April, 2003
Volume I, Issue 6

News

As of mid-April, the war in Iraq has had less impact on healthcare news coverage than SARS and HIPAA. I believe that is because the war coverage is so dominated by the stunning live reports broadcast on TV. Also, because we've not seen use of chemical or biological weapons, there has not been much of a health angle to report so far.

In contrast, both the general interest and trade press have reported extensively on SARS and HIPAA.

The April 14 HIPAA privacy rule deadline prompted many stories including ones in the the New York Times (April 6) and in regional dailies such as the Dallas Morning News and Boston Globe. Most newspaper stories have concentrated on the impact on consumers and how local organizations are preparing.

The information technology aspect of the Iraq war has been underreported, perhaps because it lacks a compelling visual image. One interesting look behind the scenes was reported in the April 11 issue of "Insider Pass E Letter" from Technology Marketing (www.technologymarketing.com).

The newsletter ran an interview with writer Joshua Davis, reporting for Wired magazine and embedded with the U.S. Army's 11th Signal Brigade. Here is a portion of the interview:

"Connectivity between (Army) sites is via a giant web of wireless connections that stretch to the border...(there) it is transmitted via satellite to Centcom, which is in Qatar. Then it goes to the Department of Defense back in the States.

"They plug in Panasonic Toughbooks..and are on the military's Siprnet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network)...the network wasn't super-zippy...but it does the trick for the way they use it.

"The things that I've been seeing out in the field are off-the-shelf systems...What's so interesting is seeing how these guys take systems that were never intended to be used in these conditions and make them work. I'm wiping the dust off of my face watching these guys vacuum servers out in the field. You'll see a whole rack of Cisco routers in the middle of the desert in a tent."

Trends

Using major current events as news pegs can offer new ways for healthcare technology companies to attract coverage they would not otherwise receive. SARS, a deadly disease that is instilling widespread fear, is not something most companies want to comment on (with the exception of drug manufacturers). HIPAA, however, is a different matter.

There have been hundreds of HIPAA articles in the healthcare trade press in the past two months. It has also been widely covered by local and national business publications.

Our agency has been able to place a number of HIPAA commentary articles in the op-ed or viewpoint sections of major trade publications and regional business journals. Unlike op-ed articles in major daily newspapers, which must take a strong political stand, commentary articles in the trade press can be basically explanatory, interpreting the event for business readers. They offer a good way to establish thought leadership on topics that have marketing significance.

In addition to HIPAA, other topics editors are interested in for commentary pieces include reducing medical errors, consumer health education, building a national healthcare information infrastructure and bills in Congress allocating funds for healthcare technology.

The best way to place these articles is to contact the editor in advance (two weeks for business journals, three months for trade pubs) and discuss a specific idea. Commentary articles are relatively short (600-900 words) but need to be tightly written with insightful comments of interest to senior executives.

Industry Insight

" 'Twenty-seven years ago Wrigley's put a barcode on a pack of chewing gum,' Mark Neuenschwander testified at an FDA hearing last July. Neuenschwander has been a long-time advocate of bedside scanning and bar coding in health care. He contends that, 'bedside scanning is to patient safety what wearing seatbelts is to passenger safety.'

"So if it's such a fundamentally important technology, why has it taken so long for bar coding to be adopted by health care? Neuenschwander points out that the first unit dose medication bar code by a manufacturer showed up in 1991. By 2001, only one-third of medications appeared at hospital bedsides with bar codes. It's been a chicken-and-egg scenario ever since: drug manufacturers asked why they should apply barcodes when hospitals didn't have scanners, and hospitals questioned the rationale of buying scanners when drugs didn't have barcodes."

-- by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, in an iHealthbeat commentary, March 17, 2003

Resources

Technology Marketing's email newsletter (mentioned above) focuses on computer hardware marketing trends. There are several daily email newsletters specifically covering the healthcare industry.

The oldest and most comprehensive daily news feed comes from Healthleaders (www.healthleaders.com), which now has more than 50,000 subscribers. This newsletter has a good selection from magazines, daily newspapers and local business journals. The HTML newsletter has a hyperlink for each news story, allowing easy connection to the original article.

Other email newsletters covering the healthcare industry include HDM Week (www.healthdatamanagement.com)and Modern Healthcare's Daily Dose (www.modernhealthcare.com). HDM Week covers six news categories: HIPAA, vendor news, new products, government, trends and mobile tech.

Modern Healthcare's Daily Dose covers government regulation, healthcare corporation financial news, hospital technology and managed care issues.

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