Media Insights

As Senior Manager, Corporate Communications, at HIMSS, I interact with the media on a daily basis and at our Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition .  I know you may do the same by interacting with healthcare reporters and bloggers to provide information on your organization plus insights and analysis on what is going on with healthcare reform.

Now, and perhaps once or twice a month, I’ll share with you the insights of healthcare reporters and bloggers via this blog column –  Media Insights. 

You  may have met Jane Sarasohn-Kahn at one of the Meet the Blogger sessions at HIMSS10.  Cari McLean, HIMSS Program Manager, Communications, and Cesar Torres, Manager, Web Content, organized these informative and interactive sessions so that attendees could, yes, meet the bloggers who are part of our healthcare world. (And watch for more updates about HIMSS11 on this blog!) 

I talked via e-mail with Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a health economist and management consultant  serving clients at the intersection of health and technology. 

She has been a columnist for the California Healthcare Foundation’s iHealth Beat since its inception in 2002. Her own blog, Health Populi, details her passion for quality healthcare delivery and good health. 

Here, Jane provides her thoughts on blogging, health IT and health reform – from her perspective as healthcare blogger, health economist and journalist.

Media Insights from Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

What drove you to become a healthcare IT blogger?

Health Populi was envisioned, first, as a book. The two publishers whom I drove crazy updating the table of contents told me it seemed more like a blog than a book, so I took their advice and launched Health Populi the week before Labor Day, 2007.

What drives me to share my knowledge and my network is that, after 20+ years as a health economist and consultant to every kind of stakeholder organization in health, I felt I had an integrated, bird’s-eye view over the landscape of health markets, technology, policy and health citizen-consumers. 

How has your blogging experience changed your understanding of the HIT industry?

I’m reminded on a daily basis how ever-changing and -evolving the HIT industry is as part of the overall health ecosystem. Every day, I choose one issue or data point that comes to me in emails overnight that I want Health Populi readers to know about. Doing this every day shows me, viscerally, that HIT continues to morph and grow.

I’m also reminded how inter-connected IT is with the “H” – health and health care. Health care is a data-intensive sector, and health overall can’t be managed until it can be measured.

How has your blogging experience changed your interaction with the HIMSS community?

It’s given me the confidence to apply to speak at the HIMSS annual conference. I’m also regularly tapping into HIMSS-generated content and refer to the website frequently. I’ve been a member of HIMSS for over a decade, but hadn’t been as active early-on. 

What role do you think the blogosphere should play in regard to healthcare reform?

I’m asked this a lot, and interviewed by PBS’s MediaShift about this here; the readers of blogs, if they do themselves a service by reading the full political spectrum, can become well-informed in many of the nuances of health reform. If you only read one or two, the benefits of the blogosphere aren’t being fully exploited.

Health reform is such a broad topics — PPACA has “10 Titles” ranging from prevention and quality to new business models like the medical home and ACOs, so blogs can fill in much of the ‘grey area’ that mainstream media cannot.

Furthermore, the HITECH Act was part of the ARRA stimulus, and HIT plays into so much of the ACA. So blogs that cover “healthcare reform” per se are many and varied — physician-oriented, technology-focused, policy-wonking of course, and health industry-oriented, as well.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Washington Post, Business Week, and other general media publications also have health blogs that cover reform that are well-worth reading.

What is the first HIT blog you read each day, besides your own?

To be frank, I don’t read any HIT-specific blogs every day, but do subscribe to many that I read through feeds throughout the week. Some of my favorites, in no special order, are The Health Care Blog, John Halamka’s Life As A Healthcare CIO, HISTalk, Health Affairs, ONCHIT’s Health IT Buzz Blog (you’ve got to love Government 2.0!), the Health Care Law Blog, Health Blawg, KevinMD, Medicine and Technology by Dr. Joe Kim, and Maggie Mahar’s HealthBeat blog. But there are many, many others I admire, as well…