Welcome to PR Vibes(tm), created by Calysto Communications to provide you with key insights into the publications and events in the telecommunications industry. Today, we’re featuring a short interview with Richard Martin, editorial director of Mobile Healthcare Today, Virgo Publishing’s newest online media property that recently launched. Enjoy!
What prompted the idea for Mobile Healthcare Today?
I wish I could say this was my brilliant idea, but that wasn’t the case. As you know, we have a new CEO at Virgo Publishing, John Siefert. (See Calysto’s PR Vibes interview with Virgo’s John Siefert.) John and I knew each other from when we both previously worked at InformationWeek. A few weeks after John started here at Virgo, we had a conversation about this idea John had about a media property around mobile healthcare. John asked me if I wanted to head it up and I said yes — partly because he’s the CEO and partly because it’s such a great idea: smartphones and tablets and mobile devices are starting to transform healthcare.
Physicians today have a BlackBerry or iPhone or other smartphone in their personal lives. They see how it makes their lives easier, and can see how this technology will make them more effective and improve patient care and save lives. One thing we’re really seeing is that physicians, who are typically slow adopters of new technology, are actually demanding this stuff. I think they see it as a game changer.
How would you define mobile healthcare?
The simple definition? Mobile healthcare is the use of mobile communication in healthcare, whether it’s a smartphone or a tablet or some other mobile device.
For example, there’s now a mobile check-in application available for your doctor’s office. Instead of filling out a clipboard, a patient checks in by grabbing a tablet computer and filling out information, which is then uploaded. Then your physician is able to type notes directly into their laptop, or tablet, in the examination room. Or, they dictate to a digital voice recorder, which may have voice-to-text capability. I think what you are going to see over the next couple of years is, whether you are in a hospital or your doctor’s office, your patient information will be automatically uploaded into a database and it’s all going to be a smoother, much more accurate process.
Do you feel EMR stimulus money will affect mobile healthcare?
The government has designated approximately $17 billion in incentives for electronic medical records (EMR) adoption and to get access to federal funding, healthcare providers have to prove that they have records to the database. While mobile is not required to deploy EMRs, what we have found is that mobilizing the technology is an accelerator to the adoption of EMR. For instance, we just finished a case study on The Ottawa Hospital, which is deploying several hundred thousand iPads to doctors and nurses. What they found is that doctors are far more likely to use an EMR application if they can carry it around with them.
Who is your target audience for Mobile Healthcare Today?
Anyone who is evaluating, purchasing, deploying and using mobile healthcare technology, such as CIOs, CEOs, healthcare IT administrators, practice managers, and others in the position to evaluate this technology. This covers hospitals, clinics, extended care facilities, physicians’ practices, universities and government agencies, such as the CDC, and insurance companies, in both urban and rural settings. To reach these people
we’re also working with some of the big healthcare IT associations, such as the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME).
What will set Mobile Healthcare Today apart?
Mobile Healthcare Today is enterprise-focused. We are a B2B company and mobile healthcare is one of those emerging markets where there is not a lot of independent, authoritative information available. CIOs, physicians who run their own practices and others have a lot of questions about this new mobile technology. What’s the return on this investment? They have a lot of questions about selecting the best vendors and the appropriate technology, and those questions are not being answered.
Virgo Publishing also has existing and related sites in the both the telecom and the healthcare space, including Channel Partners, Infection Control Today, SurgiStrategies and so on. Today that we will leverage by reaching out to those existing audiences.
What’s the format?
The format is entirely online premium content, with free registration. While Mobile Healthcare Today is not a daily news site per se, content is refreshed daily. There will also be a weekly e-newsletter. But the core of our edit strategy is high-end reports, either Onsites – which are essentially case studies of major projects and innovators, such as The Ottawa Hospital – and topic-focused reports. We have a reporting coming out in February on new and forthcoming tablet computers for healthcare, which is very timely.
Those reports are of the quality of products from the big research and analysis firms that cost thousands of dollars. Reports from Mobile Healthcare Today will be free, with registration. The strategy behind that is to create content that will be of value to influencers and decision-makers — CIOs and CEOs and physicians. We are not going after “eyeballs;” we’re building a desirable and highly engaged audience of influential healthcare providers.
To provide that content, we will have a roster of contributors from across the industry, including journalists who follow this space. We’ll also have some contributed content in our Resource Center, which goes beyond that typical vendor white papers promoting their own products and technology.
Will there be conferences tied to Mobile Healthcare Today?
Our event strategy will start out with virtual events, including Webinars and virtual demos and the like. Stay tuned for more information on live events.
What are some of the topics you plan to cover this year?
As I mentioned, we are going to focus on premium content, with in-depth reports and case studies of a quality that you would expect to obtain from an analyst firm. For example, our first Onsite is on The Ottawa Hospital’s project to mobilize access to patient records on iPads throughout the hospital. The next one will cover tablet computers for healthcare. Coming later this year we’ll cover the future of electronic medical records; mobile healthcare and the Cloud; the role of big telco carriers and healthcare; and the mobile healthcare ecosystem plus many other topics.
What are your expectations for the end of 2011?
We look forward to having an engaged audience of several thousand of the most influential CIOs, physicians and healthcare providers. Mobile Healthcare Today will bring together the user community, application developers and vendors, and provide them with sharp, fresh, useful information as well as a place to exchange new ideas, new technology, best practices and so on. We plan to be the most authoritative voice on the use of mobile technology in the healthcare industry.