the abuses in the Medicare system in US.

The series titled "Medicare Unmasked" presented Americans "unprecedented access to previously confidential data on the motivations and practices of their health care providers."

The series of articles brought to light the frauds and misuse in Medicare, the US government's health insurance scheme that encompasses around 43 million senior citizens and about 9 million people dealing with severe disablities.

Kumanan is a graduate from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, who created an interactive database on Medicare billing used to examine government funds given to more than 880,000 medical service providers. This data helped the readers to utilize an interactive database created on the journal's website to look for themselves information about various medical service providers and analyze it.